Reimagined history with Vicki Krieps (The Phantom Thread) magnetic as the rebellious Empress Elisabeth of Austria, who must decide over the course of an imagined year how long she can bear life in a gilded cage. Carefully deployed anachronisms remind us these 18th Century lives are not so distant after all.
Come for a never-better Russell Crowe, for Peter Weir’s extraordinary cinematic artistry, for the deeply thrilling, you-are-there naval battle scenes, or for the music by Wollongong’s own Richard Tognetti — just come and see this epic the way it should be seen, on the big screen.
Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster were never better — and that’s saying something — brilliantly cast against type as a desperate small-time press agent and the monstrous gossip columnist who can make or break lives with a line.
Glass-obsessed heiress Lucinda (Cate Blanchett, already extraordinary in one of her first films) and guilt-ridden naif priest Oscar (Ralph Fiennes, in a role unlike any other in his career) are inveterate gamblers, and lifelong misfits until they meet one another. But even then neither can resist an all-or-nothing bet.
