Goya's Ghosts could have been a very good picture.  As it is, it's merely a decent one, with adequate performances and a historically interesting period, but the characters and their experiences somehow run flat.

The film centers on two characters on opposite sides of the Spanish Inquisition.  On one end is the Spanish painter Francisco Goya, played by Stellan Skarsgard.  His masterpieces grace chapels and the best homes, and he has been appointed the court painter to the King and Queen.  But he also prints drawings which the religious leaders of the day find distasteful.  On the opposite end is Brother Lorenzo (Javier Bardem), who is leading the drive to re institute the harsher methods of the Inquisitions older days.  Early in the film the daughter of a local merchant (Natalie Portman) who Goya has painted in the past is arrested by the Inquisition on a charge of being a secret Jew.  Her forced confession is one of only a few scenes which carry any true emotion...as does her eventual release from prison.

The character of Goya is merely a centerpiece for the struggles going on in Spain at the time, as Napoleon's forces invade, followed by the British.  None of the characters are ever really developed.  Lorenzo shifts from evil persecutor to religious zealot to heathen to radical revolutionary without the slightest hint at his inner workings or motives.  Goya is allowed to produce his drawings without any response or even the slightest pressure from the Inquisition, who are perfectly willing to torture innocents in the meantime.  Natalie Portman is given very little to work with in either of her roles (she also plays a young prostitute for reasons which become clear as the plot moves forward).  The cinematography is detailed and interesting, and the direction by Milos Forman (Amadeus and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) is effective.  What fails is the direction-less plot, and the empty characters.  Who lives and who dies is of little concern to the audience.  Even the terrors of war hold only minor interest.  In the end, you are left only waiting for the final scenes, and then wondering what could have been made of this story if only it had been done differently.

I'd give Goya's Ghosts a C, perhaps a C+.  I can't say I am sorry to have seen it, but I am sorry that the film I saw couldn't have been given better treatment.