Telluride Review: 'Suffragette' Starring Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter & Meryl Streep

If only Carey Mulligan had been inspired to protest for the right to a better script for "Suffragette," an overly schematic look at the struggle for women’s voting rights in 1910s Britain that almost gets by on the strength of a great slow burn of a lead performance. As much as the movie wants to overplay its hand at virtually every turn, Mulligan just as surely undersells the transformations that her initially mousy laundry worker undergoes on the way to suffragette city. She deserves a vehicle that’s worthier of her nuance, but she’ll pick up a lot of women’s (and men’s) votes in early 2016 anyway.

If your idea of the English suffrage movement was mostly informed by Mrs. Banks in "Mary Poppins," director Sarah Gavron and writer Abi Morgan want to give us something that feels closer in spirit to "12 Years a Slave." The lack of the vote is just the tip of the subjugation and degradation iceberg here. Husbands remind their wives that they’re property,...