Big-time Oscar bait: THE FAVOURITE, Yorgos Lanthimos' most entertaining and accessible film so far, opens in South Florida

We've already seen as number of films this year with a terrific lead performance from a woman -- Kelly MacDonald in Puzzle, Julianne Moore in Bel Canto, Glenn Close in The Wife, to name a few of the best -- but here comes a movie that sports three major, spot-on and Oscar-worthy performances from its leading actresses. Plus, it proves such a fascinating, oddball entertainment for so many reasons that TrustMovies predicts it will be land Oscar nominations in quite a few categories.

THE FAVOURITE (British spelling, folks) is the fifth film from Greek movie-maker Yorgos Lanthimos (shown at right) to garner a theatrical release here in the USA, and it is by light years his most accessible and entertaining. Splendidly cast, top to bottom, it is also his first to concentrate so fully on women. The result has so far proven both mainstream-arthouse box-office and critical gold.

As usual with Lanthimos' work, the actual time frame is somewhat bizarre. If it seems like the present (Dogtooth or The Killing of Sacred Deer), the human behavior on view is from elsewhere -- in the case of the latter film, somewhere in the land of myth. In The Lobster, both time frame and behavior are completely elsewhere. (Alps comes closest to medling period and behavior into a cogent whole.)

The Favourite pulls a reverse twist: Set in England of the early 1700s, during the reign of Anne, Queen of Great Britain, the period details of the sets and costumes look both sumptuous and correct. Yet the dialog -- classy, witty and very smart -- is thoroughly of today, and it is delivered by the entire cast with such panache that it works with nary a hitch. (The screenplay comes via Tony McNamara and Deborah Davis.)

Note, too, the scene of dancing in the court (above) that begins as rather your standard sort before morphing into something closer to the kind of jitterbug/swing moves that were seen during World War II. Yet, instead of jarring us, thanks to the skill of Lanthimos, his cast and crew, this odd duality seems to somehow achieve precisely the correct tone.

The tale told is of Queen Anne (a brilliant job by Olivia Colman, above, of Broadchurch, Tyrannosaur and The Night Manager), a woman of unsteady mind, physical health and emotional state,

and the vying of two of her underlings (Rachel Weisz, above, and Emma Stone, below) for the place at the Queen's side as her favourite.

A war against France is currently raging, which provides some political backdrop and a chance for the lesser males in the story -- particularly the warring politicians Nicholas Hoult (below, center) and James Smith to strut their marginal stuff. Don't mistake my meaning here: The actors are just fine, but their roles are clearly subsidiary to those of the much stronger women.

Who holds the upper hand changes and then changes again, and the feint-and-parry antics of this crew proves consistently surprising and lots of dark fun. (Dark is ever-present in Lanthimos' world, as it seems to be in Greece.)

Interestingly, the most completely sympathetic character in the film is that of Masham, the decent young man played by Joe Alwyn (above, left) who simply has the hots for Ms Stone's character and is used as a disposable stepping stone throughout.

Lanthimos keeps a pretty firm hand and eye on things, but occasionally he can't resist a too-cute camera angle (as two photos up) or the use of something I believe is called a fish-eye lens, above, to produce an odd visual that calls attention to itself but says nothing. Still, this is overall a small price to pay for enjoying such good, dark fun.

History, bunnies (lots of them), poisoned tea and a runaway horse all come into play and help make this two hour movie pretty much fly by. That, and the work of its three very fine actresses, each of whom consistently commands your attention and respect, even sometimes convincing you that her character might just be the caring, humane person she so wants her Queen to admire.

But since this is a warts-and-all (maybe warts-and-little-else) affair in which power must be held so tightly, these strong, smart and heartless women must ever jockey for that power. The three actresses are a wonder to watch. As Ms Stone's character answers, when asked what side she is on concerning a particular dispute, "I am on my side." Well, aren't we all? And don't we end up in prisons mostly of our own making?

From Fox Searchlight and running 119 minutes, The Favourite, after opening on the coasts and elsewhere around the country, hits South Florida today, and is playing pretty much all over Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach County areas. 

Sunday Corner with Lee Liberman: Mark Passover and Easter with AMAZING GRACE, the story of British abolitionist William Wilberforce who made his country 'great'

Now available for rental or purchase via Amazon Video, AMAZING GRACE, the evocative 2006 film that Rotten Tomatoes' critics consensus calls "Your quintessential historic biopic: stately, noble and with plenty of electrifying performances" is worth the two-hour look-back at this 18th century British version of our own 19th century Civil War. However the UK abolitionist movement, amidst centuries of empire building, resembled Martin Luther King's 20th century non-violent crusade for civil rights rather than our own guns-and-bullets conflict of the 1860's.

