Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

Console best movie i've ever seen.

Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

SanEat A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

Paul TABET For those wanting to know the original story, please make the effort to read the book by Alexandre Dumas.This being said, this movie has everything I hate in french cinema ( I myself am french ! ) : it is pretentious, badly interpreted, the original story was largely rewritten and furthermore, I found the movie to be incoherent and incomprehensible. Dumas must be dancing in his grave ! When I see IMDb critics saying that this is a great artistic movie, I wonder if people saw the same movie I did...Topmost, I find it inadmissible that Chereau permits himself to rewrite such a masterpiece written by one of France's most beloved writers, as if what Dumas wrote wasn't good enough to make a decent movie. It is a common flaw in movie making to change the story pretexting that the original material isn't suited for screen play.A few examples : the St Barthelemy night which we have to endure for a long 15 or more minutes in the movie merely takes one page on the 600 of the book...As for the friendship between La Mole and Coconnas ( who are amongst the most interesting characters of the book ) which is at the center of the original material, it is largely omitted in the movie and furthermore is totally incoherent : after fighting to the death and being quite unknown to each other, the fall in each other's arms in one ridiculous scene that had me laugh because it was so bad.Anyways, all this is bad french cinema making, the kind which we would like to stop seeing. Do not bother to waste your time on that piece of trash and rather watch real french cinema d'auteur like Coup de Torchon or Rene Clair's movies which are the real heritage of french movie making that knew about the art, but are from another age which is sadly over.Pityful ! PS : sorry my English isn't good enough to say everything I despise in this movie with the language it would require.

surajalva La Reine Margot is about the St. Bartholomew's day massacre and the intrigues at the court before and after the event. It uniquely tries to denominate Catherine de Medicis as the evil culprit as can be seen, in a way, by her terrible Italian accent. Even though till today the orchestrator of the massacre is in doubt, the movie seems to place the blame on an outsider, on an Italian. Ah, the French, always weary of the outsider. It is close to hilarious to see the portrayal of Charles the ninth as a hypochondriac/drunk, always under the control of external influences. External from himself. Himself representing France. An acute sense of this movie can be derived from a dialog lasting fifteen or so seconds, and which I could not get out of my head {and I kept telling myself throughout the film}. It is the scene where Margot tells Charles XIX, after he witnesses the massacre: Calme-Toi, Calme-Toi. The film is a stupid, overly dramatized piece of work that plays to the emotions of the French. It is a crime against historical fiction and should be persecuted to the fullest extent; the penalty being its burning. The burning of all its copies, original and duplicate reels, so that not a word of it might be spoken of; ever.

writers_reign I can't recall ever being disappointed in a film written by Daniele Thompson who has gone on to prove herself a brilliant writer-director also. Nothing if not versatile she began with one of the biggest box-office hits in French cinema, La Grande Vadrouille, which is still being revived close to half a century later and continued in comedic vein with such titles as Les Folies de grandeur and The Adventures of Rabbi Jacob whilst along the way launching the career of Sophie Marceau via La Boum - if these two ladies were fillies rather than filles we could employ handicapper terms to note that Marceau has just released her own second film as writer-director - before turning serious as she does here and also with Those Who Love Me Can Take The Train. This time around she is working with historical facts as distorted through the prism of Alexander Dumas and giving them a new coat of paint before setting them before Isabelle Adjani, Virna Lisi, Daniel Auteuil, Jean-Huges Anglade, Pascall Greggory, Vincent Perez and, if you're paying attention to every frame, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, all of which, with the possible exception of Perez, turn in fine performances modulating toward the exceptional in the case of Virna Lisi's Catherine de Medici. The plot has been discussed elsewhere so suffice it to say that as costume dramas go this is among the best even if the direction is the odd light year behind Thompson's screenplay.

monimm18 Since I enjoyed reading Dumas' "Queen Margot" long before this film was made, I went to see it fearing a disappointment - usually it's hard to turn a good book into an equally good film. I was pleasantly surprised. The film follows the book a bit loosely, and maybe that was a good thing; too many times copying a book faithfully makes a film lose focus and artistic/dramatic impact. "La Reine Margot" is played by a great team of actors that turned in excellent performances. Daniel Auteuil, as Henry de Navarre is superb as usual, in his depiction of an intelligent king caught in the middle of the deadly politics of a religious war; Isabelle Adjani is perfect for the title role, so is Vincent Perez as La Mole, and the rest of the cast is just as wonderful, except I thought Virna Lisi was a bit too melodramatic in depicting the "evilness" of Catherine de Medici and I found the film's suggestion that there were some sort of incestuous relations between Catherine and her sons sensationalist, unfounded and a bit slimy for a film of this caliber). The costumes seem as sumptuous as French royals would wear in those times, without looking overdone; the decors and extras appear as real as if filmed in a time warp - dirt, mess and all; they are carefully done, yet without an over-manicured look; all this conferred the film an air of authenticity instead of just making it look too perfectly staged. The violence of the St. Bartholomew massacre looks quite realistic and non-glamorized, which apparently turned off many viewers. Hmmm... give us violence, but don't let us feel bad about it.The story is loosely based on historical truth, but is close enough to it. Apparently, Margot was indeed a victim of the politics of the time, and the whole business of her saving Henry de Navarre from assassination and helping him gain political momentum is historically true. Although she divorced him later and he remarried, they remained in friendly terms. The love affair with La Mole might just as well be true too, considering that Margot had a many lovers, not surprisingly, since all other aspects of her life were controlled or repressed by others... I was a bit sorry to see Catherine de Medicis portrayed so unidimensionally as the vicious, bloodthirsty queen mother. Her methods were not excusable, but considering the times, they were the typical "diplomatic tools" employed by everyone. Although Italian and married to Henry II against her will, she loved France and embraced her resposiblities as its queen, and her purpose was, besides keeping the House of Valois on the throne, to save the country from a civil war that would have exposed it to invasion by Spain and England. OK, back to the film: I thought it was great, with excellent dialogue, well crafted scenes, good suspense, the romance is not corny, yet dramatic enough. Historically accurate or not, it gives one a glimpse of how love, life and the politics of those times must have been. Lovely to watch.