5) Mrs. Brown
Yes, we all love stories about Queen Victoria, but how many of them center on the Queen after her youth? Mrs. Brown takes on the question of Queen Victoria’s life after Albert, as the grieving Queen (Judi Dench) forms a quasi-romantic attachment to her husband’s Scottish servant Brown (Billy Connolly).
The romance causes serious consternation in the court, especially as the exact nature of their relationship is rumored but never substantiated. Brown seems to exert more and more influence over the Queen, drawing into question the monarch’s continued rule in the very society she helped to create.
While the film never makes explicit a possible sexual relationship, there’s enough sexual tension between Dench and Connolly to make one imagine just about anything. But it’s also a poignant and touching film about the nature of grief and the requirements placed on a widow and a monarch at a very complicated time in British history. What’s more, it succeeds in humanizing a Queen often reduced to a caricature based on the era that bears her name.