The film is very well directed by Michael Apted, while the estimable Steven Knight (shown at left, of Taboo, Locke, Allied, Peaky Blinders) wrote the tender, satiric, contentious screenplay that slowly unpacks William Wilberforce's long struggle against British Parliament's endless intransigence on the slavery topic, most MP's having interests that profited from the trade. In fact Britain's empire can be said to have acquired the prefix 'Great' on the backs of slaves who grew, processed, and helped distribute tobacco, sugar, cotton.

The film is stocked with best Brits led by handsome leading Welshman Ioan Gruffudd (above, from Forever, Horatio Hornblower, Titanic, Forsyte Saga, UnREAL) and includes Benedict Cumberbatch, Albert Finney, Romola Garai, Rufus Sewell, Toby Jones, Michael Gambon, Ciaran Hinds, Youssow N'Dour and Jeremy Swift (as Wilberforce's well-read butler, who here previews his dutiful service to Dowager Countess Grantham in Downton Abbey).

Preacher John Newton's poem Amazing Grace (1772) was the moral underpinning of the abolitionist movement and is said to have been performed 10,000 times a year in the U.S., with spurts during our Civil and Vietnam Wars. In Britain, slavery existed from before Roman times (mostly conquered European populations). The human traffic in Africans began much later, commandeered by Elizabethan seafarer, Sir John Hawkins, who formed a slave-trading syndicate of merchants in the mid-1500's, launching Britain's leadership in the Atlantic slave trade.

Newton (1725-1807), above, was a ship owner and slave trader before a religious conversion led him to the ministry. He wrote: “It will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders.” We first meet him (Albert Finney) barefoot and in sackcloth, mopping the floors of his London church. Young William Wilberforce, torn between pursuing a religious life or a promising career in Parliament, has come to seek the advice of his old mentor who continues to live with the ghosts of thousands of humans whose lives he had taken or ruined.

Newton urges Wilberforce to shun a religious life and use his leverage as a politician: "Blow their filthy ships out of the water -- the planters, sugar barons of London, Liverpool, Boston, Bristol, New York -- all those streets running with blood, dysentery, puke. You won't come away from those streets clean, Wilber. You'll get filthy with it, you'll dream it." Newton founded a group known as the Clapham Sect which grew among members of Holy Trinity Church on Clapham Common, a fashionable area south-west of London. A network of friends bonded together over their enlightenment views and activism, eventually aiding the passage of the Slave Trade Act banning slave trading throughout the colonies and years later the emancipation entirely of all British slaves.

Thus with the prodding of his friend and future Prime Minister, William Pitt (Cumberbatch, above, left, whose acting is so subtly fine, at moments he steals the focus from Gruffudd), and the aid of the Clapham supporters began Wilberforce's near 20-year campaign of oratory and action in the House of Commons to expose his fellow legislators to the ugliness of slavery. London had the largest Black population in Britain in the mid-1700's -- about 10,000. Having black servants was fashionable. In one depressing incident, Wilberforce is gambling in the company of the Duke of Clarence (Toby Jones) who has his black coach driver hauled to the gaming table as 'capital' offered to settle his losses. To his friend Pitt, Wilberforce says bitterly: "For me, slavery is like arsenic. Each new tiny dose doubles the effect". It was their friendship from student days at Cambridge -- Pitt the master politician, Wilberforce the passionate, witty orator -- that positioned Wilberforce at the helm of the legislative process.

"It is with a heavy heart that I bring to the attention of the House a trade which degrades men to the level of brutes and insults the highest qualities of our common nature..... Conditions in Jamaica are... brutal..... Many children are scalded to death by the molten lava. Others die of exhaustion or roll into the fires in their sleep. The result in the morning is a few pounds of pure refined sugar." Wilberforce as a very young MP experienced a religious experience himself. His friend Henry Thornton, banker, economist, MP, great-grandfather of E.M. Forster (Nicholas Farrell), introduced Wilberforce to his wife Barbara Spooner (Romola Garai, below) and to the Clapham activists who persuaded him he could do God's work and politics too by taking up the cause of abolition in Parliament.

