15 | ★★★★

Although director Karim Aïnouz’s account of life with Henry VIII brings the perspective of women to the fore, it is the film’s two male performances that dominate.

As the king who is tormented by gout legs and an infection that is spreading throughout his wide body, Jude Law is on terrifying form. So too is Simon Russell Beale as his Torquamada-like Bishop Gardiner who roots out revolutionary Protestant reformism by burning its adherents.

Based on Elizabeth Fremantle’s novel Queen’s Gambit, the tension caused by this creative account of history is an example of poetic licence being used to excellent effect. Much hinges on whether Alicia Vikander’s defiant Katherine Parr (Henry’s sixth and final wife) will be undone when Law’s casually murderous Henry discovers that she has gifted the necklace he gave her to Anne Cleeves, the fiercely intelligent revolutionary and – to Henry and his henchman – a heretic.

In that role Erin Doherty, the star of the above theatre review, is again stunning, delivering a witty charismatic performance that sweeps all before her.

Violence and barbarism hover over every scene. Yet Aïnouz milks the tension without ever succumbing to the gratuitous. The lead-up to the climax is almost unbearable. Yet its conclusion is a dramatic coup whatever the historians say.