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In 'Spencer,' Kristen Stewart's Princess Diana grasps for reality in order to survive

Linda Holmes

Kristen Stewart plays Diana in a very different vision of an imagined moment in her life. Pablo Larraín/Neon hide caption

Kristen Stewart plays Diana in a very different vision of an imagined moment in her life.

Pablo Larraín's Spencer opens with a label that reads, "A fable from a true tragedy." The tragedy, of course, is the story of Diana Spencer, who became Princess of Wales, went through a bitter and public divorce, was largely beloved nevertheless, and lived a short life — at 36, she was literally chased to her death. The fable, on the other hand, is an imagining of a Christmas weekend in the early '90s when her children were young, when a separated but not yet divorced Diana realizes the depth of her own despair and decides to pursue her freedom.

It seems only fair that a woman like Diana, so eagerly drawn by pop culture and so damaged by the ravenous interest in her, would get a chance to be seen through different cinematic lenses. The stage musical about her life that recently debuted on Netflix fails in part because it feels devoid of ideas and perspective, like a filmed Wikipedia page that runs down a checklist of events in her life. Spencer , instead, makes the reasonable assumption that the vast majority of its audience already knows how Diana fit into the family, how she was publicly perceived, how she died, how she was treated. Details are not fussed over or explained: Camilla Parker-Bowles looms large over this story but is not named, because Larraín and Knight assume you know her, you know at least the vague outlines of her history with Charles, and you know how things turned out.

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The most obvious precursor to Spencer is Larraín's Jackie , which also studied a few crucial days in the life of one of the world's most famous women: in that case, young Jackie Kennedy in the aftermath of the death of her husband. But while the films share a fondness for footage of women who feel and look lost in enormous, grand spaces, Spencer -- written by Steven Knight — is far less bounded by efforts to be faithful to, or even recreate, reality. Even if Jackie faithfully recreates reality mostly in order to imbue it with unexpected elements of horror or irony (as when Kennedy wanders around hearing "Camelot"), it is careful to make Natalie Portman sound precisely like Kennedy and to have its footage of the White House Christmas tour look precisely as it actually did. It also adopts quite a conventional structure and framing device in the form of a journalist coming to interview Kennedy about these events later.

Spencer is, from that opening title, much more unconventional and almost entirely uninterested in the historical accuracy of any of its details; it is intentionally not real, intentionally a "fable." Other than the roughest outlines of Diana's marriage and the cast of royals who surround her, there's little reason to believe this story is literally true; it is instead meant to feel true, to say something true, and to change the angle through which Diana is seen, from a storybook princess to something closer to a Gothic horror heroine struggling to hang on to her grip on reality as her world tilts. And rather than the interview conceit that Jackie is built around, Spencer opens with a long, beautifully shot, and initially baffling sequence that communicates just how disconnected from a regular person's reality Diana's Christmas weekend is actually going to be.

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Reality begins to tilt.

We meet Diana, played beautifully by Kristen Stewart, as she drives herself to the Sandringham estate where the royal festivities happen every year. She gets lost and is therefore late, and arriving after the Queen means that she begins the weekend already having erred, already being — as she sees it — in trouble. Confronted with scales on which she must be weighed at the beginning and end of the weekend, offered a series of pre-selected outfits she's meant to wear for everything from meals to church trips, Diana feels not merely micromanaged and limited, but instantly choked by her surroundings, even as she finds refuge in the company of her children.

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But what begins as a straightforward drama begins to tilt as Diana struggles with an eating disorder, a habit of self-harm, and paranoia that the film plays with. Initially this paranoia seems unreasonable, but eventually it seems like it might just be common sense. One of the men who works for the Queen, played by Timothy Spall, is a terrifyingly cold figure who seems to be everywhere at once, and who could have walked directly out of a horror novel that will eventually reveal that he maintains a torture room.

The dread around the story only grows, especially when Diana finds that someone has left a book about Anne Boleyn in her room. She sees parallels between herself and another royal wife who fell out of favor, and clings to her only friend, a dresser named Maggie, played by Sally Hawkins. Maggie's presence and absence affect Diana's sense of safety, both physically and emotionally.

Seeing a different Princess

Diana has so often been seen in popular culture as either a perfect princess or a tragic victim; here, she is a woman trying to be proactive in her own survival, much like the "final girl" in any horror film must be. And while the other royals do speak — there is one fascinating scene between Charles and Diana that beautifully positions them as strategic opponents — they don't do so very often. They mostly hover, they move in and out of frame, and they are often out of focus and effectively anonymous on an individual level. Their personhood isn't terribly relevant to Diana by this point in her life; they exist as monsters, or at least as threats. They play the role of ghosts or whistling winds here, more than as characters with whom she interacts.

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It's not even just Gothic horror that Larraín seems to be referencing, though; echoes shift throughout. There is — and honestly, there also was in Jackie — a bit of The Shining , here in the way Diana seems at times to be lost in the long corridors of the house, seeing things that might not actually be there, feeling that her mere presence is sapping her of sanity. There's some of the stiffness of upstairs-downstairs royal tales. There's even a bit of the '70s paranoid thriller and the '90s trenchcoat thriller: Spall is part horror, yes, but he's also part ominous company man, like the one who lingers at the edges of most John Grisham books, making grave pronouncements about what might happen to those who go against power. A scene in which he warns Diana while out on the grounds of the estate looks a lot like scenes in which FBI agents or mysterious operatives walk around the National Mall with their collars pulled up, telling people not to talk.

The design does great work here — the grand halls, the spooky beauty, the dated outfits and familiar dresses — as does the score from Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood. Greenwood is a prolific film composer, and has a particularly deft touch with what might be called the grandly unsettling: The Master, There Will Be Blood , and particularly Phantom Thread , for which he earned an Oscar nomination. The score is sometimes traditionally orchestral, sometimes discordant and creepy, and smart about touches like jazz-inflected horns that instantly shift the mood.

Kristen Stewart's Diana

While her take on Diana's voice rang true enough to my American ear, Stewart wisely doesn't spend a lot of time physically recreating Diana with precision — with one exception. Early on, when Diana is lost, she stops at a small café to ask for directions. As she walks through the crowd, which recognizes her and stares in silent awe, Stewart briefly casts her eyes down at the floor and smiles just a bit. That moment is so very reminiscent of the real Diana that it creates a bond between actor and real person that survives even the most reality-bending moments in the story.

Her performance here is powerful, and it carries this version of Diana through such instability as a character (is she right to be afraid? is she losing her grip on reality?), but she always seems like the same person, the same good mother who doesn't know how to begin to separate herself from the life she's walked into. She is asked to do big things, grand things, genre horror things, but she never tips over into caricature.

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The obvious question about any Diana project at this point is whether it has anything to add to the massive amount of cultural material about her that already exists. By the end of her life, she had told her own story in her own words quite a bit. But the point of Spencer seems to be not to reveal Diana the real person, but to treat her differently in a cinematic sense — to recast her in a different kind of movie than the ones that we've already seen. And, perhaps ironically, to use horror to imagine an ending for her that's less horrifying.

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‘Spencer’ Review: Kristen Stewart Transforms in Pablo Larraín’s Masterly Princess Diana Movie

The director of "Jackie" has made an enthralling drama of Diana's moment of truth and transition.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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And here’s the beauty part: Right off, we feel as if we’re seeing… Diana . The real thing. Kristen Stewart doesn’t just do an impersonation (though on the level of impersonation she’s superb). She transforms; she changes her aspect, her rhythm, her karma. Watching her play Diana, we see an echo, perhaps, of Stewart’s own ambivalent relationship to stardom — the way that she’ll stand on an awards podium, chewing her lip, reveling in the attention even as she’s slightly uncomfortable with it (and even as she makes that distrust of the limelight a key element of her stardom). Mostly, though, what we see in Stewart’s Diana is a woman of homegrown elegance, with a luminosity that pours out of her, except that part of her is now driven to crush that radiance, because her life has become a wreck.

“Spencer” is a movie made very much in the spirit of Larraín’s “Jackie,” the 2016 drama in which Natalie Portman brilliantly portrayed Jackie Kennedy during the week following the JFK assassination. I thought “Jackie” was a knockout, and “Spencer,” which also finds its heroine living through a fateful moment of truth and transition, is every bit as good; it may be even better. The entire film is set over the Christmas holiday, about 10 years after the 1981 wedding of Diana and Prince Charles, and it takes the form of a you are-there voyeuristic diary of what Diana was going through as she came to realize that her disenchantment with her life had become defining, consuming.

In the movie, we see a princess, a woman of power and true majesty, who is treated like a child. Major Gregory, played by a disarmingly gaunt and severe-looking Timothy Spall, has been brought onto the premises to keep an eye on her, and his watchful gaze makes her feel like a pinned insect. And Diana’s lady-in-waiting, Maggie (Sally Hawkins), is her one trusted confidante — but for that very reason, Maggie gets sent away. There can be no secrets. And there are none. At Sandringham, the walls have ears.

“Spencer” is an intimate speculative drama that stays as close as it can to everything we know about Diana. At the same time, the movie is infused with a poetic extravagance. The remarkable production design, by Guy Hendrix Dyas, turns the interiors of Sandringham into a profusion of textures that dance before our eyes — the patterned curtains and gilded wallpaper, the carved paneling, the warm light of the chandeliers, the paintings and upholstery and mirrors and knickknacks. And Jonny Greenwood’s ominous jazzy score seems to have a direct pipeline to Diana’s emotions. Larraín places Di in this luxe getaway palace as if he were making a royal version of “The Shining,” though part of what’s bracing about the movie is that the members of the royal family have come to think it’s Diana who’s the monster. They regard the attention she receives as a threat to who they are, and they’re right. What they’re in denial of is that the media is creating a new world that’s going to squeeze them out.