Year after year Wilberforce and his Clapham friends assembled new evidence, petitions, demonstrations, and first person accounts. Below center: the freed slave Olaudah Equiano (Youssow N'Dour), chains from a slave ship on the table beside him and at right, Thomas Clarkson (Rufus Sewell).

Patriots refused sugar in their tea; renowned pottery-maker Josiah Wedgwood manufactured an official medallion for the movement (below). Their collective efforts have been referred to as the world's first grass roots human rights campaign.

But Wilberforce would submit his bill in the House of Commons and watch its defeat over and again. Below, Ciaran Hinds (Game of Thrones), is Liverpool's rabid pro-slavery MP orator, Sir Banastre Tarleton. Tarleton had earned a reputation as hated officer and butcher during the American Revolution -- sympatico with his ardent support of slavery.

Each millennia it has to be relearned: when logic and decency fail and other means must be tried, whether more subtle or more violent. In this case it was maritime lawyer, James Stephen, who came up with a clever legal maneuver that broke the logjam. Stephen called it: 'nosus decipio'-- loosely translated, 'we cheat'( the denouement of the film). And they succeeded -- the Slave Trade Act finally passed in 1807. However Wilberforce (shown below in a portrait from his day) was no liberal. Change, he believed, should come through Christianity and improvement in morals, education, and religion. He opposed unions, women anti-slavery activists, any appearance of anarchy. The essayist William Hazlitt condemned him for preaching the teaching of Christianity to savages while tolerating its worst abuses at home. However he did support prison reform, improved working conditions for chimney-sweeps and textile workers, and less severity of punishments. He died in 1833 just after learning that the final piece of legislation to abolish slavery throughout the empire was about to pass. Nearly 800,000 Africans were freed, most in the Caribbean.

Note: press HERE for the link to a description of the Atlantic Triangle Trade -- in which slaves and goods were moved between Africa, the Colonies, and Europe.

This Sunday Corner post was written by

our monthly correspondent, Lee Liberman, 

but appears a day late, thanks to TrustMovie's 

current forgetful state. Sorry, Lee!

The October Sunday Corner with Lee Liberman THE LAST KINGDOM -- How England Was Made

"If you were alive in 880, the word 'England' would mean nothing," says Bernard Cornwell, author of "The Last Kingdom," his chronicles of Saxon history and the basis for the TV series from BBC now streaming on Netflix. After Rome fell, England splintered into unaffiliated fiefdoms; King Arthur, his Knights, and Tristan and Isolde made it out alive in our imaginations from the dark of ancient Briton. Various Germanic tribes called Saxons invaded in the 5th century. By the 9th, when the story of Uhtred the warrior (above) and King Alfred begins, the Viking Danes had moved in on the Saxon kingdoms and were picking them off -- all except Alfred's in Wessex, where brawn would be outmaneuvered by brains.

Early in that war the Danes had Alfred pinned down in several square miles of swamp until 878 when he called up swords from all over England and inflicted a decisive defeat on joint Danish armies. Alfred's descendants regained the 3 Northern kingdoms of Mercia, East Anglia, and Northumbria, fulfilling his dream of uniting England under one king (and one God -- Alfred was pious). His foresight and strategic win in 878 (Season 1's conclusion) led historians of the 1500's to call him "the Great". Without Alfred, England might now be Daneland and Danish our mother tongue.

Cornwell (shown below) uses his Saxon adventures to tell the "incredibly untaught " story of how England was won, and he spins good hero in the vein of Horatio Hornblower or loose-cannon Richard Sharpe. (His many historical novels include the Napoleonic era Sharpe tales starring Sean Bean in a lengthy PBS film series.) Cornwell's Saxon chronicles are masterful water and land battle epics -- though you have to dig out from under sword and shield to piece together historical narrative or gain context. Still, it's for exposure to King Alfred and his constructs of civilian order that the TV series has food value, unless gritty battlefield action and strategy is your thing. Then the novels and TV series are total feasts. Season 2 of "The Last Kingdom" is filming now (Series 1 filmed in Wales, Denmark, and Hungary). It contains characters who were real contemporaries of Alfred -- a game of thrones anchored more in history than white-walkers and dragons.

