Metacritic reviews

Elizabeth: The Golden Age lacks the intricate plotting that characterized its predecessor. The screenplay is more action-oriented but not as smart, and some of the dialogue is downright cheesy.

Too bad Kapur's new, glittering sequel also shows up feeling prematurely old, square, and cautious. A production of exquisitely complicated wigs and expensively grand wide shots, it pauses often to admire its own beauty, leery of messing with previous success.

Favors pageantry over substance.

Cate Blanchett can do anything, even play Bob Dylan, but she can't save this creaky sequel to her star-making 1998 biopic of Elizabeth I.

Despite good performances all around, particularly the ever-brilliant Blanchett, Elizabeth: The Golden Age is a gilded ornament, speculative and uninterested in much besides this queen's matters of heart.

Blanchett miraculously gives a good performance, even when saddled with lines like this one, to Clive Owen's Sir Walter Raleigh: "In another world, could you have loved me?"

An unholy mixture of the banal and the bombastic.

Without the pleasure of watching Cate Blanchett continue the role that launched her to stardom, there would be little to recommend this latest of many cinematic and television accounts of the celebrated monarch's life.

Kapur and his screenwriter have little interest here in maintaining even a dollop of historical accuracy.

Overdresses and ultimately abandons what drew us to its 1998 predecessor in the first place: an intimate embrace with history.