 What positive critique does the film reviewer offer for "Elizabeth"? juicy melodrama
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. Probably, although the evidence suggests that Elizabeth had developed a head for stratagems earlier in life (her position had been precarious since the beheading of her mother) and came to the throne with few girlish illusions about How Things Work in a barbarous state. 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. Their severed heads look on, wide-eyed, as Elizabeth directs her hair to be shorn--images of her girlhood flashing by as her locks rain down--and then walks weightily to her throne, now a chalk-faced gorgon. With all due respect to Blanchett, Bette Davis, and Glenda Jackson, my favorite Elizabeth I remains Miranda Richardson's capricious, baby-talking psychopath on the BBC comedy Blackadder II . But Blanchett comes in a close second, pulling off the transition from hapless young woman to coolly ruthless monarch with uncommon subtlety.
 It relies on juxtaposition-based cinematography that makes for a compelling theatrical performance
 It relies on juxtaposition-based cinematography that makes for a compelling theatrical performance  It takes necessary liberties with history's version of Elizabeth's reign to make her story more interesting to movie-goers  It takes the best aspects of both Jacobean and Shakespearean interpretations of Elizabeth I and combines them into one melodramatic depiction  It is the best interpretation of Elizabeth I's ascent to the throne and subsequent reign