Fantastic!

Admirable film.

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

In the end how do you judge a man like George Gordon Byron? He certainly left a nice body of work to judge him as writer and poet. It might have been more had he spent a little more time at creation and less indulging every kind of vice there was. As he puts it so accurately pleasure is the only real reason we know we're alive.This film covers the period of 1812 to 1824 from the publication of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage until his death. He's quite the toast of Regency London and he's welcome by dint of his work and title in the best of homes. He soon wears out that welcome in a series of scandalous affairs. Regency society didn't mind affairs, but just be discreet. Discreet did not exist in his vocabulary.Byron's personal life is probably best known for his affair with Lady Caroline Lamb. But this film shows she's only one of many. Camilla Power plays her and Power is in the film long enough to show what a mad woman she was. A little too much for a lover and a husband to handle.I can't think of anything Byron missed. He made it with any woman who showed the slightest interest, even a little incest with a sister. He indulged himself in the love that dares not speak its name with a young boy. He drank to excess, took opiates at a rate that his contemporary Coleridge might have envied. There's brief scene of him turtling down some Laudanum like it was a brewski.I think he envied the Shelleys played here by Sally Hawkins and Oliver Dimsdale. Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley were his contemporaries and they seemed to find happiness that was unattainable for Byron.Jonny Lee Miller plays the title role and makes Byron the last word in hedonism. He strikes just the right notes and pulls a lot of emotions from the viewer. You envy him and yet you're jealous of him. He's rich with a title which allows him to indulge. We'd all like to be him, but the business of day to day living leaves 95% of us with enough challenges for our lives.This BBC production of Byron is both revealing and non-judgmental. It will give you a good understanding of the man who in many ways was the symbol of the romantic age.

I am appalled by some of the reviews on this movie. The people who take the time to criticize the film because they find Byron's personality inherently distasteful are no better than the stuck-up, vapid, and inherently depressed figures that also made up the aristocratic regency of England. Hypersensitive people like Lady Caroline or Byron merely reflect the madness and desperation festering within all of us, as well as the absolute solipsism. For one reviewer to find it important to tell us the movie was lusterless because Byron was a chaotic and dissolute fiend is about as productive as setting a leaf on fire and hoping the forest will catch. For your information, Byron was and is a hero to those who would dream. Don't take the opportunity to offer your privileged and sheltered scornful opinion on a legacy and film that have no time for such worthless peons of petulancy such as yourself. Yes he did things in his life that are considered horrible, but now he, and those he hurt, are no more than flakes of dust and dirt blowing around this world. Take time to focus on your menial existence rather than pompously proselytizing about others.Now that I am done putting down the insufferable philistines who found it fit to comment, I'll offer my own opinion on this movie. I adore this movie, and I make a habit of watching it at least once a month if I can. Sure it's choice of making an apex of Byron's life in England is blatantly wrong, and I thank the person who wrote that wonderful review mentioning how that choice is only a mark of the continuously conservative and scandal-obsessed society we live in today, but the aesthetics of the film remain intact. In fact, this biopic is perhaps the best I have seen in regards to its respect for the viewer's basic intelligence, wit, and sense of aesthetic. We are given the life of a man hounded by his own existence bar none. My favorite scenes were the ones between Byron and Augusta, though I would have liked to have seen Shelley get a larger role and have Keats ridiculed by Byron as well (that middle-class masturbator, to paraphrase Byron).Please, if your mind is as sufficiently petty as benbrae76 (who wrote that god-awful review), don't bother commenting. Or even better, take a cue from Fanny Imlay (Mary Shelley's half-sister) and kill yourself.

I find myself disagreeing with a previous reviewer. Byron was indeed a beast, apparently, but because Miller plays him as a damned beast, I found myself sympathetic toward the character. I thought the casting was good, and especially liked "Lady Caroline"'s insanity -- what a hairdo! Lovely costuming. "Shelley" was excellent, too. He seemed soulful, half-crazed, and damned as well. Weren't all the Romantics...?And Vanessa Redgrave, of course, was marvelous. One could actually imagine how, if there "had been fewer years between (them)," it might have been a very short dinner, indeed.Inner-City High School English Teacher Central Valley, California

This is the only film depiction of Byron I've seen that attempts to portray him as the clever, funny man that he was rather than some cartoon goth with a big floaty cloak, eyeliner and an evil, reverberating laugh. Other films tend to be simple, self-indulgent perpetuations of Byron's partially self-made myth and this film is the only one I have seen so far that shows something of what was beneath: Regency society seen through Lord Byron's eyes as he rips the piss. Jonny Lee Miller carries off the parallel aspects of Byron's personality with aplomb, making him smug and petulant while unavoidably charismatic and likable. Of course it's still all conjecture, as is emphasised at the start of the film, but as far as Byron films go, there's nothing out there to touch this.