Yes, she has wealth, comfort, privilege, fame. But life within the gilded cage of the royal family is also stifling. As she explains to her sons, William (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddie Spry), that’s because it’s a life that makes time stand still. “Here,” she says, “there is only one tense. There is no future. Past and present are the same thing.” What she’s talking about is an existence in which “tradition” is code for what has been, and what always will be. (It’s code for a very British kind of control.) There is no room for anything that isn’t tradition. The film presents Diana’s bulimia with disarming frankness (it’s an open secret that even Charles makes scornful reference to), but part of the drama of how it’s portrayed is that it’s not just an “eating disorder.” It’s Diana’s way of rejecting the food porn that’s part of what the royals use to numb themselves.

As “Spencer” presents it, Diana is trapped in a loveless marriage to a diffident stick of a man who openly betrays her. Not an uncommon situation. But since she’s one of the royals, she cannot leave him (or so she thinks). She’s effectively imprisoned. She knows she’s supposed to wear the gorgeous pearl necklace that Charles got her, but he also got the same necklace for her — for his mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles (who we glimpse outside the church on Christmas morning; she gives Diana a grin of malice). He did it thoughtlessly, not even realizing that anyone would notice. (Unlike Diana, he’s got a pre-media mind.) In her bedroom at the mansion, Diana finds a biography of Anne Boleyn, the wife that Henry VIII accused of adultery and beheaded so that he could marry someone else, and she begins to feel Boleyn as a kindred spirit. Larraín stages a remarkable dinner scene in which Diana takes in the stares of Charles, the Queen, and others who have begun to register that she’s “cracking up.” Their attitude is: How do you solve a problem like Diana? But Diana grabs the pearls around her neck as if the necklace itself were about to execute her. Those pearls are killing her softly.

How will Diana escape? For most of the movie, she has no idea that she can. But an encounter with a scarecrow, nicknamed Bertie, that she remembers from her youth, when she was Diana Spencer, sets off something in her. She goes to visit her old house, which is all boarded up, and she realizes that she was more of herself back then than she is now. That said, in all the conflicts she has with Charles, who is played by Jack Farthing as a man of brutal limitation, there’s one that she’s driven not to compromise on: She does not want her sons to become part of their father’s pheasant-hunting brigade. She says it’s dangerous. She’s right, but the real problem is what she won’t say: that she feels like she’s one of the pheasants, and that the habit of hunting , and the way that it’s linked to the royals’ tradition of “military” discipline (though a real soldier doesn’t get his prey paraded right in front of him), incarnates everything that’s wrong with them.

So the day after Christmas, she drives out to the hunting ground, desperate and defiant, and she becomes that scarecrow. Skewing her arms up in the air, Diana demands that her sons stop hunting. And Stewart makes that the most moving moment I’ve seen in any film this year. Diana isn’t speaking as a royal. She’s speaking as a mother — as the woman she will now be. How will she do it? As the pop song that plays thrillingly during the following sequence tells us, all she needs is a miracle (and maybe a little fast food). She will still be “Diana.” But now she will be herself.

Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (In Competition), Sept. 3, 2021. MPAA Rating: Not rated. Running time: 111 MIN.

Production: A NEON/Topic Studios release of a Komplizen Film, Fabula, Shoebox Films production, in association with FilmNation Entertainment. Executive producers: Steven Knight, Tom Quinn, Jeff Deutchman, Christina Zisa, Maria Zuckerman, Ryan Heller, Michael Bloom, Ben Von Dobeneck, Sarah Nagel, Isabell Wigand.
Crew: Director: Pablo Larraín. Screenplay: Steven Knight. Camera: Claire Mathin. Editor: Sebastián Sepúlveda. Music: Jonny Greenwood.
With: Kristen Stewart, Sally Hawkins, Timothy Spall, Sean Harris, Jack Farthing, Jack Nielen, Freddie Spry, Stella Gonet, Richard Sammel, Elizabeth Berrington, Lore Stefanek, Amy Manson.

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Kristen stewart in princess diana biopic ‘spencer’: film review | venice 2021.

Director Pablo Larraín, who upended the conventions of the genre with ‘Jackie,’ examines another iconic woman in crisis, this time as the last illusions of her fairy-tale marriage crumble.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana in 'Spencer'

Any film in which a woman who left an indelible mark on the popular culture of the late 20th century finds comfort in the ghost of Anne Boleyn is unlikely to be your grandparents’ Princess Diana biopic. Pablo Larraín and screenwriter Steven Knight ’s audaciously original Spencer reins in its tight focus to a three-day Christmas weekend at Queen Elizabeth II’s Sandringham estate in Norfolk in the early ‘90s, when the sham of Diana’s marriage to Prince Charles had become unendurable. Billed as “a fable from a true tragedy,” this is a speculative study of a woman in extremis, played by an incandescent Kristen Stewart .

Chilean director Larraín’s transfixing 2016 English-language debut, Jackie , trained its emotionally penetrating lens on Jacqueline Kennedy reeling in the shell-shocked wake of her husband’s assassination. While it has a similar raw intimacy, his new film, by contrast, examines another woman in the public eye as she faces the inevitability of an escalating crisis, anticipating the harsh glare of a spotlight that has already scorched her on multiple occasions.

Full credits

Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition) Cast: Kristen Stewart, Sally Hawkins, Timothy Spall, Sean Harris, Jack Farthing, Jack Nielen, Freddie Spry, Stella Gonet, Richard Sammel, Elizabeth Berrington, Lore Stefanek, Amy Manson, Laura Benson, Wendy Patterson, Emma Darwall-Smith Distributor: Neon/Topic Studios Production companies: Komplizen Film, Fabula, Shoebox Films, in association with FilmNation Entertainment Director: Pablo Larraín Screenwriter: Steven Knight Producers: Juan de Dios Larraín , Jonas Dornbach, Paul Webster, Janine Jackowski, Maren Ade, Pablo Larraín Executive producers: Steven Knight, Tom Quinn, Jeff Deutchman, Christina Zisa, Maria Zuckerman, Ryan Heller, Michael Bloom, Ben Von Dobeneck, Sarah Nagel, Isabell Wiegand Director of photography: Claire Mathon Production designer: Guy Hendrix Dyas Costume designer: Jacqueline Durran Editor: Sebastián Sepúlveda Music: Jonny Greenwood Casting: Amy Hubbard

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In “Spencer,” Kristen Stewart’s Princess Diana Is Forever Trying Out Roles

By Anthony Lane

Kristen Stewart as Diana Princess of Wales wearing a white dress and a blazer as she stands in a foggy field.

Picture the scene. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, mooching around their Montecito stronghold and desperate to get out for the evening, are picking a movie to see. “Dune”? Too long. “No Time to Die”? Too sad. Harry won’t watch “Venom: Let There Be Carnage,” because it reminds him of the British press. Meghan won’t watch “The Addams Family 2,” because it reminds her of lunch at Windsor Castle. “Hey, I know!” she cries. “Let’s go and see a film about your mother .”

“Spencer” is a rum concoction, starring Kristen Stewart as the late Princess of Wales. It is written by Steven Knight, directed by Pablo Larraín, and described at the outset as “a fable from a true tragedy”—fancy talk for “We kind of made this stuff up.” The time frame is concise: Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and December 26th. (No year is specified, but I would guess 1991.) Most of the action takes place in and around Sandringham House, the royal residence in the county of Norfolk. Diana travels there alone, in a Porsche, without a security detail. She gets lost along the way and stops to ask for directions, admitting, “I’ve absolutely no idea where I am.” This is unlikely, since she should know the area well; she was born and raised on the Sandringham Estate. What Larraín wants to make thumpingly clear, though, is that Diana is now a soul adrift, wretched in her marriage to Prince Charles (Jack Farthing) and all but ostracized by his relations.

Anyone who endured a film like “Diana” (2013)—a starchy royal bio-pic, with Naomi Watts—will gather, within minutes, that “Spencer” is going to be far more elastic, not to say expressionist, in regard to the rules of the genre. The people we meet here, as in a children’s game, are split into goodies and baddies. One side comprises Diana, her sons, William and Harry (very well played, with a solemn charm, by Jack Nielen and Freddie Spry), and Maggie (Sally Hawkins), her favorite dresser and confidante, who says things like “Hold on. Fight them. Be beautiful.” There is also the head chef, Darren (Sean Harris), who is sympathetic to Diana’s plight, though he is busy overseeing the foodstuffs, lobsters included, that are ferried to the house by troops. A sign on the kitchen wall, possibly borrowed from the set of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” reads “Keep noise to a minimum. They can hear you.” Yikes.

“They,” of course, refers to the opposing team, captained by the Queen (Stella Gonet) and concentrated in the frigid—and fictional—person of Major Alistair Gregory, who is played, in a lavish piece of miscasting, by Timothy Spall, one of the warmest of character actors. Gregory has been drafted in to keep everything safe and secure; instead, he merely fortifies Diana’s belief that she is being imprisoned. To deter the prying lenses of photographers, Gregory has her bedroom curtains sewn shut. She promptly cuts them open and, as an afterthought, deliberately snips her bare arm. Or maybe she imagines doing so, since the flesh is then shown to be, as yet, unhurt.

The movie teems with bad dreams of this kind. Diana’s necklace—a present from her husband—breaks, at dinner, and the pearls drop into a bowl of thick green soup. She fishes them out, swallows them, and later regurgitates them: a gloopy, gothic heightening of the bulimia from which Diana, at her unhappiest, is known to have suffered. Other fantasies are more tenuous still, notably the appearance of Anne Boleyn (Amy Manson), who pops up here and there as a cautionary kindred spirit, the implication being that to lose your mind (“I’m a magnet for madness,” Diana says) is the latter-day equivalent of losing your head, as the luckless Anne did in 1536. Her presence in “Spencer” also answers a nagging question: Why do filmmakers keep on lugging the saga of modern British royalty onto our screens? Because it is the only costume drama that happens to have lingered, unaccountably, into the here and now.

