A Knight's Tale

This crowd-pleasing medieval adventure tale is very loosely inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer's -The Canterbury Tales and mixes the anachronistic elements of modern-day rock music and colloquialisms with a period setting and characters. Heath Ledger stars as William Thatcher, a low-born 14th century ...more

The summer of 2001 saw the birth of an unusual new hybrid -- the period film featuring modern-day music, ideas, and catch phrases. In both instances (director Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge [2001] and this medieval fantasy from writer/director Brian Helgeland), the device works. That's probably because both filmmakers fought the powers that be to make it so, relying on the courage of their convictions that they could make it as giddily cool as they envisioned it being. Cool it is, ...more