The best Guy Rolfe’s history movies

Who is Jesus, and why does he impact all he meets? He is respected and reviled, emulated and accused, beloved, betrayed, and finally crucified. Yet that terrible fate would not be the end of the story.

Drawn from the same events that later inspired Gladiator, the film charts the power-hungry greed and father-son betrayal that led to Rome's collapse at the bloody hands of the Barbarians.

Tsar Nicholas II, the inept last monarch of Russia, insensitive to the needs of his people, is overthrown and exiled to Siberia with his family.

Ukraine, 16th century. While the Poles dominate the Cossack steppes, Andrei, son of Taras Bulba, a Cossack leader, must choose between his love for his family and his folk and his passion for a Polish woman.

In 1826 British-ruled India, the secret Cult of Thugee demonstrates their worship of their goddess, Kali, by the mutilation and mass murder of thousands of Indians while pirating the shipments of the British East-Indian Tea Company. As the British military leaders play down the implications of the piracy and disappearances, a lone captain realizes that they are not just coincidence and sets out to uncover the source of the deviltry, at the risk of his career. Based on history.

The mother died under the executioner's axe; the daughter rose to become England's greatest monarch -- the brilliant and cunning Queen Elizabeth I. Jean Simmons portrays young Bess in this rich tapestry of a film that traces the tumultuous, danger-fraught years from Elizabeth's birth to her unexpected ascension to the throne at a mere 25. Charles Laughton reprises his Academy Award®-winning* role as her formidable father Henry VIII. Deborah Kerr plays her last stepmother (and Henry's last of six wives), gentle Catherine Parr. And Simmons' then real-life husband, Stewart Granger, adds heroics as Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour. In a resplendent world of adventure, romance and court intrigue, Young Bess reigns.

Sophie Dorothea is a young woman forced into a loveless marriage with Prince George Louis of Hanover. George Louis is later crowned King George I of England. Despairing of ever experiencing true love, the depressed queen finds life at court no solace. Sophie then falls for a dashing Swedish soldier of fortune, Count Konigsmark.