Cornwell's birth father, William Oughtred, dated his lineage back to Northumbria, whence comes our fictional hero Uhtred (Alexander Dreymon, American Horror Story alum), a swaggering, insolent hero born Saxon, bred Dane, accepted nowhere. Through Uhtred the warrior we come to know Alfred's life and his descendants' effort to unite England. Uhtred is a Saxon nobleman's young boy when the Danes capture his homeland of Northumbria; Uhtred Sr. is killed by Dane Earl Ragnar and the boy is taken and raised happily by Ragnar (Peter Gantzler, below, with young Uhtred). Uhtred asks Ragnar why the Danes keep coming to Britain. Ragnar explains that Denmark is wet, harsh, and the ground is so flat and sandy you can't grow a fart. We are here to grow. If you want land and wealth, you have to take it.

As he nears maturity, Uhtred sees his Danish home upended by the murder of Ragnar's family, leaving him and Brida (Emily Cox), a Saxon girl also raised with Uhtred, on the run from Danes who blame him for the murders. The pair make their way to Ubba, a menacing Viking wild man (Norwegian Rune Temte, below) to find that Uhtred's rumored infamy had reached Ubba's ears, making him their mortal enemy. They stay on the run.

Uhtred and Brida head south to Wessex, the only kingdom that remains in Saxon hands. Uhtred wants to recoup his Northumbrian ancestral home and title from the invaders but as a youth he is, in his own words, arrogant and stupid, incapable of ingratiating himself with Alfred (the competent David Dawson, below). Alfred, however, sees a resource in him to learn the ways of the Danes -- they intend to use each other.

When Uhtred and Brida meet the soft-spoken but ruthless leader, we and they get our first glimpse of Alfred's power -- his use of the written word. ("When a man dies, if nothing is written, he is soon forgotten.") His inner sanctum (below) is filled top to bottom with handwritten scrolls describing his actions, findings, translations, and scholarship. (Later Guthrum, a Danish occupier, brandishes one of Alfred's scrolls: "This magic is words without sound -- voices without people; I am going to learn how to use this magic.") Alfred is driven by the order he finds in ancient scholarship, the church, and the law. Uhtred could care less; he thinks Alfred is a pious weakling. But by watching the relationship develop between the paganized Saxon action man and the devout, intellectual king until Uhtred becomes strategist and military leader, you gain the essence of the story.

Cornwell is described by peers as a brilliant writer of battles with "an unflinching approach to bloodshed" (Daily Mail), but domestic relations is not his thing. The TV series succeeds better than Cornwell's first two books in investing the saga with relationships that make you halfway care, while providing tension between Christian and pagan. Aelswith, Alfred's whiny Queen (Eliza Butterworth, below) never stops whispering to Alfred that Uhtred must die because of his heathen ways.

Uhtred has two lovers and a wife in the first season and his women make their mark. Awesome Brida is a brazen warrior and prickly fem; Charlie Murphy's Iseult (below) mesmerizes Uhtred and the camera with a quiet intensity that she also brings to Rebellion, a 4-parter about the Irish Easter Uprising in 1916 (also streaming on Netflix).

The BBC series is executive-produced by two familiars --Gareth Neame and Nigel Marchant of Downton Abbey. A third carry-over is composer John Lunn whose score for Kingdom is unimaginably different from DA; Faroese musician Eivor adds unearthly vocals that get one's pagan up. (She hales from the Danish Faroe Islands which have old folk traditions.)

Although Cornwell's novels and the series introduce King Alfred as the foil to the warrior's ambition to recover his birthright, it is Dreymon's handsome Uhtred whose life-force drives the action. We are due for a full-on treatment of Alfred because his achievements were so foundational to modern civics. Alfred created defense and tax systems, borough organization, representative rule, a legal code; his center of scholarship in Oxford became Oxford University. Many millennia and despotic kings later, his organizational achievements became touchstones during the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Victorian era and onward to the present. Perhaps Alfred's good governing will make it into the TV series if renewals are forthcoming, but for now one hopes that Uhtred gets his land back and hangs up his sword.

Note: the Scandinavian seafaring pirates were called Vikings but were referred to as Danes when living in England.

The above post was written by Lee Liberman, 

our greatly valued, monthly correspondent

Sacrifice & caring: Sarah Gavron/Abi Morgan's bone-deep feminist history, SUFFRAGETTE

Maud Watts, one of the drab but determined protagonists of the new film, SUFFRAGETTE, doesn't have much to show for her life: a poorly-paid job in a laundry, a semi-caring husband, and a child she adores. That she will lose all of this, and that the loss will be of her own doing because she is attempting to bring fairness and justice to herself and to the women of her day (the film is set in the early 1900s) brings to mind a word we've seldom heard of late and seen put into action even less. That word is sacrifice, and although the film, as best I can recall, never uses this term, the act itself is everywhere to be seen.

