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Review

McCormack stars as a strong-willed woman of lower station in 16th-century Venice who, when spurned by her true love (who refuses to marry below his station), becomes a very popular courtesan. The first of a recent spate of "feminists from the past" films, Dangerous Beauty is art-less art-house lite, a repeatably dull and pandering film with a potentially intriguing premise: how does an intelligent, independent woman get by in a society where women are treated as little more than objects? The clichéd answer that a whore is master of the man is given a spirited reading by McCormack, but the film as a whole can't transcend the mundane. A last-minute segue into the plague and the Inquisition feels tacked on (this despite the fact it's based on a true story), injected clumsily to pump up the sagging narrative. Fans of costume dramas should enjoy this more, but even they will most likely be underwhelmed.