Starring Carey Mulligan, Natalie Press, Helena Bonham Carter, Ben Whishaw, Meryl Streep; directed by Sarah Gavron; 106 minutes; PG-13 for violence, profanity, adult themes.

Is Carey Mulligan single-handedly reliving the story of the women’s movement in the U.K.? In “Far from the Madding Crowd,” released this spring, the actress was Bathsheba Everdene, Thomas Hardy’s headstrong Victorian. She inherits a farm, runs it with sweat and savvy, and goes in pursuit of the independent life – a daunting task given that men are in control, and three of them come courting.

Jump ahead about 40 years, and Mulligan is Maud Watts, a Londoner who toils long hours at a giant laundry, keeps her head down and accedes to the wishes of her piggish boss, even if it means submitting to his molestations.

But in “Suffragette, written by Abi Morgan (“The Iron Lady, “The Hour”) and directed by Sarah Gavron (“Brick Lane”), Maud has finally had enough. A fictional tale set amid the real world of early 20th century England, the film tracks Maud’s political awakening and radicalization. One day, she’s a low paid, hard-pressed working woman – a wife and mother, too (Ben Whishaw is her spouse, Adam Michael Dodd is George, their son). The next day, she’s addressing Lloyd George in Parliament, falling in with a band of rock-throwing, mailbox-bombing activists and getting carted to jail by club-wielding police.

If we now take a woman’s right to vote and to hold public office for granted, “Suffragette” reminds us it wasn’t that long ago when things were different.

Steven Rea, The Philadelphia Inquirer