The most telling invention devised by Knight and Larraín concerns Diana’s birthplace, Park House, a short walk from where she is staying for Christmas. One night, she sneaks over to the dark, deserted building, where relics of her childhood, such as a doll’s house, are conveniently strewn. The staircase cracks underfoot, and she envisages launching herself from the top of it. But here’s the thing. In 1983, well before the events depicted, or cooked up, in “Spencer,” the Queen gave Park House to Leonard Cheshire Disability, a charity of which she is the patron—a gesture of no interest to this ungenerous film. (Leonard Cheshire, a much decorated Second World War pilot, and an observer at Nagasaki, was a saintly, efficient, and altogether remarkable man, who devoted the second half of his life to the care of others.) In 1987, Park House opened as a hotel for the disabled. It was not , therefore, available for paranoid prowling.

“Spencer” is, in many ways, baloney, abundantly spiced with slander. It is contemptuous of those whom it accuses of treating Diana with contempt. Although Maggie says to her, “Don’t see conspiracy everywhere,” the film sees nothing but. I can’t decide what made me laugh louder: the dead pheasant, stiffly positioned on the road at the entrance to Sandringham, like a prop from a Monty Python sketch, or the Prince of Wales informing his wife that “you have to be able to make your body do things you hate.” He sounds like a Pilates instructor.

And yet, strange to say, the film is hard to ignore. For all its follies, I would rather watch it again than sit through further episodes of “The Crown.” The sight of that show clawing toward the credible, without ever quite getting there, is painful to behold, whereas Larraín is somehow freed by the liberties that he takes with historical facts. Just as he drew us into the grieving consciousness of Jacqueline Kennedy, in “ Jackie ” (2016), so, now, he tunes in to Diana’s high anxiety; the camera is constantly on her, with her, and around her, as if drunk on her perception of the world.

Much is demanded, then, of Kristen Stewart, and she responds with vigor. What we get is not so much an authentic portrait (though the shy tilt of the head is uncanny) as a set of variations on the theme of Diana, ranging from the tender to the loopy, and stressing the extent to which she herself is forever trying out roles. The best scene finds her waking her sons up, for early-morning Christmas presents, and starting a game—gruffly pretending to be in the military. (“Do you want to be king, soldier?” William is asked by his brother.) Keeping Stewart company is a wonderful score by Jonny Greenwood , which mingles echoes of Purcell with noodling riffs. Unbalanced and unjust, “Spencer” is nonetheless perversely gripping. It dares to unbend, playing the angry fool amid kings-to-be, queens, princes, princesses, and all that jazz.

If you doubt that any movie could pay more exhaustive attention to its heroine than “Spencer” does, try “Hive.” Written and directed by Blerta Basholli, it’s another feature film based on a real person: in this case, a woman named Fahrije (Yllka Gashi), proud and severe, who seldom escapes our frame of vision. Like the Princess of Wales, Fahrije is the mother of two children, but she dwells at the opposite end of the economic spectrum, in a village in Kosovo, and I suspect that she would, if apprised of Diana’s unusual predicament, advise her to toughen up fast. It takes a lot to make Fahrije smile and even more to make her weep, so how come she cries when she realizes that her daughter has begun her periods? Is it because of what awaits her as a woman, in the teeth of a wolfish society?

Not until the end credits are we told what has befallen Fahrije, though vigilant viewers will have pieced the tale together. Her husband was among the local Albanian Kosovars rounded up by Serbian forces, seven years earlier, in 1999. He is still missing, presumed dead, though Fahrije doesn’t share this presumption. She is a widow-in-waiting, that most forlorn of creatures, and she is joined and sustained in her limbo by fellow-wives, who also fear the worst. Somewhere behind “Hive,” I think, you can hear the far-off cry of Euripides’ “The Trojan Women,” which recounts the agony of Hecuba, the Queen of Troy, and of others bereaved by the ruination of their home—and which, incidentally, was staged out of doors in Pristina, the Kosovan capital, in 2018.

The bitterest aspect of Basholli’s film is the attitude of the men in the village. Far from supporting the single women, they scorn them, and resent any hint of female enterprise or independence. Fahrije has plenty of both. She learns to drive, she keeps bees, and she branches out, with the aid of her friends, into producing ajvar , a paste made from roasted red peppers, to be sold in a Pristina supermarket. And what does she get for her pains? She is called a whore. A stone is thrown through the window of her car. And, in the most evocative scene, she finds her jars of ajvar smashed, and the womenfolk picking through the debris, like gleaners on a battlefield. In a movie that is redolent of violence, yet devoid of bloodshed, here is a welter of scarlet. Fahrije, of course, clears up, and carries on. ♦

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Kristen Stewart channels Princess Diana's soul with new movie Spencer

The past and present collide in the film, where kristen stewart becomes the late lady diana.

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How can one of the world's most admired women find a way to be herself again, trapped in a kingdom of the past?

That's one of the questions at the heart of Spencer, a vivid reimagining of a few critical days inside the head of Diana, the Princess of Wales, as her marriage to Prince Charles turned from a fairy-tale into a pearl-lined prison.

No stranger to the ravenous attention of the media, Kristen Stewart transforms herself into Diana with a blond bob of a haircut, a breathy, posh accent and her eyes, often glistening on the edge of hysteria.

The year is 1991. The setting is Sandringham Estate, the palatial country residence the Royal Family retreats to over the holidays.

The film opens with a study in contrasts. As the royal kitchen is stocked with military precision, Diana zooms across the English landscape in a Porsche, already late for celebrations.

Life from Diana's POV

Speaking with CBC News, director Pablo Larraín described Spencer as a thought experiment. "A slice of what could have happened. We only see reality from her perspective."

(Larraín also directed the Oscar-nominated biopic, Jackie .)

Like a POV video game, the camera tracks Diana closely as she storms down the hallways, retreating into her bedroom.

Much of the film plays out as a battle of wills between Lady Diana and a fictitious Major Alistar Gregory. A prune-faced Timothy Spall plays the Queen's butler, the unbending personification of her will brought in to quell the swirling controversies.

A holiday rebellion

Speaking with CBC News, Kristen Stewart said Diana felt like "a really honest person who is not given an avenue, especially initially, to express herself. So she does it in other ways."

In this closely choreographed world, rebellion takes the form of tardiness or choosing whether to wear a certain dress, each outfit being carefully selected and scheduled by the royal dressers.

The confrontation begins early as Diana arrives. There is a tradition of literally weighing in, where members of the Royal Family sit on a scale to measure whether you've put on three pounds of jolly-good fun after all the festive meals. A potentially humiliating practice for a woman barely hiding her bulimia, but the major insists: "No one is above tradition."

The script — written deftly by Stephen Knight — paints a picture of a Princess Di penned in by history and obligations. Staying in a very room once occupied by Queen Victoria at Sandringham, she remarks that in the Royal Family, "the past and present are the same thing."

Indeed, as Spencer continues, Diana is haunted by history. First, it's visions of Anne Boleyn, the accused adulterer beheaded by Henry VIII. But a more recent aspect of Diana's own past also lurks nearby.

Situated next door to Sandringham is Park House, the rented property where Diana's family, the Spencers, were raised. Diana longs to escape and visit the setting of a simpler, less complicated time.

A movie about a mother inspired by another

With the heaving strings composed by Johnny Greenwood underscoring Diana's state of mind, Spencer is a far cry from the slushy soap opera treatment of The Crown .

But Knight's thoughtful script and Larraín direction make for an immersive, somewhat impressionistic experience.

As Stewart herself said, they took liberties to channel Diana's essence. "We really had this beautiful terrain with which to dance and dream — sort of revive this woman for a moment, in order to kind of give her a chance to speak for herself."

For Larraín, Spencer is ultimately a film about mothers. The Chilean filmmaker said he was inspired by his own mother's fascination with Diana and the empathy she inspired.

"[Diana] had a very particular and sometimes difficult life, but she was always someone who created an incredible amount of empathy. Why? What's so relevant for so many people?"

WATCH | CBC News speaks with Kristen Stewart about becoming Diana:

Why there’s mixed reaction about a new Princess Diana movie

For all its histrionics, one of the film's most effective scenes is a secret midnight meeting between Diana and her sons, William and Harry, where they pretend to be soldiers whispering questions to each other.

At one point William asks: "What's happened to make you so sad?"

Diana bluffs until William insists.

"The past," she says.

"I think it's the present, soldier," William says.

"I think it's in the future," adds Harry.

It's a heartbreaking scene for its tenderness and the two people Diana can't hide from.

In addition to Spall as the royal watchdog, Stewart is complemented by a strong supporting cast: Sean Harris, as the taciturn head chef Darren; and Sally Hawkins, as Diana's favourite dresser Maggie — someone who sees through the royal rigamarole. Jack Farthing appears briefly as Prince Charles, showcased as a cold, uncaring cad more worried about protocol than his wife's state of mind.

Locking in on the mystery of Diana

While Spencer is stuffed with symbols — the ghosts haunting the halls, the dead pheasant on the drive in — the film is undoubtedly Kristen Stewart's. The fancy frocks and exquisite setting help sell the story, but as Larraín says, the final step was Stewart locking into the mood and character.

"It was very surprising and quite beautiful," he said. "After the first day of shooting … she already captured what people can relate to [about] her, which is her soul."

While both the actor and director deferred when asked what Diana's grown children may make of the film, Stewart said of Diana: "We leaned toward her with love, because she did the same for us."

That is where Spencer ends. With love and a final act of rebellion, as Diana and the kids zoom away, a pop song blasting on the car stereo. A giddy high note replacing the all-too-real final destination.

