The British are so very competent at getting everyone up in period costume and riding them around on horses that sometimes, as with “Cromwell,” they figure that’s enough. It isn’t anymore. Roger Ebert, 1971.

Hughes fudges facts and skews his portrait of Oliver Cromwell, who had elements of the visionary to him but was hardly a prototypical 20th-century liberal, as a man operating according to his period’s prejudices but driven ultimately towards far-sighted, democratising impulses. Roderick Heath