 What critique does film reviewer offer of Haynes? wishes he would let the picture catch its breath, that the performers would stop coming at me in stroboscopic flashes
Only a strategic marriage to a Spaniard or a Frenchman will mollify all factions, her advisers insist, but the pickings prove dismal. (The director, Shekhar Kapur, made the same point in his grim 1994 Indian epic The Bandit Queen , against a backdrop of scrubby plains along the Ganges.) But Blanchett comes in a close second, pulling off the transition from hapless young woman to coolly ruthless monarch with uncommon subtlety. Gradually expunging all empathy from her moist, pink eyes and permitting her visage to ossify, she gives this carnival of carnage an awe-inspiring center. Every other line of dialogue is a cue for one of its dazzling numbers, largely covers of songs by Brian Eno, Bryan Ferry, and T. Rex.
 His pacing is too frenetic and hasty
 His pacing is too frenetic and hasty  His costume and makeup design is too glamorous  His adherence to fact is too rigid  Its use of competing sound effects is grating