Director Shekhar Kapur, who put Ms. Blanchett through her flouncing paces in "Elizabeth," the rather more restrained 1998 film about the monarch's earlier years, doesn't spend much time pondering the Sapphic possibilities, mostly because he has armies to unleash, conspiracies to uncork and one head to lop off.

The Elizabeth of this film bears little relation to the flushed young woman of the first film, who had not yet been unmoored from the merely mortal. The spring lamb is no more, and with her Kabuki-white mask and palace rituals, this older, ethereal Elizabeth on occasion seems like a space alien, which, in some ways, is what she has become.

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