Marie Antoinette: Critic Reviews

The work of a mature filmmaker who has identified and developed a new cinematic vocabulary to describe a new breed of post-postpostfeminist woman.

Highly theatrical and yet also intimate and informal, Marie Antoinette lets its story slink almost casually through its lovingly composed and rendered images.

Though Dunst looks the part and stunningly carries off foot-high powdered wigs and lavish costumes, her flat affect and simpering voice don't conjure up the requisite sense of arrogant power, corruption and narcissism.

Coppola brilliantly conjures the young queen's insular world, in which she was both isolated and claustrophobically scrutinized. While not celebrating Marie Antoinette's reign, Coppola clearly sympathizes with a girl who was less heedless than naive.

Given Coppola's fashion-first approach, it's a miracle the film doesn't feel more like a long perfume ad. But the movie has atmosphere, beauty, spirit, and exquisite production design, photography, and editing.

A graceful, charming, and sometimes witty confection -- at least for its first hour.

Dunst plays Marie Antoinette as if she's seen the future and it's Paris Hilton.

Marie Antoinette, which was shot at Versailles, looks absolutely sumptuous, but is, ultimately as substantial as a bonbon.

There's not much meat at this banquet, only sweets.

The movie ends as it started, with Marie in a carriage, unaware of the fate we know awaits her. It's the last in a long line of things the movie neither shows or tells us.

The result is a silly piece of costume jewelry called Marie Antoinette, and no, the soldering of a new-wave-revival soundtrack with 18th-century Versailles is not interesting enough to save this bauble.

This is one of the most immediate, personal costume dramas ever made, and so it's not unseemly to consider how the writer-director and her heroine overlap.

The one, transfixing virtue of Marie Antoinette is its unembarrassed devotion to the superficial. There is no morality at play here, no agony other than boredom, and, until the last half hour, not a shred of political sense.

Every criticism I have read of this film would alter is fragile magic and reduce its romantic and tragic poignancy to the level of an instructional film.

Insouciant but never cavalier, Coppola's latest effort should prove definitively she's a talent in her own right.

The movie falls apart when the peasants storm the palace in 1789, an event completely outside Coppola's frame of reference -- at least until the Cannes premiere.

Coppola's film is a superior achievement, a story as rich and resonant as its protagonist is hollow.

She was born into fabulous wealth and fame. By the time she was a teenager, her name was well-known to both the public and the well-to do. So is it any wonder Sofia Coppola wanted to do a movie about Marie Antoinette?

A largely static, desperately pseudo-hip attempt to reconstruct the events leading up to the French Revolution from the vantage point of a 1980s punk rocker.

The overwrought director sees Marie as France's most misunderstood monarch, but provides nary one sane member of the court who misunderstands her.

Ms. Coppola and her colleagues have also taken an anachronistic approach to her material with an anarchic pop-music score suggesting the complacent spirit of a contemporary spoiled teenager infatuated with the glistening surfaces of her generation.

Let them have eye candy pretty much sums up Sofia Coppola's approach to her revisionist and modernist take on the famous royal airhead who in the end lost her head.

Pouring Coca-Cola in the cabernet, Sofia Coppola's dazzling Marie Antoinette couldn't be more anachronistic if it showed the queen of France saying, 'Let them eat sushi.' Coppola works in weird ways, but the real Versailles was so much weirder.

This is just a lark, a heavy-handed one without the heart of even the bad histories which gave us a Marie who said (as she never did) Let them eat cake.