Revisionist history that allows an unwed sixteenth-century English queen to get it on before declaring herself a career virgin also allows the lush Elizabeth to bust free of period torpor. Stuffy it's not. Australian actress Cate Blanchett has a passionate fire and wit that command attention. Think of Princess Diana when British screenwriter Michael Hirst and Delhi-born director Shekhar Kapur show a girl forced into womanhood by the duties of royalty.

At times the film is annoyingly enamored with its own campy, post-feminist cleverness. Here's this tender girl, deferential to her lover, Lord Dudley (Joseph Fiennes, Ralph's raffish brother), until she's thrust on the throne, pressured to marry a Catholic and to breed sons. Naturally, she rebels. Blanchett makes Elizabeth's transformation from mouse to marriage-hating monarch such a hypnotic spectacle that you're happy when she stops diddling Dudley and starts kicking the ass of the conniving Duke of Norfolk (Christopher Eccleston). Her chief ally is spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush), who has a nasty habit of slitting the throats of the boys he buggers. Still, he's handy in a crisis. Rush slithers with a wonderfully sinister allure, but the film belongs to Blanchett — this hellcat Virgin Queen is something to see.

“Is It True”

As the British Invasion reached its peak in 1964, Brenda Lee went from Nashville to London to record one of her hardest-rocking hits, her perky vocal backed by a stuttering, squalling guitar. That guitar was played by session musician Jimmy Page, yet to skyrocket to fame with first the Yardbirds and then Led Zeppelin. "She said to me, 'I've come here to make a record with the British sound,'" remembered producer Mickie Most. "She felt she wouldn't get the same sound in Nashville because they're only just catching up on the British beat group sound of about six months ago."