A Royal Affair Reviews
Top CriticFor all its incident, A Royal Affair is slow and picturesquely framed - more of a languorously animated coffee-table book than a gripping drama.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The film ends not on a happy note, naturally, but on a moment of hope. Love may not conquer all, but it has a power all its own.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Although the brazen lovers, bellicose ministers and backstabbing handmaidens are familiar elements, the film is so handsomely mounted that we happily endure the ride until the turning of the screws in the tragic last act.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
A Royal Affair covers plenty of stately ground, all in good time.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
A crowned-heads soap opera that balances effectively between pomp and melodramatic circumstance.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Even appreciated simply as a little-known chapter of European history, it proves consistently engrossing, edifying and affecting.
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| Original Score: 3/4
"A Royal Affair" is an engaging and entertaining film, one that might have been great, if only the history were different.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The film moves along crisply, looks great and stimulates the brain (I am a sucker for torrid romances propelled by quotes from Rousseau and Voltaire.)
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| Original Score: 3/4
A Royal Affair is historical drama of the highest order - teeming with big ideas, and anchored by the nicely nuanced performances of Vikander and Mikkelsen.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Director Nikolaj Arcel gets outstanding performances from all three of the principals, which enlivens the whole affair considerably.
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| Original Score: 4/5
The film tells an intimate story with an enormous amount of grace.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
'Affair' is disappointingly conventional, much too decorous and, at two hours-plus, sometimes just plain dull.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
It does a fine job of dramatizing the pure power of ideas and the attraction of like minds. And what happens when those ideas, and that attraction, runs counter to the pleasures of the most powerful man in the land.
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| Original Score: 3/4
"A Royal Affair" is basically a good-looking set of historical Cliffs Notes.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
This highly polished costume drama is exceptionally well-made and a model of intelligent restraint, but it is also unapologetically earnest and a bit on the bloodless side.
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| Original Score: 3/5
With its sumptuous settings, urgent romance and intellectual substance, A Royal Affair is a mind-opener crossed with a bodice-ripper.
While it's lavish and lush in all the expected costume-drama ways, A Royal Affair never bogs down in period detail.
Nikolaj Arcel's sumptuous Danish romance looks much like other well-made costume dramas, barring a single, crucial exception: This is the only one with Mads Mikkelsen in the lead.
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| Original Score: 4/5
This Scandinavian coproduction is essentially an old-fashioned period spectacle, offering the tried-and-true pleasure of romantic melodrama in fancy costumes.
Anyone eagerly awaiting Anna Karenina and Les Miserables shouldn't miss A Royal Affair.
As the power behind the throne once removed, Mikkelsen is well-cast as a strong leading man who is also convincing as an intellectual and reformer.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Director Arcel handles the material with a stately grace that compensates for the story's predictable trajectory, though humdrum period detail and monotonous pacing too often leave the proceedings feeling only partially aroused.
We are drawn undeniably to well-crafted beauty, power wielded for good and romance built upon authenticity, and A Royal Affair has all three in bounds.
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| Original Score: A-
Intrigue and eroticism abound, all of it watchable, none of it particularly exciting.
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| Original Score: 2/5
Genuinely engrossing, if a little stiff, and it's only in the drama of the last five minutes that actor-of-the-moment Mikkelsen shows us what he's really made of.
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| Original Score: 3/5
