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Anonymous
- Director: Roland Emmerich
- Writer: John Orloff
- Producer: Roland Emmerich; Volker Engel
CGiii Comment
Nominated for 1 Oscar: Best Achievement in Costume Design...what an insult!
This is what film-making is all about...challenging academia, confronting history.
Admittedly, it is a little erratic at the beginning - it takes a while before you are comfortable with the shifting timeline.
Shakespeare is played too much like a buffoon.
Those are the low points...everything else soars up and beyond the stratosphere.
Emmerich has created beauty...Elizabethan London looks filthy and, strangely, alluring. The performances are intoxicating...Redgrave's Elizabeth is almost playful, Thewlis.....he is one damn fine character actor...but, it is Ifans who steals the film with his perfectly pitched sensitivity...skillful, seductive and hypnotic.
Orloff has written a literary and historical controversy that puts revisionism back in the spotlight.
Watch it...gasp at its revelations...this is a plausible and meteoric theory presented with great skill and vision...deserving of every award.
Trailer...
The(ir) Blurb...
Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford, is presented as the real author of Shakespeare's works. Edward's life is followed through flashbacks from a young child, through to the end of his life. He is portrayed as a child prodigy who writes and performs A Midsummer Night's Dream for a young Elizabeth I. A series of events sees his plays being performed by a frontman, Shakespeare.
Cast & Characters
Rhys Ifans as Earl of Oxford;
Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Elizabeth I;
Sebastian Armesto as Ben Jonson;
Rafe Spall as William Shakespeare;
David Thewlis as William Cecil;
Edward Hogg as Robert Cecil;
Xavier Samuel as Earl of Southampton;
Sam Reid as Earl of Essex;
Jamie Campbell Bower as Young Earl of Oxford;
Joely Richardson as Young Queen Elizabeth I