There's a too-oft rewound scene on my VHS copy of Helen Mirren's 1989 performance in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover that features a young Ms. M with her clothes off. But from now on, it will be rewound no more—because she's far sexier as Britain's 71-year-old monarch, and I'm still trying to get over it. But never mind my bollocks: God Save the Queen!

In this exploration of the queen's apparently heartless reaction during the week following Princess Diana's death in 1997, Mirren plays Her Royal Highness, Elizabeth II, with just enough respect without fawning the role to pieces (as, say, Judi Dench might have). And she's surprisingly sexy: "My, but you're a beauty," Mirren says to a stag which has caught her, unawares, on a royal estate. It's a troublingly complex moment, made all the more troubling for the glint in her eye and a stirring in the audience's "downstairs" in response to it.

James Cromwell is miscast here as Prince Philip, but his wrongness, at least, minimizes a role that could have distracted from the film's central relationship—that between the queen and Prime Minister Tony Blair, who's played with aplomb by relative unknown Michael Sheen. If there's anything wrong with Sheen, it's his over-humanizing of real life's ambitious, warmongering Blair. But Sheen's portrayal does heighten the tension between Blair and the queen, and one suspects that's just what mischievous director Stephen Frears intended. More props to Frears: He thankfully refuses to engage in any easy stereotypes about the British monarchy or Princess Diana's death (Diana's death is handled, in fact, in an unsentimental, even polite fashion). My first tear in nine years over the whole Diana affair was shed an hour into The Queen—and coming from an unsentimental Englishman, that's paying kudos where it's due: to Helen Mirren. Sigh...