Spencer opens in theatres on Nov. 5.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Senior entertainment reporter

Eli Glasner is the senior entertainment reporter and screentime columnist for CBC News. Covering culture has taken him from the northern tip of Moosonee Ontario to the Oscars and beyond. You can reach him at [email protected].

More by this author

‘The nation had lost its mind’: the extraordinary new documentary about the death of Princess Diana

The team behind a new film, The Princess, explain why the royal family possess all the vital ingredients to make them the perfect cinematic subjects

O nly a genius of longform plotting could have planned the sting in the tail of the royal 2022. In the rolling melodrama of the British monarchy, the platinum jubilee was always slated for this year, gratitude splashed across the Daily Express. But now the mood will darken. So it is that 70 years of the Queen segues directly into 25 since the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. In Macbeth, the ghost haunted the feast. Here she returns with the pink gin hangovers barely faded. On with the show.

A film will mark the occasion: The Princess , a much buzzed-about new documentary. It also follows a celebration of the Queen, the fond bio-doc Elizabeth: A Portrait in Parts . That was the last movie directed by the late, highly regarded Roger Michell . But The Princess too arrives as a prestige project. The producer is Simon Chinn, whose CV includes award-winners Man on Wire and Searching for Sugar Man. The director is Ed Perkins, the fast-riser responsible for the Oscar-nominated Black Sheep.

Fond bio-doc … Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh on their coronation day in Elizabeth: A Portrait in Parts.

If you made documentaries for a living, you would probably make a royal one. Think of the business case. Both Perkins and Michell go big on scenes of royal watchers: straining to touch a young prince, scowling when asked to make room for schoolchildren. Easy to mock. But to be born British is to be raised a royal watcher, either by choice or as a bored kid stuck in front of them. It makes the country a pre-sold audience. With Diana, moreover, the brand remains global.

And if you made documentaries, you probably would make The Princess. The operatic drama is a given. Just as important, it took place in front of a camera, or a bank of cameras, leaving an archive breadcrumb trail. Abundant source material for what is now the house style of modern documentary: talking heads sidelined for un-narrated collage. The Princess is a descendent of Asif Kapadia ’s “fame trilogy”: Senna, Amy, Diego Maradona. Ill-starred icons of music and sport, Kapadia’s subjects came steeped in glamour, routinely filmed, seemingly cursed. Snap on all counts.

Perkins was 11 when Diana died. The memory stayed with him, he says, not least because his parents solemnly arrived together in his room to tell him, each more distressed than made rational sense. Such is a secret weapon of royalty: the tree rings of your life get tied up with their story. “I still vividly recall that night,” he says. “It was the same watching TV in the days afterwards. So many adults flocking to Buckingham Palace, publicly grieving as if they had lost a family member. At 11, I was just very, very confused.”

So a documentary-maker might also direct The Princess from a sincere desire to solve a childhood mystery. And that ready-made audience is part of it. The gargoyles of the tabloids were rightly blamed for blighting the sad, gilded life before the early death, but looks inward are rarer. “I wanted to use archive because that is the record of how we consumed her through the media. And that was my core question. What does this story say about us ? About what we still consume and the demand we create?”

Chinn was much less keen than Perkins to make The Princess until the hounding of Meghan Markle. Then, he says, he saw history repeat. It wasn’t just the spite of the papers. Something else had resurfaced: a giddy public investment in misogyny and soap. “I’d thought Diana was overfamiliar. A bit of a dead end. Then I realised it was an origin story. Not just about Meghan but so much of modern Britain.”

Perkins captures Diana’s last night on 31 August 1997 not through stunned newsreaders but Australian tourists, chancing on police lights outside the Pont de l’Alma traffic tunnel while shooting Paris with a camcorder. It was the late 90s, after all. New digital cameras were flooding the market. A tech revolution was just beginning. Now it extends to high-end documentaries made up of nuggets of old telly and the device you may be reading this piece on. Chinn recalls that limbo period in late summer as a young producer of 28, beginning a TV career, boggling at news reports in the days after the death. “I honestly felt the nation had lost its mind,” he says. “There was this consensus that we were all devastated – for me and for my friends, it simply wasn’t true. So even then you think: ‘Ah.’ Two different Britains, right?”

Public outpouring of grief … Elizabeth Debicki as Diana, Princess of Wales in the Crown.

The mutinous teeter to the national mood was being fuelled by flag-wavers outside Buckingham Palace. For republicans, it enshrined the irony of Diana: the queen-to-be who nearly put a bullet in the monarchy. The weirdness didn’t end there. In 1997 I was living around the corner from London’s first internet cafe and working near Victoria. My walk home that summer used to take me past the palace. Up close, it was became clearer every day that the madly swelling crowds were not simply milling and mourning. They came with cameras. They filmed and photographed themselves and each other. It was a riot of the performative, in a glut of emotion. Remind you of anything? “There is a definite argument her life and especially her death were omens of social media,” Perkins says.

Fiction has tried to tell this odd, contradictory story too. But scripts that try to get into the psyche of the princess don’t help. Nor the default mode of drama, making events bigger than reality. As big as last year’s catastrophic Netflix musical Diana , or Spencer , with Kristen Stewart lost in Kubrick delirium. And then there is The Crown, whose coming seasons will see the character played by Elizabeth Debicki , another LA film star, one more Diana for the hall of mirrors.

With a story this close to camp already, you have to strip back to something like the facts. And documentary itself has a role in the tale. Newsreels made for early 20th-century cinema crowds were embraced by prewar royalty: a means to be glimpsed by their subjects en masse. Diana was not the first British royal who worked the camera. She was just the most gifted .

It partly explains the meltdown after her death. When Michell reaches those tinderbox days outside the palace, he cuts in a snatch of Lenin from the great dramatisation of the Russian revolution, October. The moment lands as a joke. Yet something ineffably strange did briefly hang in the air. What now ? The answer turned out to be the Queen, the one Windsor who could soothe the crowd. Let Mummy kiss it better.

But what now? Because, while The Princess obviously closes with a funeral, the sense of an ending is here in 2022. After the rictus gaiety of the jubilee, a change of hands is surely coming. Like royal watchers pressed up against the crash barriers, the reward for the well-timed documentary is a place adjacent to history. “The Queen’s death will be a moment of great peril for them, won’t it?” Chinn says.

Lost in Kubrick delirium … Kristen Stewart in Spencer.

The Crown has two more seasons planned in which to make the most of Diana, alongside a Queen now played by Imelda Staunton. Sooner rather than later, the actual royals will lack both. From here, different memories will come to mind, other overlaps with the tree rings of our lives. Where were you when you heard Prince Andrew had paid £12m to Virginia Giuffre after she said he sexually assaulted her as a teenager?

That documentary will have to wait. Instead, after the Queen’s funeral there will simply be a coronation, fanfared as if this was still the days of newsreel. But the audience will be smaller, mostly confined to a Britain now fractured and shrunk like the Windsors themselves. As models for The Princess, Senna and Amy also tell an implied truth about less tragic pop icons and sports stars. Most don’t die young. They just dwindle into a niche. The remaining royal family too may soon find there are only the smaller venues – where cameras no longer bother to follow.

Yet the twists keep coming. In the fortnight since the jubilee, all signs have pointed to a new era, with a seemingly spectral influence. Prince William’s turn in a Big Issue bib channelled his mother’s optics. The hostility of Prince Charles to the government’s Rwandan flights seemed a further homage. And we keep watching. The puzzle that vexed Ed Perkins at 11 is, he says, at least half-answered in his film. “If you want a royal family, the essential question is: do you actually want them to be people? Or do you really still want fairytales? Because both at once is impossible.”

Documentary films
Queen Elizabeth II

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, diana: the musical.

Now streaming on:

Among the many cultural casualties of the coronavirus was “Diana: The Musical,” which had just begun previews in March 2020 when the pandemic hit, closing the curtains and turning off the lights on Broadway. It’s finally making its way back on stage this fall, but before then, you can watch a filmed version of the production on Netflix—something you may want to do only if you’re a Diana completist.

Even so, you’ll probably find this song-and-dance extravaganza about the Princess of Wales to be frustratingly empty. There’s no shortage of innovative and insightful portrayals of Diana out there, from Kristen Stewart ’s performance in Pablo Larrain’s upcoming drama “ Spencer ” to Emma Corrin ’s Emmy-nominated work on another Netflix property, “The Crown.” In the decades since her untimely death, Diana has remained endlessly fascinating. But “Diana: The Musical” adds nothing novel or substantial to our understanding of her as a wife, mother, royal or celebrity. She remains one of the most famous and talked-about people on the planet, but this production merely rehashes in rushed, glossy fashion what we already know about her.

What’s perplexing is that “Diana: The Musical” was and will be in the creative hands of Christopher Ashley , director of the stage production and this filmed performance, which happened in summer 2020 in an empty theater with covid protocols in place. (Stick around through the credits to see behind-the-scenes photos of how the cast and crew found ways to work safely.) Ashley is also a Tony Award winner for his staging of the Sept. 11 musical “ Come From Away ,” and the director of an excellent filmed version which is streaming on Apple TV+. He knows how to take a theatrical production and make it feel immediate, alive and engaging for the home-viewing audience. Aside from some inspired, on-stage costume changes, “Diana: The Musical” feels rather staid and traditional, with a reliance on head-on shots from the audience perspective and not much attempt to make us feel immersed in the action the way “Come From Away” did.

Then again, the book and lyrics by Joe DiPietro (“ Memphis ”), with music and lyrics by his frequent collaborator (and Bon Jovi keyboardist) David Bryan , are so shallow and hurry through so much of Diana’s public and private life, they offer nothing that’s novel or meaningful for us to grasp onto. Spanning from her first flirtations with Prince Charles as a shy, 19-year-old nursery teacher’s assistant to her death in a Paris tunnel pursuit at 36, the show spells out everything the characters are feeling or doing, which we’re capable of seeing with our own eyes. The rock-infused tunes are peppy and polished but not terribly memorable.

