A biting sense of topicality pervades this passionate account of the murder of protesters at a mass pro-democracy protest in Manchester in 1819
Mike Leigh brings an overwhelming simplicity and severity to this historical epic, which begins with rhetoric and ends in violence. There is force, grit and, above all, a sense of purpose; a sense that the story he has to tell is important and real, and that it needs to be heard right now. The film has an uncompromising seriousness, as much like George Eliot’s novel Felix Holt as Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy, the poem inspired by Peterloo.
On 16 August 1819, at what we would now call a pro-democracy demonstration in St Peter’s Field, Manchester, an excitable band of cavalry and yeomanry – whose commander had airily absented himself for a day at the races – charged with sabres drawn into a crowd of 100,000 unarmed people, many of...
Mike Leigh brings an overwhelming simplicity and severity to this historical epic, which begins with rhetoric and ends in violence. There is force, grit and, above all, a sense of purpose; a sense that the story he has to tell is important and real, and that it needs to be heard right now. The film has an uncompromising seriousness, as much like George Eliot’s novel Felix Holt as Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy, the poem inspired by Peterloo.
On 16 August 1819, at what we would now call a pro-democracy demonstration in St Peter’s Field, Manchester, an excitable band of cavalry and yeomanry – whose commander had airily absented himself for a day at the races – charged with sabres drawn into a crowd of 100,000 unarmed people, many of...
- 9/1/2018
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
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