Andrew Garfield: "The Uprising"

 Andrew Garfield makes a point of working with high-profile directors: Scorsese, Lin-Manuel Miranda, David Fincher, Guadagnino. So the Garfield/Paul Greengrass collaboration has a sense of inevitability.

It's the 1300s! The bubonic plague is doing its thing. Richard II is running out of money; his nefarious advisors suggest that he should tax the poor. But the masses strike back. There is an assumption that Richard II himself is a decent person; he has just (unfortunately) surrounded himself with snakes. Fighting ensues. People start to reevaluate their understanding of Richard II.

That's the entire movie. If you're going to have sinister barons whispering in the 1300s, you're going to need Stephen Dillane and Tom Hollander; this movie gives us both actors, and they do exactly what we want them to do. You also get Katherine Waterston, consistently mysterious as Joan of Kent.

The biggest shock of the cinema summer season was Anne Hathaway in "The End of Oak Street"; having seemed friendly for two hours, Hathaway suddenly chooses to murder her own children to secure a certain elixir. (You have to see "The End of Oak Street.") "The Uprising" isn't quite as surprising--but its commitment to nihilism did make me raise my eyebrows. This is not "an easy watch."

Reasonably effective and worth renting.