This was...not remotely close to the overlong, oscar bait-y sort of bad movie that I expected it to be. I might even venture to say that it was all right, and that it genuinely had something to say about the personal and political dimensions of being a powerful woman at a specific place and time. Sure, the movie's overcut and sometimes ugly in a digital way and saddled with an unimpressive "main" performance (Ronan has more screentime than Robbie, who is much better in her smaller role), but it also spends a lot of time addressing how its two central figures balanced their goals and their country's needs as politicians with societal demands of them as women and societal reactions to their supposed expressions of femininity. Moments like Ronan's big sex scene, wherein she persuades/coerces her closeted husband into impregnating her, are neither mechanical period recreations nor cheap or lurid exploitations of the female characters but, rather, are realistic and oftentimes sad expressions of the desires of the central characters.
To give some context to the pictures/discussion that started the thread (none of this is really a spoiler at all, but I'll spoilertag out of an abundance of caution):
The movie repeatedly highlights how Mary of Scots and Elizabeth I dealt aesthetically and personally with health and beauty issues as they related to their appearances as rulers. Early on, we see how Ronan and her servants react to and clean up after her period comes early, and the pictures above are taken from a scene set after Robbie recovers from an awful case of smallpox. As she ages, the scars left from the illness get worse and worse, and she applies more and more white makeup to hide them as the movie progresses. In the climactic scene of the movie (the only scene with the two leads together), a one-on-one conversation between the two leads, Robbie talks about how she personally prepared for them to meet by commissioning an elaborate outfit and wig with excessive makeup so as not to "destroy" Ronan's image of her, and one gets the sense that the rivalry of the two queens was motivated just as much by Robbie's professional and personal jealousy of Ronan as a leader/woman as much as it was motivated by the rivalry between nations. Now, this doesn't exactly work in the movie as I think it was intended, since Ronan doesn't sell admirable confidence in the same way that Robbie sells a lack thereof (and this is why I think her performance is flawed), but there's a lot more going on here than an unpleasant costume drama catfight (cough cough, The Favourite), and, to directly address some comments made about Robbie's appearance in the pictures above, she's deliberately made ugly for much of this movie not to caricature her or for the sake of shallow jokes, but in the service of larger points regarding her character as a ruler and a person.