The Other Boleyn Girl

Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson are dynamic diametric opposites in their roles -- so good that it's unclear which one should be considered the "other" Boleyn girl of the title.

The Other Boleyn Girl had vast potential to become a chick-flick or a bodice-ripper, but it's not. It's an historical drama with sex, sibling rivalry and great costumes. You can see the difference.

The Other Boleyn Girl is a period piece, the kind of flick that typically appeals most to women. And yet, Girl is hardly refined and dainty.

Director Justin Chadwick, a veteran of British television including Bleak House, gets fine work from his actors and impressive period visuals from various sites around England.

Not much of a visual epic maybe, but an absorbing, exciting costume drama that works as a historical romance, a family tragedy and a showcase for its young stars.

The Other Boleyn Girl is really more like an episode of the Showtime series The Tudors (with elevated production values and less gratuitous sex) than an attempt to transport audiences back to the grimy and underlit 16th century.

On-location exteriors throughout the English countryside, elaborate costumes, and colorful sets overrun with tapestries, mounds of food and large sporting hounds make this one of the most authentic-looking period films in recent years.

The Other Boleyn Girl whips historical fact, speculation and pure fiction into a frothy frappe of political intrigue, sexual maneuvering and sibling rivalry.

Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman are very nearly upstaged by their costumes. The conniving courtiers' garish, multilayered costumes and the dank, gloomy castle interiors are pretty amazing.

I have to admit a weakness for political chicanery and another weakness for opulent costume dramas -- and The Other Boleyn Girl, a combination of 16th-century soap opera and palace intrigue, delivers plenty of both.

It's probably a safe bet that The Other Boleyn Girl won't be getting too many raves, simply because it's so easy to mock.

The Other Boleyn Girl is an agreeable piece of filmmaking, carefully and sometimes artfully balancing solemnity with fluff.

Gossip Girl has nothing on Boleyn Girl, which strikes a balance between relative historical accuracy and modern hindsight.

If you are one of those people who thinks "they don't make movies like they used to," The Other Boleyn Girl should put your gripes on hold.

The Other Boleyn Girl offers the pleasures you want, and expect, from a middlebrow royal-court soaper.

This well-crafted historical drama is a treat for Tudor history fans and everyone else who appreciates a lusty tale.

It gives us romance, adultery, beheadings, divorces, rape, betrayal and the basest kind of ambition. It takes us through events of lasting significance. Yet at times the pace is so slow, it seems like not much is happening.

There's no two ways about it: To enjoy The Other Boleyn Girl, you're going to have to suspend disbelief and buy into the idea that Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson are 16th-Century British women.

The Other Boleyn Girl is a fitting prequel to the Elizabeth movies: It's pretty, passionate, and full of historical poppycock.

The film wants to be a heavy historical costume drama and a sudsy soap opera, but in trying to be both, the movie is only mildly diverting when it should be riveting.

The movie stops being fun when it shrugs off the first-stage sisterly competition drama and dives into a hyper-text version of the history-shaping events that follow.

The Other Boleyn Girl can't quite make up its mind whether it's a tale of courtly intrigue or merely an excuse for sexual shenanigans.

The Other Boleyn Girl is a sullen genre picture, hardly as vivacious as Russ Meyer's uncategorizable sexploitation films, and not as edifying, either.

A lightweight production struggling valiantly to stand up under the twin weights of history and popular mythology.

The British are still so traumatized by the erosion of their royal seat that, four centuries after the fall of the house of Tudor, they can't find an English actor to ascend that particular throne.

As a costume drama, it falls somewhere near the middle of the pack, though its costumes definitely rank above par.

The Other Boleyn Girl feels less like an epic drama about power and the power of love than an episode of a Masterpiece Theatre mini-series.

The Other Boleyn Girl is two-hours of trashy eye-candy that, while fast and loose with the truth, functions as a perfectly adequate divertissement in a time of year when studios tend to unleash their worst.

What works is the combustible teaming of Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson, who give the Boleyn hotties a tough core of intelligence and wit, swinging the film's sixteenth-century protofeminist issues handily into this one.

I like the fact that plot drives the Boleyn dilemma. There's no overabundance of garish costumes or fancy makeup, just royal relationship problems to die for.

It's a terrific showcase for battling Boleyn babes Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman.

The Other Boleyn Girl is a Hans Holbein-esque portrait of British history as a sex-and-ambition-driven soap opera.

