British Movies: 'The Lost King' Is a Heartwarming Piece of Plantagenet Propaganda

Everyone knows the story of King Richard III. Or, at least, they think they do. Thanks to William Shakespeare and his dark history play about the doomed monarch, everyone remembers Richard as a monster, a villain with a deformed body to match his dark heart. A usurper who murdered his nephews to claim a crown and solidify his own power, he's a man who almost certainly got what he deserved on Bosworth Field.

Or did he? What if none of those stories about Richard are true? History is written by the winners, after all, and  Shakespeare's play was penned more than a century after the last Plantagenet king was dead and gone. And heck, it sure would have made life a lot easier for King Henry VII and the Tudor family line if everybody believed him to be the welcome overthrower of a hated tyrant rather than a fourth-tier cousin who killed a distant relative in the name of satisfying his ambition, wouldn't it?

These are just some of the questions posed by The Lost King, a charming British film that dramatizes the fascinating search for Richard Plantagenet's grave and the life of the amateur historian who devoted herself to proving the conventional wisdom about the allegedly crookbacked-king false. A sweet, gentle movie that is a story of second chances (both in life and death); as much as it is a tale of the man Richard III might have been, it's an easy, briskly paced ride grounded in genuine emotion. Is it, in its way, as much of a piece of propaganda as the Shakespeare play that insists on Richard's monstrous nature? Perhaps. After all, it's probable that the most likely truth of the man lies somewhere in the middle of these two interpretive extremes, and he was neither a hero nor a devil, if we want to be super technical about it. But, given the anti-Ricardian sentiment that has dominated historical discourse for centuries, it's nice to see a different perspective represented.