Not all modernisations of Shakespeare stink - and it's all personal opinion anyway - but Branagh, for some reason, just instinctively knows how to render Shakespeare. Thus, his Hamlet was very, very good. I think Henry V was the best one he's done, if only because I've often thought that Richard Briers would be the better for a good hanging.
My problem with Dick III was that the acting and the script didn't overpower the incongruity of the modern setting. The editing was (again IMHO and with apologies to Ted) inept, the scenes were poorly set and the choreography was iffy. I walked away with the overpowering impression that the approach by the director (was it McLellan?) had been "Oh dear, I want to do RIII but another costume drama is not going to fly at the box office. So let's do something outrageous." He might as well have had Dick saying "Horsepower, horsepower, my kingdom for some horsepower" which would have, at least, provided a laugh.
Still, I guess that's why so many films get made - no one film is going to please everyone.
Richard himself was a child of his times, doing what he could to survive with what he had.
By our standards, he was probably what we would call "evil", but that would apply equally to all mediaeval monarchs. You do have to remember that all of his contemporaries who wrote about what was going on around them were generally in the nobility or the church. Richard unfortunately managed to get off-side with both institutions at the same time, a deadly combination. We really don't know what the commons thought about him, if anything. On the other hand, we regard Henry V as some kind of English hero-king. But he was more of a murdering, conniving, underhanded monomaniac than Richard ever was. Richard merely tried to protect what was his - his throne and, by extension, his life - and lashed out at those who threatened them. Henry projected his general disdain for human life outward and got a lot of people killed in the process, many more than Richard topped in his entire lifetime including Bosworth.
Henry Tudor took the throne at a time when the first whisperings of the Renaissance were beginning to percolate into the English psyche. His work on Westminster Abbey is probably an expression of this. Henry VIII was truly a Renaissance monarch, a mixture of intellectual erudition and day-to-day cruelty which I find much harder to understand than Richard's "kill-or-be-killed" choices.
BTW, there are two really good books on Henry V (both fiction, but extremely well-researched). The first is "My Lord John" by Georgette Heyer and, I think I have this right, "Cry God for Harry" by Margaret Rofheart. Don't be put off the Heyer book by the fact she wrote all of those novels about romance in the Regency period. Her first love was "real" history, and she made a damned good job of it. Another book to read which may help anyone interested to understand the mid-Plantagenet period is "Falstaff" by Robert Nye. Funny, bawdy, and a damned good read.
