YNOT at the Movies

Six hundred years on, the 1381 The Peasants' Revolt still hasn't loosened its grip on the public imagination, and director Paul Greengrass is only the latest to try to bring it to the big screen, this time with a camera that moves like it's still trying to keep up with the mob.

Written, directed, and produced by Greengrass, "The Uprising" (U.K./Germany/U.S. 2026 | 128 min.) marks his first true period piece. In England, 1381, the Black Death has wiped out half the population, and the boy king's council answers the resulting grief with a poll tax. Ploughman (Andrew Garfield), a farmer who has already lost his family to the plague, intervenes when tax collectors turn violent, and that single act of resistance snowballs into tens of thousands marching on London.

The rebels reach the banks of River Thames, expecting to negotiate with 14-year-old King Richard II (Woody Norman); when his terrified council pulls him back at the last second, the crowd storms London instead. Once inside, the rebels hunt down the officials they hold responsible for the tax, the king's promises of amnesty prove hollow, and the uprising curdles into exactly the kind of bloodshed it rose up against.

Among the rebels, John Ball (Jamie Bell) is the preacher with an evangelist's hunger, Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis) gives the rebellion its blunt forward motion, and Alyce (Thomasin McKenzie), a character invented for the film, stands in for the women who marched alongside the men.

On the crown's side, Treasurer Hales (Tom Hollander) and Archbishop Sudbury (Stephen Dillane) hold the real power behind the throne, Mayor Walworth (Jonny Lee Miller) gives London's merchant class a wary self-interest, and the Countess (Katherine Waterston), Richard's mother, is desperate for her son to rise to the authority the crown demands of him.

The film's real find is the Scribe (Sky Yang), who moves easily between the king's court and the rebel camp, a kind of go-between no one else in the story gets to be. It's a terrific performance, and the Scribe emerges as the closest thing the film has to a conscience.

Garfield doesn't smile once across the film's runtime, and that choice reads less like a limitation than a decision Ploughman has already made before the story even starts. He's a man carrying two griefs at once, the family behind him and the tax collector in front of him, and both stay visible on his face throughout. Norman gets the harder assignment: King Richard II starts the film as a terrified boy in a room full of men older and crueler than him and ends it cold enough to order executions without flinching, and Norman charts that shift almost entirely without dialogue.

Every interior in this film feels dark, grim, and lifeless, and the effect builds a real sense of dread around institutions that are supposed to represent order. Production designer Nikolaj Danielsen turned Nuremberg's St. Sebaldus Church into a working set, and cinematographer Pål Ulvik Rokseth shoots every council chamber and cathedral like it's been sealed off from daylight for six hundred years. The costume work is its own achievement; the sheer volume of period-accurate clothing this production needed for tens of thousands of extras is staggering to consider, and the designers reportedly leaned on 3D-printed textiles just to keep pace with the shoot.

The film's believability slips over the mechanics of the rebellion itself. Wat Tyler and Ploughman address armies of thousands in open fields with no amplification available to fourteenth-century England, and the crowds cheer back as if every word carried clean to the rear of the field. It's the kind of small thing that pulls you out of an otherwise immersive picture right when the crowd scenes need you leaning in rather than doing the math.

Greengrass has made this kind of film before, staging chaos so it reads as legible rather than merely loud, in "Bloody Sunday" (2002) and "Captain Phillips" (2013). "The Uprising" is the biggest and bluntest version of that instinct yet, and its politics are current on purpose: a population wrecked by plague, furious at a government that failed it, marching on the people who rule them. In this film, he tells that six-hundred-year-old story about disease, grief, and fury at the people in charge, to an audience that just lived through another pandemic.

"The Uprising" opens in theaters on Friday, September 11, 2026.