The Other Boleyn Girl works both as an engagingly sordid meditation on protofeminism and contemporized sisterhood set in a time and a place where either/or were grounds for, at the very least, defenestration.

We're treated to the odd pretty location, stunning costumes and a tendency to truncate history, time and events to wrap up this complicated blood-letting in under two hours.

Sex, money, social status and politics are the key ingredients in The Other Boleyn Girl, which makes 16th-century England look like a hedonistic playground.

Wow! Hot dueling sisters. Beheadings. Untold wealth and power. Lush costumes. Decisions that change the course of history. And, again -- hot dueling sisters! So how come The Other Boleyn Girl is such a snooze?

The director, Justin Chadwick, goes in for thick and heavy emotions -- glances that should dart around a royal dais instead land like bombshells, with fun becoming the collateral damage.

If you're indifferent to silly revisions of history and bad acting, you may enjoy The Other Boleyn Girl. I'm not, and I didn't.

The direction of Justin Chadwick, a veteran of British television, is mopey and fussy, and he's too quick to pan away from the sexual clinches to raise the movie's temperature above room level.

Directed by Brit television director Justin Chadwick, this is a less gripping foray into the territory of Showtime's highfalutin historical soap The Tudors.

Like a lot of other historically based costume dramas, The Other Boleyn Girl is filled with intrigue. But that certainly doesn't make the movie intriguing.

Stunningly dull for a movie about sex and betrayal, the beautiful costumes and scenery only make it a high-budget seventh-grade book report.

One of the most pivotal and provocative periods in English history is given the soap-opera treatment in this handsome but hollow drama.

The film's seduction is all too obvious to ravish anyone, especially viewers who've read a paragraph or two on Henry VIII and recollect what happened to his wives.

There are other ways to make history engaging, but casting Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson as siblings vying for the affections of Eric Bana as Henry VIII in The Other Boleyn Girl leaves the competition in the dust.

Based on a novel built on historical fact, The Other Boleyn Girl is more overwrought soap opera than serious costume drama, but nobody involved in making the film seems to understand this.

The movie looks gorgeous, and Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman do their best to infuse rigidly defined roles with some complexity. A bland Eric Bana, however, leaves us wondering why they even bother fighting over him.

The interest of the movie lies in how freshly it can recreate familiar historical events, such as Henry's divorce from his first queen, Katherine of Aragon, his subsequent marriage to Anne, and her downfall.

The Other Boleyn Girl might not qualify as an example of “ye olde chicke flicke,” but it certainly tries hard enough to be.

The 1969 drama Anne of the Thousand Days, starring Richard Burton and Genevieve Bujold, was a far more compelling piece of historical fiction than this oversimplified, overheated mediocre melodrama.

Just read the Wikipedia entry on Anne Boleyn. Not only is it more illuminating than The Other Boleyn Girl, but chances are you'd also be able to write a more entertaining script from it than the one used by director Justin Chadwick.

The movie does offer one of the things we count on in this genre: The clothes are almost overwhelmingly beautiful, perfectly constructed from richly patterned textiles.

If Shakespeare was writing the screenplay for The Other Boleyn Girl, he might have named it Much Ado About Nothing. In truth, a more fitting title would be Much Ado About Something Done Better Dozens of Times Before.

The Other Boleyn Girl quickly devolves into tedium -- it's a catfight without claws.

It's a muddy-looking and sometimes unintentionally funny piece of schlock, in which Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson save face but Eric Bana proves he's worse than a Clive Owen stand-in.

The Other Boleyn Girl is the kind of potted historical drama that's not good enough to take seriously and, sadly, not bad enough to be any fun.

It's pretty hard to make a dull movie about Henry VIII and his complicated love life, but The Other Boleyn Girl, a failed Oscar contender, manages to do just that, with yawns to spare.

The Other Boleyn Girl contains two miscarriages, two births, two executions, one rape, one hunting accident, treason, adultery, incest, bigamy and excommunication. So why isn't it more interesting?

The umpteenth film incarnation of Henry VIII's marriage to Anne Boleyn, The Other Boleyn Girl races through the events at the Tudor court like a triple-time miniseries.

While there are no circumstances under which I would ever defend such behavior, suffice it to say that when rape feels like the first justified act in an entire movie, it's a sign of some particularly bad filmmaking.

The picture is directed by Justin Chadwick, whose emergence from a well-deserved obscurity he is now ready to resume.