Director Stephen Frears’ historical comedy-drama “Victoria & Abdul” puts an alarmingly light spin on the, er, complicated relationship between 19th-century Great Britain and its colonies — and would be easily dismissed as period puffery if not for a moving performance by Dame Judi Dench as Queen Victoria.
It’s not the first time Dame Judi has played the long-reigning monarch, having portrayed her in the 1997 drama “Mrs. Brown.” In both movies, the focus is on Victoria’s relationship with a male companion after the death of her husband, Prince Albert, and the tut-tutting responses of her household staff and her son the Prince of Wales (who became King Edward VII after Victoria’s death in 1901).