Diana (Jeanna de Waal) gives birth to both of her children with Prince Charles ( Roe Hartrampf ) in the course of a single song, with pedestrian lyrics like: “Harry, my ginger-haired son/You’ll always be second to none.” The show’s attempts at satirizing the relentless media scrutiny she endured and the archaic standards of the monarchy she rejected have no wit or bite. There’s an entire number (“Snap, Click”) featuring predatory paparazzi dancing wildly around Diana in trench coats, reflective of a dated vibe that pervades throughout. And when it turns toward more serious territory, “ Diana ” only briefly touches on the depression and self-harm she suffered, and without any emotional depth.

De Waal is capable, if a bit stiff, as Diana, with a propensity for standing motionless with her hands folded politely in front of her. This is especially awkward during the song “The Rage” when Charles is scolding her. She’s supposed to be unsure of herself as the younger Diana but barely registers as someone who ultimately will have a profound impact on everyone she meets, especially later in her life when she’s clever enough to shine her constant limelight on causes like AIDS and landmines.

She is, however, up for the multitude of wardrobe changes asked of her—many of which occur right before us, and with a bit of trickery. Diana was, after all, a fashion icon, so there’s an entire song (“The Dress”) devoted to the sexy, black revenge number she wore to a gallery dinner while Charles was on television admitting he’d been unfaithful with Camilla Parker Bowles ( Erin Davie ). And when de Waal steps into Diana’s behemoth pouf of a wedding gown, I had to rewind and re-watch three times trying to figure out how she did it, so seamless is the sorcery. (Costume designer William Ivey Long recreates dozens of Diana’s most famous outfits, including the sweater with the little sheep on it.)

But speaking of Parker Bowles, Davie nearly steals “Diana” away from Diana herself as Charles’ longtime true love, pulling the strings behind the scenes. She has a much more powerful voice and sparky stage presence. And the veteran Judy Kaye pulls double duty as both Queen Elizabeth II and romance writer Barbara Cartland, Diana’s step-grandmother, giving her room to be both haughty and saucy. As the Queen, she also gets to show off her vocal range while telling her own story in the second-act tune, “An Officer’s Wife.”

Despite a few musical bright spots, you’ll leave humming the costumes.

On Netflix today.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Diana: The Musical (2021)

Rated PG-13

117 minutes

Jeanna De Waal as Princess Diana

Roe Hartrampf as Prince Charles

Erin Davie as Camilla Parker Bowles

Judy Kaye as Queen Elizabeth

Zach Adkins as Ensemble

Tessa Alves as Ensemble

Ashley Andrews as Ensemble

Austen Danielle Bohmer as Ensemble

Holly Ann Butler as Ensemble

Stephen Carrasco as Ensemble

Bruce Dow as Ensemble

Richard Gatta as Ensemble

Lauren E.J Hamilton as Ensemble

Andre Jordan as Ensemble

Gareth Keegan as Ensemble

Nathan Lucrezio as Ensemble

Tómas Matos as Ensemble

Chris Medlin as Ensemble

Laura Stracko as Ensemble

Bethany Ann Tesarck as Ensemble

David Bryan
Joe DiPietro
Christopher Ashley

Choreographer

Kelly Devine

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Kristen Stewart finds her voice as Princess Diana in the new Spencer trailer

The new look at director Pablo Larraín's portrait of the Princess Di allows viewers to finally hear how Stewart sounds portraying the icon.

Marcus is a Digital News Writer. He enjoys when Rihanna makes music, and is open to watching any film or TV show where someone has a drink thrown at them.

The outspoken princess finally speaks!

Save for one final moment where Kristen Stewart dramatically utters, "They don't," the recent teaser for the highly anticipated biopic Spencer only gave a brief look at the actress' transformation into Princess Diana. The film's new trailer however gives a much closer look at the performance many believe will lead to Stewart's first Oscar nomination.

Directed by Jackie filmmaker Pablo Larraín , and written by Steven Knight , the tense movie is set during the tail end of the beloved royal's rocky marriage to Prince Charles (Jack Farthing), with the couple attending the Queen's Sandringham Estate at Christmas.

The trailer conveys how Diana repelled tradition, being late to dinner, and unsure of how to keep up with public appearances as her relationship with Charles was falling apart. On the flip side, it shows the mother of two being an attentive parent to Prince William and Prince Harry despite the stressful atmosphere surrounding their family.

Familiar faces like Timothy Spall ( Mr. Turner ) and Sally Hawkins ( The Shape of Water ) show up as well, as two palace aides — one opposed to the people's princess, the other her most valued confidante.

Having debuted footage at CinemaCon , and screened at the Toronto International Film Festival recently, Spencer has already become a certified must-watch for this coming awards season.

Watch the new trailer above.

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly 's free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

‘The Princess’ Review: Chilling Princess Diana Doc Turns Tables on Media Consumption and Complicity

Kate erbland, editorial director.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The film will start streaming on HBO and HBO Max on Saturday, August 13.

There are no talking heads in “The Princess.” There are no graphs or charts or diagrams or maps. There are no chyrons to tell us dates or names or places. There are plenty of voices, all of them nameless, all of them freely allowed to share their thoughts on a person they (likely) never met. There is plenty of video, some of it shot by everyday people, some by professional news organizations, some of it by paparazzi. People wink and smile and scream, gasp and yell and point fingers. “Is that her?” they whisper. It’s surely someone important, they say. And there: It is her. Princess Diana . And also, somehow, even as we watch her walk across the screen or play with her kids or grimace through a press conference or ever-so-slightly move her chaise lounge away from prying pap eyes, it’s not her. Not at all.

Ed Perkins’ remarkable documentary “The Princess” eschews many of the trappings we’ve come to associate with the modern documentary — again, there are no talking heads in the film, no little bits of snazzy knowledge, nothing to contextualize it beyond our own broad knowledge of the dearly departed princess — and Perkins instead relies on a wealth of contemporaneous archival footage to weave his story. The effect is, at first, jarring: The film opens inside a car as a group of friends wheel around Paris at night. The footage predates things like iPhones and Instagram and TikTok, but the effect is the same, an immediacy to the material that feels a bit too personal. As they zip through the city, they alight on The Ritz, beset by paparazzi and lookie-loos and just people everywhere. Is that her at the center of it all?

And, suddenly, based on your knowledge of Princess Diana — presumably not narrow, not if you are watching such an ambitious documentary — it comes into focus. Paris. The Ritz. Nighttime. Paparazzi swarming. Oh.

From there, Perkins rewinds, opting to tell the majority of “The Princess” through a distinct timeline. We again meet Diana mere days before she’s to be engaged to Prince Charles (or, as the hordes of journalists who surround the then-nanny’s house intimate and ask, perhaps she’s already engaged to him?) and follow her through her adult life in the royal family. Given that Diana met Charles when she was just 19, that’s nearly all of her adult life. Perkins and editors Jinx Godfrey and Daniel Lapira ably weave together a wealth of footage, zipping between personal video like the kind that opens the film, to news reports, chat shows, man-on-the-street interviews, pap shots, and seemingly sanctioned sequences of royal life.

In retrospect, knowing all that we know about Diana — and, as the film reminds us from the very start, knowing how it all ends — it’s impossible not to attempt to contextualize what we are seeing. Is Diana grimacing here, during a televised interview with Charles about their upcoming nuptials? Is Charles’ light stroking of her hand creepy or romantic? Is this photo shoot emblematic of the distance between Diana and her in-laws, or is everyone just bored waiting for the photographer to snap the shot? Without the influx of talking heads and other bits of opinion and information, the audience is forced to confront their own judgements.

Perkins, however, doesn’t entirely snip out other voices. While “The Princess” features a wealth of interview footage with both Diana and Charles — and yes, that infamous “Panorama” interview is here, as are many others that are likely not as familiar to non-British audiences — it also features frequent voiceover from an array of nameless, faceless chatterboxes. By aural quality alone, we can guess at a few identities, surely some newscasters and journalists, but there are others, too, maybe the everyday people Perkins often shows, either recorded in the audience at a variety of talk shows or right there on the street, a news camera shoved in their face to ask what they think about Diana. The effect is ingenious and chilling: Everyone has an equal stake in talking about Diana, everyone’s voice counts, everyone can say whatever the hell they want. Isn’t that the problem? Hasn’t that always been the problem?

The film is not without its judgements, though many of them feel entirely internal (not including Martin Phipps’ score, which does often set tones that can feel leading to the audience). The immersion of it all helps, the constant clicking of cameras, all the shots of paparazzi swarming Diana wherever she went, the prying questions on all manner of topics. And yet, even as audiences might judge what’s happening — good God, those paparazzi would just not let the woman rest! — Perkins has already implicated them too. You’re watching it, after all. You’re still watching it.

Which is perhaps why Perkins also exhibits something of an obsession with the paparazzi that stalked Diana for so long. They’re there from the start, hordes of them waiting for her like prey outside The Ritz, all of it leading somewhere horrible. While many of the most outwardly emotional sequences in the film that don’t focus explicitly on Diana — like a number of moments that follow regular people with even a fleeting interest in “The People’s Princess” — the ones that really rankle immerse us with a variety of paparazzi. There they are, bemoaning her covered carriage that took her to her wedding, or grinning outside her gym as they scale walls and build platforms to get a peek at her, running through airports as she begs them to stop snapping, only ever focused on one thing and seemingly not caring about her in the slightest.

As the film builds to its logical, horrible conclusion, Perkins settles more squarely on everyday people watching Diana from the outside, joking and playing cards just hours after Diana’s tragic final accident. Yeah, yeah, sure she’s injured. Oh, yeah, go ahead and arrest those paps who were following. What good TV! What incredible coverage! And then, the gut shot. Finally, it’s time to turn away, even if it’s already too late. But you knew that already.

