


Stellan Skarsgard
'Physician' tells a Dark Ages story in a vivid, if old-fashioned way

Stories about the modern world's origins within the Dark Ages have always held a fascination for some OK, maybe it's just me. It's not exactly filmdom's favorite era, all brown and muddy and unhygienic. A priest on the run ("The Reckoning") falls in with a troupe of actors and helps condemn a murderous lord. "The Name of the Rose" and TV's "Brother Cadfael" had monks investigating crimes, logically and rationally, in a time of superstition. A young Medieval lawyer's immersion in this new form of provable facts-based law was the foundation of an early Colin Firth gem, "The Advocate." "The Physician," based on...