 In comparing queens, whom does the film reviewer view as the most controversial?
Only a strategic marriage to a Spaniard or a Frenchman will mollify all factions, her advisers insist, but the pickings prove dismal. You can't be both a queenly queen and a womanly woman, says the script (by Michael Hirst)--at least not in 1554. It's even closer to a Jacobean drama of our own age: The Godfather (1972), which it emulates by cutting back-and-forth between queen and courtiers in prayer and the roundup and slaughter of Catholics on their privies, in bed with their mistresses, and so on. But Blanchett comes in a close second, pulling off the transition from hapless young woman to coolly ruthless monarch with uncommon subtlety.
 Jonathan Rhys-Myers as Brian Slade
 Jonathan Rhys-Myers as Brian Slade  Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I  Miranda Richardson as Elizabeth I  David Bowie as himself