I wish I could say that Mary, mother of God, riding a horse through a wall of fire was the worst thing about Netflix’s Mary. As an unrepentant fan of some truly unrealistic films, I can forgive a lot of entertaining embellishment in a movie.

Hopkins is the quintessential Herod, capturing all of the cunning, ruthlessness and absolute evil that propels the tyrant. He slowly moves into paranoia, too. Hopkins is the king of all the actors who have ever played Herod. None have portrayed that real malice to this degree. Naturally, violence in various ways underlines Herod’s brutality.