Henry V

The young King Henry V claims the French throne and starts a war. By the time his army reaches Agincourt it is exhausted, sick and heavily outnumbered. The night before, he moves among his soldiers in disguise. In the morning he rises and gives the St Crispin's Day speech. Kenneth Branagh wrote, directed and played the lead in his first film as director, at twenty-eight. Paul Scofield, Derek Jacobi, Ian Holm, Judi Dench and Christian Bale are in the cast, and Emma Thompson appears in her first feature. Patrick Doyle wrote the score, his first for film. The four-minute single take at the end of the Agincourt section, carried by the hymn Non Nobis, Domine, became the film's most cited sequence. At the 62nd Academy Awards it won Best Costume Design and was nominated for Best Director and Best Actor. It won the BAFTA for Best Direction and the European Film Award for Young European Film of the Year. It passed 10 million dollars in the United States and took 652,555 pounds in the UK, playing at its widest on only 134 US screens. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 98 percent, with critics calling it energetic, passionate and wonderfully acted. Roger Ebert gave three and a half stars. Who it is for: viewers who like Shakespeare on film and war shown muddy rather than magnificent. Who it is not for: anyone new to the text. The dialogue is not shortened and the political argument for the war goes past quickly at the start.