“The Princess” premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. HBO and HBO Max will debut it in 2022.

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Trivia Posters for the film were hung at Place de l'Alma in Paris, near the entrance to the tunnel where the Princess of Wales died in a car accident in 1997. After an uproar, the posters were eventually removed at the request of French distributor Le Pacte.
Goofs When Diana orders burgers for Hasnat from Burger King, the current logo is seen on the bag instead of the 1995 one.

[last lines]

Hasnat Khan : From the poet Romi. "Somewhere beyond right and wrong there is a garden. I will meet you there."

Diana : "Somewhere beyond right and wrong there is a garden. I will meet you there." I will meet you there.

Connections Featured in Projector: Diana (2013)
Soundtracks Ne me Quitte pas Music by Jacques Brel Lyrics by Jacques Brel Performed by Jacques Brel

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$15,000,000 (estimated)
Nov 3, 2013
$21,766,271

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Runtime 1 hour 53 minutes
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Diana Reviews

Diana turns out to be an enormously tedious character study which never once has the balls to go beyond its glossed-up TV movie roots.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Feb 16, 2021

A film that plays like a National Enquirer exposé with better pictures.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Jan 31, 2021

I just wished the film was brave in its execution. It played it very safe...and it showed.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 16, 2020

One can't help but think while watching Diana, maybe if we'd had a PG-13 film version of her banal romance with the heart surgeon while it was transpiring, the masses would have let them have their privacy since there's nothing to see.

Full Review | Aug 29, 2019

Diana is a yawner, and the Princess' memory deserves much, much better than this. There's a big responsibility that comes along with portraying a recently deceased, widely beloved person on-screen, a responsibility to dig at the truth.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.8/10 | Apr 10, 2019

Putting aside its atrocious script, soppy romanticism and miasma of misjudged performances, it's difficult to decipher who exactly Diana is being targeted towards.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Mar 2, 2019

This film's flight of fancy in taking Diana to quasi-Sex and the City, 'girl about town' territory goes a touch too far.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 2, 2018

This is a script they might have found in the boot of the car -- an overblown, empty, frilly and flatulent sub-Sylvie Krin web of lipstick and lunches with Clive James.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Mar 6, 2018

The contradictions that made the Princess of Wales so interesting are presented here in a maddeningly pedestrian manner, a Hallmark TV movie without insight or point of view.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Nov 29, 2017

It's just a shame a film about such a complex woman has been reduced to something only vaguely interesting.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 8, 2017

Too much of this movie feels made specifically for the movie, which goes directly against its alleged realism, and leaves the audience confused about the point of it all.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jan 9, 2017

An incredibly depressing re-make of Notting Hill.

Full Review | May 5, 2015

Sets the proceedings within a misty cloud of conjecture.

Full Review | Feb 4, 2014

By the time Diana goes gay-clubbing to the sounds of the Pet Shop Boys' 'West End Girls' I began assuming the filmmakers actively hated their subject.

Full Review | Original Score: D | Dec 26, 2013

Yes, Diana is the poor little rich girl, but the opulent settings, private jets, yachts, and chauffeured cars prove peculiar and distracting affectations.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Nov 22, 2013

This affair hardly plays as being more than the pre-Dodi Fayed footnote it still is today, much less deserving of this grand epic romance treatment given by the filmmakers.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Nov 15, 2013

It may not be anything all that special, but it's harmless, well-made and entertaining on its own terms.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Nov 13, 2013

If I didn't know John Hughes was dead I would have sworn he had written this film.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 9, 2013

Are the micro-biopics that don't even bother to provide overviews of their famed subjects' entire lives, but instead lean on the spectacle of celebrity impersonation, the new camp?

Full Review | Original Score: .5/4 | Nov 8, 2013

Diana might have been flawed and scheming and love-starved, but this film doesn't help explain that. Nor does it illuminate the common touch and humanitarian side that endeared her to a global audience.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Nov 8, 2013

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Fallout First Reviews: A 'Violent, Fun, Emotional, Epic' Video Game Adaptation, Critics Say

Critics say prime video's new series benefits from strong storytelling, committed performances, and a deft balance of tone, making it one of the best video game adaptations ever..

TAGGED AS: First Reviews , streaming , television , TV

Fallout is the latest video game adaptation to hit the small screen. Created by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner , and executive produced by Westworld ‘s Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy , the eight episode series, inspired by the hit game franchise from Bethesda Softworks drops on Wednesday, April 10 to Amazon Prime Video.

The post-apocalyptic series stars Ella Purnell as Lucy; Aaron Moten as Maximus; and Walton Goggins as The Ghoul. Joining them is an ensemble cast that includes Kyle MacLachlan , Sarita Choudhury , Michael Emerson , Leslie Uggams , Zach Cherry , Moises Arias and Johnny Pemberton , among others.

With nearly three decades of lore under its belt, the video game franchise has drawn a massive fanbase. Needless to say, there’s a lot of hype surrounding the new series. Does it live up to expectations? Here’s what critics are saying about Fallout :

How does it compare to the video games?

Prime Video’s TV adaptation of Fallout does something the games in the legendary franchise never have—put storytelling above all else. — Bernard Boo, Den of Geek

Fallout is the new standard for video game adaptations. This series is violent, fun, emotional, epic, and just plain awesome. — Alex Maidy, JoBlo’s Movie Network

Opting for a new narrative that simply takes place in the Fallout world, the series is a mix of adventure and puzzle-box mystery, with more than enough action scenes to satisfy the RPG faithful. It’s fun, and only occasionally overcomplicated. — Kelly Lawler, USA Today

Fallout takes the ideas of the games and crafts its own story in an already interesting world. Nails the satire, the wackiness, and about everything a fan could want. — Zach Pope, Zach Pope Reviews

Bodies fly, heads explode, and video game logic reigns triumphant. — Niv M. Sultan, Slant Magazine

How is the cast?

(Photo by Prime Video)

All of the performances are great; Purnell is a strong, loveably naive lead, while Moten delivers a fascinatingly, sort-of loathsome turn. Excusing the wonderful pooch that plays CX404, aka Four, Goggins is the runaway MVP, an agent of chilly, smooth-talking chaos somewhere between John Marston and Clarence Boddicker. — Cameron Frew, Dexerto

“I hate it up here,” Lucy mutters early on, and given the horrors to which she’s subjected, nobody could blame her. Yet her quest not only involves no shortage of carnage but also insights into her community and its origins, as well as encounters (some relatively brief) with a strong array of co-stars, including Moisés Arias, Kyle MacLachlan, Sarita Choudhury, Michael Emerson, and Leslie Uggams. — Brian Lowry, CNN

The Ghoul serves as the perfect foil for Lucy and Maximus, with Goggins deploying megatons’ worth of weary charisma in his performance as Fallout’ s resident lone wolf, black hat archetype. — Belen Edwards, Mashable

Emancipation’s Aaron Moten and And Just Like That… standout Sarita Choudhury nail the determined, world-weary drive that propels their characters forward while Justified’ s Walton Goggins gives one of his best performances yet as Cooper Howard, a mutated ghoul of a gunslinger who gives everyone a hard time with biting quips and searing bullet work. — David Opie, Digital Spy

How’s the writing and world-building?

The show’s creators have done such an impeccable job fleshing out the world of Fallout that it feels like the characters are treading stories and quests you’ve experienced yourself in one way or another. — Tanner Dedmon, ComicBook.com

Story-wise, Fallout smartly eschews trying to adapt specific storylines or side-quests from any of the games, but rather concocts a new one set in the rich and familiar landscape. — Brian Lloyd, entertainment.ie

There are plenty of Easter eggs, as you might expect from a video game adaptation, but Fallout manages to make them seem like part of the world, too. It all feels real and believable as pieces of a whole existence that these people have scraped together, which goes a long way toward helping the show’s humor land. Even the Easter eggs feel carefully designed to fit into the world and the lives of the characters, rather than drawing focus away from them or sticking out as a glaring distraction. — Austen Goslin, Polygon

Do the violence and humor work?

It’s strong, it’s goddamn hilarious, and it highlights exactly how to swing for the fences while still knowing where Homebase is. It may be a new series, but Fallout is an instant classic of the streaming age. — Kate Sánchez, But Why Tho? A Geek Community

A bright and funny apocalypse filled with dark punchlines and bursts of ultra-violence, Fallout is among the best video game adaptations ever made. — Matt Purslow, IGN Movies

Finding a tonal balance between the drama and the comedy is a razor’s edge, but Fallout makes it look effortless. As a result, spending time in this hardened world is as fun, engaging, and engrossing as the games. — William Goodman, TheWrap

It’s an equal parts funny and nightmarish show that, like its protagonist, isn’t content to live inside a projection of the past. — Kambole Campbell, Empire Magazine

Crucially, these laugh-out-loud moments of disbelief don’t detract from the harsh reality of this world, which is perhaps even more violent than you might expect, especially for newbies to this franchise. — David Opie, Digital Spy

Any final thoughts?

Fallout is a clever, twisted apocalyptic odyssey that soars as both a video game adaptation and a standalone series. — Lauren Coates, The Spool

For those who have never played the Fallout series, especially those of the time-strapped ilk who can’t just pour hundreds of hours into a game, they should give Prime Video’s Fallout a go. — Howard Waldstein, CBR

Fallout is both totally rad and an absolute blast. — Neil Armstrong, BBC.com

The show’s clearly committed to being the definitive Fallout adaptation, a love letter to fans, no question, while still opening the vault door to welcome in just about everyone else brave enough to step inside. — Jon Negroni, TV Line

There’s really nothing like Fallout on television right now, and that’s ultimately a good thing. — Therese Lacson, Collider

Thumbnail image by Amazon Studios. On an Apple device? Follow Rotten Tomatoes on Apple News .

