This has already been kicked around, but Owen Glieberman’s Lost King review got me going again.

HE to Gleiberman: “Very keen on seeing this, and your TIFF review excited me. But why oh why does the film insist that Richard III wasn’t a vaguely grotesque figure, or the glint-eyed. hunchbacked fellow played by Laurence Olivier in the mid ‘50s? Why does the film insist on depriving us of that perversely pleasurable characterization?

“Even if you claim that Richard III was contorted into a deformed or misshaped figure whom dogs barked at…even if you assert that Shakespeare mangled him into a creep in order to please the Tudors, Richard was still a scheming bastard who murdered his way to the throne. And Harry Lloyd’s beatific expression is infuriating in this light. One glance at Lloyd and I felt a surge of instant loathing. How dare you, Stephen Frears and Steve Coogan? The ghost of Lord Olivier is puzzled; ditto the alive-and-well Ian McKellan, Ralph Fiennes and Al Pacino. Unwelcome revisionism, to put it mildly.”