As written by Abi Morgan (The Invisible Woman), shown at right, and directed by Sarah Gavron (Brick Lane), shown below, this is bone-deep and not-at-all-pretty feminist history. For starters, the two filmmakers do not use their "suffragettes" -- the British women who worked tirelessly to help gain women the right to vote --as we usually see them: figures meant for mostly comic (Hysteria) or romantic (Parade's End) purposes. Gavron and Morgan treat their suffragettes seriously; consequently, so do we.

Everything about this film --except the great energy

and specificity of its performances -- is somber and subdued. With only a couple of exceptions, the filmmakers avoid outright melodrama in favor of low-key but often devastating incident. One of these, perhaps the most devastating, comes as protesting women are beaten -- and badly -- by the police. As a director, Ms Gavron manages to let us feel the full force of this beating without in any way overdoing things or reveling in the violence. It's a remark-able scene. But then, so are so many others.

The filmmakers and their casting director, Fiona Weir, have done a superlative job of finding the right actors and then letting them do their stuff. The result is one of the finest films of the year, and one that, though it makes few concessions to the current need for feel-good-above-all, I suspect will be remembered come awards time.

In the leading role, that pert-but-deep actress Carey Mulligan (above with Ben Whishaw, who plays her husband), again does a bang-up job of drawing us in and making us understand her character's sometimes awful choices. As her friend and the woman who brings her into the movement, Anne-Marie Duff (below, left), as she often does, all but steals the movie with her wide-open, compelling eyes and great spirit.

Also major in the cast are Helena Bonham Carter (below, right) as one of the longtime suffragettes who helps train and strengthen the newcomers, and Natalie Press (My Summer of Love), below, left, as the girl who gives it her all.

Ah, yes: What about Meryl Streep? She's here, all right, below, in a very small role as the leader of the movement, Emmeline Pankhurst. Yet via her one short scene it becomes easy to understand both how Pankhurst was able to inspire her followers, and how Ms Streep is so adept at bringing whatever character she attempts to full-blown life.

In the opposition (and, yes, that would be us men), Brendan Gleeson, below, scores as the undercover policeman who arrests and otherwise natters the ladies without much success. Yet, so truthful to its time and to the situation at hand is the film, that I doubt many men who are still able to think and feel will come away from the film unmoved.

The gains made by women over the past century and a half seem to have caused a backlash, particularly among fundamentalist men. The title crawl that ends the film, just before the final credits roll, is eye-opening indeed. It lists the year in which various countries at last allowed their women the vote. It will have you muttering, "What? No!" time and again. Suffragette, as you might have already gathered, is a must-see movie.

From Focus Features and running 106 minutes, while continuing its run in New York and elsewhere, opens all over South Florida this Friday, November 6.

In this month's Sunday Corner, Lee Liberman assesses the PBS version of WOLF HALL

The Catholic Church met its match in Henry VIII. The Protestant Reformation was an accidental outcome of the Pope's refusal to grant Henry's annulment from Katherine of Aragon so he could marry Anne Boleyn. It took Thomas Cromwell, Henry's lawyer-fixer, to orchestrate a work-around -- Cromwell got parliament to declare Henry head of the English church and able to grant his own annulment. Although Protestant forces were already at work, Henry's willfulness led to the institutionalizing of Protestantism even though Henry himself was sentimentally attached to Catholic ritual. Reformation was not a calling to either Henry or Cromwell as much as it was political expediency; yet it changed the world.

I was not excited about yet another saga of Henry (Damien Lewis, above center) and his wives, but BBC2's version based on Hilary Mantel's prizewinning books, Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, turns out to deserve its heaps of praise. An Atlantic reviewer called Wolf Hall one of the rare series to deserve PBS's title of "Masterpiece". Debuting on PBS last spring, the 6-episode drama is subdued yet more interesting than recent Tudor outings such as The Tudors, The White Queen, The Other Boleyn Girl -- swashbuckling bodice-ripper versions of Tudor mayhem. In contrast, wrote Sophie Gilbert in The Atlantic (4/4/15), Mantel's version (the author is shown below) has given us "quieter more authoritative manipulation of power". Mantel herself was quoted as impressed with screenwriter Peter Straughan and director Peter Kosminsky's skill at distilling her heavily researched books, retaining both the essence and considerable nuance.

