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Anthony Hopkins is the emperor in an epic, gratuitous tale of the last days of Rome, while Natalie Portman stars in a beautiful, gritty noir about a woman on the hunt for a missing girl in the 1960sThe last days are upon Rome, a “cesspool of corruption and decay”. While the long-suffering populace wait for unreliable grain ships to arrive, the brutality of the extreme spectacles in the Flavian Amphitheatre distracts them from their misery. This epic drama focuses on the political machinations around Emperor Vespasian (Anthony Hopkins), his two no-good sons, the dubious bookmaker Tenax (Iwan Rheon), his gladiator friend Scorpus (Dimitri Leonidas) and the slaves and underlings doomed to do their bidding. It is gratuitously maximalist, but some of the money lavished on production might have been better spent on honing a slightly clunky script.
Prime Video, from Thursday 18 July Continue reading...