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Civil War Plays Like a Nightmare. You Should Still See It.

A24’s most expensive movie to date is borderline incoherent. that doesn’t mean it’s not important..

The year is unspecified—it could be a few years into some alternate future, or it could be right now. The president, a clean-cut establishment type played by Nick Offerman, is unnamed, his party and political affiliations unclear (though his rhetoric in an address to the nation sounds disturbingly authoritarian). And the precise nature of the domestic conflict that has torn the United States apart and turned the nation’s major cities into zones of open warfare is unexplained. In Civil War , the provocative fourth feature from Alex Garland ( Ex Machina , Annihilation , Men ), the details about why and how America collapsed into violent chaos are immaterial. What Garland wants is to drop us into the middle of that violent chaos as it unfolds, to make us see our familiar surroundings—ordinary blocks lined with chain drugstores and clothing boutiques—recast as active battlegrounds, with snipers on rooftops and local militias enforcing their own sadistic versions of the law.

One thing Garland’s at times frustratingly opaque script does go out of its way to clarify is that the ideological fissures in this alternate version of America occur along different fault lines than the ones that remain from the country’s actual civil war. The main threat to what we’ll call the Offerman administration is the secessionist group the Western Forces, a Texas-California alliance that’s intentionally impossible to extrapolate from our current red state–blue state split. There is also a separate rebel movement of some kind based in Florida, but above all, there is unchecked street violence and general social disorder. One early exchange of dialogue suggests that the war has been going on for some 14 months, which seems like too short a time for the country to have fallen into the advanced state of dystopia in which we find it: highways choked with empty cars, most of the population in hiding, the internet all but nonfunctional except in a few urban centers. But again, the point is less plausibility than viscerality. Garland got his start writing a zombie movie, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later , and he has also co-written an award-winning action video game. Civil War , A24’s most expensive movie to date, sometimes plays like a mashup of those two genres, with the viewer as first-person player and our armed fellow citizens as the zombies.

As the film begins, Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), a veteran war photographer, is in New York City, holed up at a hotel that doubles as a makeshift command center for the press. Knowing that the Western Forces are on the verge of taking the capital, Lee and her longtime professional partner, a wire-service reporter named Joel (Wagner Moura), are planning a perilous road trip from New York to D.C. in the unlikely hope of landing an interview with the embattled president. Lee’s longtime mentor, news editor Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), warns them that the plan is sheer madness—then asks if, despite his age and limited mobility, he can get in on the action.

As they’re preparing to leave, they’re joined, despite Lee’s protests, by Jessie ( Priscilla ’s Cailee Spaeny), an aspiring photojournalist in her early 20s who idolizes Lee’s work but has no experience in war zones. Bringing along the stowaway Lee disparages as a “kindergartner” will only, she argues, put all of them in even more danger. These doubts turn out to be justified: The presence of Jessie, a live wire with a penchant for unnecessary risk-taking, makes the journey to D.C. even more perilous, while forcing Lee to confront how jaded she’s become after years of compartmentalizing her most scarring memories. On the way to the capital, this multigenerational foursome encounters gas-station vigilantes, a shootout at an abandoned Christmas-themed amusement park, and a gut-churning encounter with a racist militant played by Dunst’s real-life husband, Jesse Plemons.

In its vision of journalism as a form of amoral adventure-seeking, Civil War belongs to a long tradition of films about hardened war correspondents in far-flung places, movies like A Private War and The Year of Living Dangerously . But the fact that the carnage these reporters are documenting is homegrown shifts the inflection significantly. Suddenly it’s impossible to exoticize or otherwise alienate ourselves from the bloodshed onscreen, which makes us ask ourselves what we were doing exoticizing it in the first place. This effect of moral immediacy is Civil War ’s greatest strength, and the reason it feels like an important movie of its moment even if it isn’t a wholly coherent or consistently insightful one.

Garland’s idea of throwing us in medias res during a civil war in progress is a bold gambit, and his cinematic instincts—his sense of where to put a camera and how long to draw out a moment of suspense—are often keen. The horrible realities he makes us look at—intra-civilian combat, physical and psychological torture, the everyday depths of human depravity—are summoned powerfully enough that Civil War remains emotionally and physically affecting even as the ideas it seeks to explore remain fuzzy. Is this a critique of contemporary journalism or a salute to the courage of reporters on the front lines? If it’s meant to be suspended somewhere in between, how does the filmmaker position himself on that line, and how should we, the audience, feel about the protagonists’ sometimes dubious choices?

Even as they document street battles and point-blank executions, adrenaline junkies Jessie and Joel occasionally exchange devilish grins. Meanwhile, Lee is all but incapable of normal human relationships because of her unacknowledged PTSD. A late sequence finds them unofficially embedded with an especially ruthless death squad; it would seem important to establish whether this alignment is meant to signify their ultimate journalistic corruption or a necessary compromise for the survival of the Fourth Estate. Even on the level of plot logic, the movie poses a question that the script’s curiously thin worldbuilding never answers: If the internet and most of the nation’s industrial infrastructure are in ruins, how are ordinary people reading Joel’s articles and looking at the photos that Lee herself struggles for hours to upload? If it is intended in part as a satire of journalistic opportunism, Civil War should be more specific about the conditions of 21 st -century media in wartime, especially given that it’s coming out at a moment when front-line reporters face more physical danger than at any time in recent memory.

All we learn of Lee’s background is that, like Jessie, she is from a farm town in the interior of the U.S., with parents who are in stubborn denial about the crumbling of the republic. But because Kirsten Dunst is a remarkable artist, she makes this somewhat underwritten character, who on paper could have been a stoic “badass” stereotype, into a complex and indelible presence. Dunst also, perhaps for the first time, loses the girlish quality she has brought even to middle-aged characters: Lee Smith is a plain, scowling woman with a glum, even abrasive mien. She’s a person whose perspective on life has narrowed down to the size of a camera lens, yet she’s also a committed journalist and a fiercely loyal colleague. As the other three sort-of protagonists, Moura, Henderson, and Spaeny all turn in finely tuned performances that bring a depth to their characters beyond what the script provides, but it’s Dunst whose thousand-yard stare and deep-buried grief will stay with me.

“What kind of American are you?” Plemons’ fatigues-and-pink-sunglasses-clad character asks the journalists one by one as he terrorizes them at gunpoint in the movie’s scariest and most successful sequence. (Not for nothing, it’s also the moment that suggests the most strongly that the vaguely defined conflict in this fictive America has everything to do with race.) That may be the screenplay’s smartest single line, in that it dispenses with the metaphorical quality of Civil War ’s imagined political dystopia and presents us with the real question many Americans are asking each other and themselves right now, sometimes in a self-reflective mode, sometimes in a contentious or overtly threatening one. As the unfolding of that encounter with Plemons makes clear, as soon as the question is asked with a weapon in your hand, it becomes a trick question, posed not to start a conversation but to set a trap. Civil War often leaves the audience feeling trapped in an all-too-realistic waking nightmare, but when it finally lets us go, mercifully short of the two-hour mark, it sends us out of the theater talking.

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Movie Review: In Alex Garland’s potent ‘Civil War,’ journalists are America’s last hope

This image released by A24 shows Kirsten Dunst in a scene from “Civil War.” (A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows Kirsten Dunst in a scene from “Civil War.” (Murray Close/A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows a scene from “Civil War.” (A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows a scene from “Civil War.” (Murray Close/A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows Cailee Spaeny, left, and Kirsten Dunst in a scene from “Civil War.” (A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows Wagner Moura in a scene from “Civil War.” (A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows Wagner Moura, left, and Kirsten Dunst in a scene from “Civil War.” (Murray Close/A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows Cailee Spaeny, left, and Wagner Moura in a scene from “Civil War.” (Murray Close/A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows Cailee Spaeny in a scene from “Civil War.” (Murray Close/A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows Nick Offerman in a scene from “Civil War.” (Murray Close/A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows Stephen McKinley Henderson in a scene from “Civil War.” (Murray Close/A24 via AP)

This image released by A24 shows promotional art for “Civil War.” (A24 via AP)

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The United States is crumbling in Alex Garland’s sharp new film “ Civil War, ” a bellowing and haunting big screen experience. The country has been at war with itself for years by the time we’re invited in, through the gaze of a few journalists documenting the chaos on the front lines and chasing an impossible interview with the president.

Garland, the writer-director of films like “Annihilation” and “Ex Machina,” as well as the series “Devs,” always seems to have an eye on the ugliest sides of humanity and our capacity for self-destruction. His themes are profound and his exploration of them sincere in films that are imbued with strange and haunting images that rattle around in your subconscious for far too long. Whatever you think of “ Men ,” his most divisive film to date, it’s unlikely anyone will forget Rory Kinnear giving birth to himself.

In “Civil War,” starring Kirsten Dunst as a veteran war photographer named Lee, Garland is challenging his audience once again by not making the film about what everyone thinks it will, or should, be about. Yes, it’s a politically divided country. Yes, the President (Nick Offerman) is a blustery, rising despot who has given himself a third term, taken to attacking his citizens and shut himself off from the press. Yes, there is one terrifying character played by Jesse Plemons who has some pretty hard lines about who is and isn’t a real American.

This image released by A24 shows Kirsten Dunst in a scene from "Civil War." (Murray Close/A24 via AP)

But that trailer that had everyone talking is not the story. Garland is not so dull or narratively conservative to make the film about red and blue ideologies. All we really know is that the so-called Western Forces of Texas and California have seceded from the country and are closing in to overthrow the government. We don’t know what they want or why, or what the other side wants or why and you start to realize that many of the characters don’t seem to really know, or care, either.

