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Critics Consensus: Peterloo proves writer-director Mike Leigh's populist anger remains undimmed - but that righteous fury occasionally overpowers the narrative.
Critic Consensus: Peterloo proves writer-director Mike Leigh's populist anger remains undimmed - but that righteous fury occasionally overpowers the narrative.
All Critics (52) | Top Critics (5) | Fresh (33) | Rotten (19)
You can feel Leigh's fury glowering off the screen through the entire last act, but that fury does the film and the filmmaker little service.
Those with the patience and attention span are rewarded; the last 30 minutes is perhaps the most visceral filmmaking Leigh has ever pulled off...
The authenticity is immersive, even if the historical exposition occasionally feels like prep for an exam no one's warned you about.
Leigh's passion for the material seems to have led him to approach it from an angle more pedagogic than artistic.
It's a stately, explicitly rhetorical paean to the people - setting the past in stone while also lashing out at a present-day political order.
It is beautifully shot and the costume department have a real eye for detail... but despite the sheer drama of these historical events and their relevance to today's fractured world, Peterloo fails to ignite real passion and anger.
By the end of it, it's quite overwhelming... and it needs to have that kind of power.
In its wearying, near-constant speech-making, however, it's more like one of the era's densely worded pamphlets.
Peterloo is an unwatchable Mike Leigh film about the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 that's burdened with a surfeit of speeches and some terrible acting.
A lot of the detail is interesting, but there is too much for a film and it takes too long to get to the main action.
There's a chance we may have underestimated Leigh as a director.
[There's] a sense of a collective voice speaking through individuals, each brought to colourful life by a dense script and stellar performances.
There are no featured reviews for Peterloo at this time.
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