This version has enough feeling of truth to it to transport one back to the 1500's as witness to the minutia of daily life at Henry's court. Mantel says she seeks to "pin the moment to the page" -- every-day conversation, personality quirks, and small physical gestures make you feel like you are in the room in the moment. Anxiety and stress must have filled the air around this monarch, yet life-threatening was just how things were. Mantel's title: "Wolf Hall" is a bit odd, as it names the Seymour estate, home of Jane Seymour, Henry's next queen. But the title serves to emphasize the blunt 15 minutes of fame that Anne will be allowed in her own time to satisfy Henry's relentless drive to produce a son.

After devoted service, Cardinal Wolsey (Jonathan Pryce, below, right) was cast off because he had failed to obtain an annulment for Henry from the Pope; Thomas More (Anton Lesser) was beheaded for his uncompromising opposition to reformation. Cromwell was to lose his own head over similar inconvenience to Henry, but that part of the story will take place in a sequel, if one follows.

Wolf Hall is told through the eyes of Cromwell (Mark Rylance,shown below), a commoner who ran away from violence at home in his teens to soldier in Europe, learn banking in Italy and the law in London, later to become a steely survivor and fixer for Henry. He appears up close as a doting father and husband while back stage he stealthily orchestrates the machinations required to satisfy Henry's demands and fill his coffers. To those ends Cromwell first collaborated with Anne (Claire Foy) to contrive her succession to Katherine (Joanne Whalley) and then turned face rapidly, framing courtiers as Anne's lovers in order to depose her. Further, he conducted anti-Catholic purges, disposing of Catholic clerics, institutions, libraries -- depredations as ugly as present day terrorist destruction of Middle-Eastern ancient structures and relics.

But the story of Cromwell and his peer Thomas More reflects the Reformation according to who is doing the telling. Here, Protestant Mantel seeks to counter the prevailing reputation of Thomas More as humane, saintly, and intellectual and the sinister image of Cromwell (shown below at around age 48 in a portrait by Hans Holbein the younger) as a depraved Machiavellian fanatic. In Mantel's version, More is impugned for demeaning his family members and his torture of Protestant heretics while Cromwell is both humane and business oriented, punishing the excesses and hypocrisies of the Catholic Church and redirecting sources of church income to Henry's depleted treasury. Mantel does not let Cromwell off the hook, but her version does provide more balance to his character compared to older versions of Tudor history. (Before Henry VIII, his father, Henry Tudor/Henry VII, defeated and deposed Richard III at Bosworth, ending the Wars of the Roses. Shakespeare, child of the Tudor era, gave us Richard III, the 'poisonous bunchback'd toad' we have loved to hate until lately. Historians have begun to right his reputation as a man of integrity who modernized the English legal system.)

The entire cast is extraordinary. Rylance, known very well across the pond, is finally visible here in a vehicle that displays his subtle and self-effacing brilliance. David Hinckley, NYDaily News, wrote that Rylance plays Cromwell "with a face that would win a stonewalling contest with the Sphinx". Cromwell must have learned very well to mask his emotions. Ms Foy has been distinguishing herself quietly for years (she stole series II of "Upstairs-Downstairs", re-run over the summer on PBS, playing the sociopathic sister of the lady of the house). Foy's Anne Boleyn is a memorable duo of haughty entitlement and seductiveness, an annoying presence to her enemies (see Anne below -- if looks could kill....). Mr. Lewis's Henry s menacing because he is so capriciousness. Other lesser figures of nobility are mere worker bees scrambling to stay in the good graces of the political moment. Yet many lesser characters stay with you, such as Charity Wakefield (Sense and Sensibility) as Anne's sister Mary and Jessica Reine (Call the Midwives) as Anne's sister-in-law -- a tribute to their acting and to beautiful screenwriting and direction.

The naturalistic intimacy of Mantel's Tudor court makes it appear much more truthful than earlier Tudor projects, yet one must be aware of being influenced by an author who is simply a more convincing story-teller. The author/screenwriter's point of view can decisively affect our view of history, as in this case, to possibly moderate if not reverse long-held views of Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell. Yet Mantel appears somewhat even-handed as is the noted Catholic historian Eamon Duffy, who does a fair job of explaining (here) the two figures despite his own predispositions.

This clip (click the link) gives you a flavor of the interactions among the players as Anne begins to sense her control over her position is at risk.

The photo chart above (from Vanity Fair magazine) depicts the main players in Wolf Hall.

The above post was written by our correspondent, Lee Liberman