This choice might be frustrating to some audiences, but it’s also the only one that makes sense in a film focused on the kinds of journalists who put themselves in harm’s way to tell the story of violent conflicts and unrest. As Lee explains to Cailee Spaeny’s Jessie, a young, aspiring photographer who has elbowed her way onto their dangerous journey to Washington, questions are not for her to ask: She takes truthful, impartial pictures so that everyone else can.

“Civil War” a film that is more about war reporters than anything else — the trauma of the beat, the vital importance of bearing witness and the moral and ethical dilemmas of impartiality. Dunst’s Lee is having a bit of an existential crisis, having shot so many horrors and feeling as though she hasn’t made any difference — violence and death are still everywhere. She’s also a pro: Hardened and committed to the story and the image. Her colleague Joel (Wagner Moura) is more of an adrenaline junkie, chasing the gunfire and drinking himself into a stupor every night. There’s Jessie (Spaeny), the wide-eyed but ambitious newbie who is in over her head, and the aging editor Sammy (the great Stephen McKinley Henderson), wise and buttoned up in Brooks Brothers and suspenders, who can’t imagine a life outside of news even as his body is failing him. All are self-motivated and none of them have a life outside of the job, which might be a criticism for some movie characters but not here (trigger warning for any journo audiences out there).

The group must drive an indirect route to get from New York to Washington as safely as possible, through Pittsburgh and West Virginia. The roads and towns are set-dressed a little bit, but anyone who knows the area will recognize familiar sights of dead malls, creaky off-brand gas stations on two lane roads, boarded up shops and overgrown parking lots that all work to provide an unsettlingly effective backdrop for the bleak world of “Civil War.”

Dunst and Spaeny are both exceedingly good in their roles, effectively embodying the veteran and the novice — a well-written, nuanced and evolving dynamic that should inspire post-credits debates and discussion (among other topics).

Dread permeates every frame, whether it’s a quiet moment of smart conversation, a white-knuckle standoff or a deafening shootout on 17th street. And as with all Garland films it comes with a great, thoughtful soundtrack and a Sonoya Mizuno cameo.

Smart, compelling and challenging blockbusters don’t come along that often, though this past year has had a relative embarrassment of riches with the likes of “Dune: Part Two” and “Oppenheimer.” “Civil War” should be part of that conversation too. It’s a full body theatrical experience that deserves a chance.

“Civil War,” an A24 release in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “strong, violent content, bloody/disturbing images and language throughout.” Running time: 119 minutes. Three stars out of four.

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‘The Greatest Hits’ Review: Yes, She Could Turn Back Time.

A high-concept movie about music and grief lacks follow through.

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In an outdoor space bathed in magenta light, a woman and a man stand close to one another, heads touching, smiling. They both are wearing headphones around their necks.

By Alissa Wilkinson

“The Greatest Hits” literalizes the familiar heartache: You’re driving down the road, radio blaring at full tilt. Suddenly that song comes on, the one that reminds you of your ex, or of a time that was joyous but now is a sadness-tinged memory. Plunged back into that head space, you feel as though you’ve traveled through time. And the longing it prompts can be unbearable.

This is where Harriet (Lucy Boynton) finds herself, except instead of feeling as if she’s moving through time, she is truly hurtling through the fourth dimension. Since having lost her boyfriend, Max (David Corenswet), in a tragic accident, any song Harriet hears attached to memories of him catapults her, quite literally, back to the moment in their relationship when that song was playing. When she leaves the house, she wears noise-canceling headphones to protect against unexpected time travel provoked by radios and errant Spotify shuffles.

At home, though, she spends her nights trying to slip backward. Harriet has become obsessed with trying to return to a moment where she can set the world straight and ensure that Max won’t die, which means, even two years after his death, that she is still “hiding out in her grief,” as another character puts it. In the midst of this, at her grief support group, Harriet meets a nice guy named David (Justin H. Min), who’s dealing with loss of his own.

Ned Benson, who wrote and directed “The Greatest Hits,” has explored this territory before. His previous work, “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby,” was a trilogy, made up of two films that explored a couple’s grief-stricken, tumultuous relationship from each of their individual perspectives, and a third that combined them. (As the title suggests, music was part of the story, too.) That film felt personal, and so does this one. It earnestly evokes the way grief mires us in memory, making us feel as if our personal timelines are slip-sliding and looping, eternally arrested in the past. Moving forward seems impossible.

But “The Greatest Hits” lacks the imagination of “Eleanor Rigby” and, at times, seems like it might be in the wrong genre. It’s easy to imagine a rom-com version of this movie, since the elements are all there — the hip location (mostly the Silver Lake and Los Feliz neighborhoods of Los Angeles), the meet-cute, the queer best friend (a mainstay of the genre , for better or worse), the crates of vinyl records, the pining, the hot guys, even the chemistry. But this movie lacks the lightness and humor of a rom-com, which might balance out all the dreary moments and make it feel more watchable. The version that exists feels more suited for lovelorn teens just off their first breakup than adults moving through profound loss and sorrow, more acquainted with the ways life can’t just stop when tragedy strikes.

“The Greatest Hits” proceeds slowly and repetitively, which doesn’t have to be a problem: The gentleness of the pace and storytelling gives the cast space to breathe and react to each other, to build relationships that feel reasonably authentic. Similarly, the music choices (which are all over the map both in genre and era) are fun and fresh, lacking the on-the-nose quality that a film with more bang-on choices might have provoked. But as it goes on, the movie begins to feel mired in its own high-concept conceit without space to develop it further. Is there a reason the only music that triggers time travel for Harriet is connected to Max? Are there tunes that throw her back to times she prefers not to remember? Why is it important to recall that she used to be a music producer?

There’s an interesting film dancing around the edges of “The Greatest Hits,” but there’s both too much sentimentality and not enough thought, and that’s too bad. For audiences in search of a good cry, it may still do the job. But for those of us for whom the music-driven time travel experience is still metaphorical, it’s cold comfort, a fantasy with no hope of fulfillment.

The Greatest Hits Rated PG-13 for some language and innuendo, plus conversations about death and grief. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch on Hulu.

Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005. More about Alissa Wilkinson

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'The nation had lost its mind': the extraordinary new documentary about
Perkins captures Diana's last night on 31 August 1997 not through stunned newsreaders but Australian tourists, chancing on police lights outside the Pont de l'Alma traffic tunnel while ...
Diana: The Musical movie review (2021)
In the decades since her untimely death, Diana has remained endlessly fascinating. But "Diana: The Musical" adds nothing novel or substantial to our understanding of her as a wife, mother, royal or celebrity. She remains one of the most famous and talked-about people on the planet, but this production merely rehashes in rushed, glossy ...
Kristen Stewart embodies Princess Diana in the new Spencer trailer
Marcus Jones. Published on September 23, 2021 02:22PM EDT. The outspoken princess finally speaks! Save for one final moment where Kristen Stewart dramatically utters, "They don't," the recent ...
'The Princess' Review: Chilling Princess Diana Doc Turns Tables
Ed Perkins' remarkable film eschews many of the trappings we've come to associate with the modern documentary, and is all the better for it. Editor's note: This review was originally published ...
Diana
Movie Info. During the last two years of her life, Princess Diana (Naomi Watts) campaigns against the use of land mines and has a secret love affair with a Pakistani heart surgeon (Naveen Andrews ...
Diana (2013)
Diana: Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel. With Naomi Watts, Cas Anvar, Charles Edwards, James Puddephatt. During the last two years of her life, Princess Diana embarks on a final rite of passage: a secret love affair with Pakistani heart surgeon Hasnat Khan.
Diana (2013 film)
Diana is a 2013 biographical drama film directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, about the last two years of the life of Diana, Princess of Wales. The screenplay is based on Kate Snell's 2001 book, Diana: Her Last Love, and was written by Stephen Jeffreys.British actress Naomi Watts plays the title role of Diana.. The world premiere of the film was held in London on 5 September 2013.
'Nyad' Review: Neptune's (Estranged) Daughter
Directed by Jimmy Chin, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi. Biography, Drama, Sport. PG-13. 2h 1m. Find Tickets. When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an ...
Diana
Full Review | Aug 29, 2019. Diana is a yawner, and the Princess' memory deserves much, much better than this. There's a big responsibility that comes along with portraying a recently deceased ...
Fallout First Reviews: A 'Violent, Fun, Emotional, Epic' Video Game
Prime Video's TV adaptation of Fallout does something the games in the legendary franchise never have—put storytelling above all else. — Bernard Boo, Den of Geek Fallout is the new standard for video game adaptations. This series is violent, fun, emotional, epic, and just plain awesome. — Alex Maidy, JoBlo's Movie Network Opting for a new narrative that simply takes place in the ...
Civil War: A24's most expensive movie is incoherent—and important
A24's most expensive movie to date is borderline incoherent. That doesn't mean it's not important. The year is unspecified—it could be a few years into some alternate future, or it could ...
'Civil War' Review: We Have Met the Enemy and It Is Us. Again
Rarely have I seen a movie that made me so acutely uncomfortable or watched an actor's face that, like Dunst's, expressed a nation's soul-sickness so vividly that it felt like an X-ray ...
'Civil War' review: A haunting portrait of a crumbling United States
The United States is crumbling in Alex Garland's sharp new film " Civil War, " a bellowing and haunting big screen experience. The country has been at war with itself for years by the time we're invited in, through the gaze of a few journalists documenting the chaos on the front lines and chasing an impossible interview with the president.
Keith Urban, Snoop Dogg sing about new 'Garfield Movie'
April 12 (UPI) --Sony Pictures released the music video "Let It Roll" from The Garfield Movie on Friday. The film opens May 24. Keith Urban sings "Let It Roll" with a rap by Snoop Dogg. The song ...
'The Greatest Hits' Review: Yes, She Could Turn Back Time
The Greatest Hits. Directed by Ned Benson. Comedy, Drama, Fantasy, Musical, Romance. PG-13. 1h 34m. Find Tickets. When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we ...