A Knight's Tale
The 2001 jousting movie that made Heath Ledger a star and opened with a medieval crowd stomping and clapping along to Queen's "We Will Rock You." A period adventure that gleefully refused to act its age.
Written and directed by Brian Helgeland — already an Oscar-winning writer for L.A. Confidential — A Knight's Tale arrived in May 2001. Heath Ledger stars as William Thatcher, a lowborn squire who seizes his dead master's armor and, with a forged patent of nobility from a broke, real-life Geoffrey Chaucer (Paul Bettany), poses as "Sir Ulrich von Liechtenstein" to compete in the jousting circuit — a sport otherwise closed to commoners.
The film's masterstroke was its deliberate anachronism. It framed a 14th-century tournament as the rock-concert spectacle of its day: the opening crowd stomps and claps to Queen's "We Will Rock You," a court ball breaks into David Bowie's "Golden Years," and Bachman-Turner Overdrive turns up on the soundtrack. The knowing collision of medieval setting and classic rock gave it a swagger that period pieces rarely have.
A modest hit that opened behind The Mummy Returns, it became a cable-rewatch favorite and a defining example of the knowingly anachronistic period movie. It made Ledger a leading-man heartthrob and helped launch Bettany — and its cult only grew after Ledger's death in 2008.
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