The Young Victoria: Critic Reviews

Director Jean-Marc Vallee's images have a creamy stateliness, but this is no gilded 
 princess fantasy -- it's the story of a budding ruler who learns to control her surroundings, and Blunt makes that journey at once authentic and relevant.

Frivolously entertaining.

I spent an hour and three-quarters waiting for this movie to start.

The Young Victoria may impart copious amounts of detail about its fascinating protagonists, but it's not a mere tutorial: It's a heady, thoroughly transporting plunge.

It's a muddled but plush experience overall, and if you're a royalist completist or a historical romantic, you'll probably have a decent time. As much as Blunt may have wanted the role, though, I'm not sure it suits her.

Man, British heritage cinema can be dull when assembly-lined for the export market.

A biography that is quite enjoyable to watch, and a bit too easy to forget.

If The Young Victoria never transcends its fussy trappings -- it's still a familiar costume drama -- it remains brisk and intelligent.

Blunt strikes me as the real deal: languid but biting, like Jeanne Moreau, yet able to command a scene while somehow appearing to shift to one side (as Moreau would never do) and observe with a skeptic's smile.

This may be the perfect shared entertainment for daughters just growing out of their princess phase and mothers with their own challenges balancing love and work.

Blunt, her eyes sparking, her manner playful, smart, and proud, shines in the title role. If the film itself isn't brilliant, its star most definitely is.

This is a lavish and lovingly detailed period piece that attempts to re-create England's last golden age, but the enchanting Ms. Blunt is the whole movie, and it wouldn't register even a small bleep on the Richter scale without her.

Well-groomed, upscale, three-hankie entertainment for the Masterpiece Theater crowd.

I didn't quite believe that this tiny girl could become the most powerful woman in the history of the world, but at the time perhaps no one believed it.

You don't have to be a royalist to be moved by beautifully staged coronation and wedding moments, and composer Ilan Eshkeri scores such scenes with music so thrilling you'll feel you've got a front-row seat to the real thing.

What emerges is a genuinely affecting love story, although it takes patience to negotiate the early intrigue.

This Victoria is not particularly Victorian, but then she is young; and everyone wants a piece of her, politically speaking. Emily Blunt is lovely and strong-minded as the Young Vic.

Watching the slow, cautious courtship between Victoria and Albert is so pleasurable, so surprisingly not-boring, that it doesn't matter how much of the ending we already know.

The Young Victoria feels like a wasted opportunity and is among the least impressive in a long line of motion pictures about British royalty.

Exquisitely produced but dramatically erratic.

The Young Victoria is good, old-fashioned period drama _ not terribly lively, not terribly insightful, but rich in pageantry and fine moments of drama, the whole show hinging on a beguiling performance from Blunt.

Emily Blunt is utterly charming in this dramatization of the young Victoria's ascension to the throne and her courtship with Prince Albert.

What filmmaker Jean-Marc Vallee has done in this delicious historical romance is capture that hot blush of pure emotion that comes before kisses, sex, heartbreak and the rest can dilute it.