A great slice of history

Rating: 8/10 (9 October 2006)

In a way I don't want to critique 'The Queen' so much as as what is going on on our wonderful IMDb website. 'The Queen' is much in the news at the moment and so when I searched for it under that name, I expected it to be the main contender, but hundreds of other films came up with 'queen' in their title and (although I could not be bothered to scan the whole list) I could not see the current movie starring Helen Mirran. This film was top of the list when I searched for 'Helen Mirran'. Some mistake here, I think! Once in the the correct pages I found many (expected) excellent reviews of this movie and I would just go along with most of these. Helen Mirran is utterly superb and I can only imagine that she will NOT win the Oscar for best actress because so many people are now saying she will. Such is life - but she gets my vote.
Her performance alone would not make this the great movie it is. ALL the characters - particularly Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Tony Blair are brilliantly portrayed and the use of newsreel footage used to advantage.
It's a few years since Frears has made such a tremendous movie - and I feel that in many countries of the world he would probably have been executed for making such. However, in the end, it is the viewer that makes up their own mind as to whether England's queen is hero or villain; Frears and Mirran together do such an excellent job in leaving the final interpretation up to you.