A 2018 historical drama starring Maxine Peake and Rory Kinnear has found a new streaming home in the UK. Written and directed by Mike Leigh, Peterloo looks back on the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, when a peaceful protest in Manchester’s St Peter’s Square was crushed by armed government militia, resulting in 18 deaths and countless injured.
Presented at Venice Film Festival and also screened at BFI London Film Festival in 2018, the film earned mixed to positive reviews.
For those wanting to catch up on a “powerful” retelling of a dark moment in British history, Peterloo is now available to watch on Prime Video, where it’s been re-added at the weekend.
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The film follows a working-class family, composed of son Joseph (David Moorst) and parents Nellie (Peake) and Joshua (Pearce Quigley), who become interested in the movement demanding Parliamentary reform and an extension of voting rights, at the time denied to middle and working-class men and all women.
Peterloo also stars Kinnear as working-class radicalism activist Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt, an important figure in the lead-up to the protest and massacre.
Holding a critics’ score of 67% on Rotten Tomatoes, the historical drama has been praised as “yet another well-acted and brilliantly staged addition to the filmmaker’s oeuvre, which has always sought to understand Britain, then and now” (via NPR).
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A “brilliant and demanding” film for The New York Times, Peterloo has been also described as “richly intelligent” and “passionate” in a review by The Guardian.
Elsewhere, Sight & Sound wrote: “Mike Leigh’s film is a powerful blunt weapon, hitting back for the people who refused to,” with Vulture calling the final act of the film “the most visceral filmmaking” in Leigh’s oeuvre.
Those who weren’t fully on board with Peterloo cited Leigh’s “more pedagogic than artistic” approach to the material (via RogerEbert.com) and underwritten characters among the film’s most apparent flaws.
“[Leigh] seems so stirred by their speeches that he forgets to craft characters,” wrote The New Yorker, while The Austin Chronicle argued: “There’s a clumsy didacticism that might work better if he didn’t run through dozens of superficially sketched characters.”
Peterloo is streaming on Prime Video in the UK.
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Stefania is a freelance writer specialising in TV and movies. After graduating from City University, London, she covered LGBTQ+ news and pursued a career in entertainment journalism, with her work appearing in outlets including Little White Lies, The Skinny, Radio Times and Digital Spy.
Her beats are horror films and period dramas, especially if fronted by queer women. She can argue why Scream is the best slasher in four languages (and a half).