Look, I'm usually a sucker for the stiff-upper-lip emotionally repressed English costume drama, but this one seems to be taking the mickey. Cumberbatch is faintly ridiculous, as is his trollop of a wife, while the young Suffragette with whom he is infatuated is scarcely adolescent and certainly not very characterful, which makes him seem more than a little creepy. Ann-Marie Duff is miscast as the neglected wife of a perverted vicar, while Miranda Richardson does her usual Queenie thing while Rupert Everett skulks around being homoerotically ambiguous. Hard to take it all seriously, and even Brits will struggle with some of the dialogue, especially Cumberbatch's aristocratic circumlocutions.
Review of Parade's End
