For decades the mantle of most beautiful and groundbreaking period piece in cinema history has deservedly rested on the shoulders of Stanley Kubrick's 1975 masterpiece Barry Lyndon.
Now Greek absurdist master Yorgos Lanthimos has posed a serious challenge to Kubrick's reign with The Favourite - perhaps the most breathtaking, assured and absorbing period film in the past four decades of cinema history.
Written decades ago by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, the film set in the last days of 18th-century Stuart England, is a firmly female-power-centred tale of love, lust and ruthless ambition that has found its moment in the era of #MeToo. Its heightened consciousness of gender inequality makes it much more than just another quaint, exquisitely costumed tale of a moment from the past no one really cares about.
In the palace of Queen Anne in the 1700s during a long war against the French, the monarch - a seemingly childish Queen of Hearts figure played with mercurial brilliance by Olivia Colman - is often too ill to perform her duties, which are carried out by her dear friend, confidante and sometime lover Sarah Churchill (an equally exceptional Rachel Weisz)...