| Neon | Release Date: November 5, 2021 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
42
Mixed:
9
Negative:
2
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Critic Reviews
The TelegraphSep 3, 2021
The 31-year-old Stewart – who will be instantly and justifiably awards-tipped for this – navigates this perilous terrain with total mastery, getting the voice and mannerisms just right but vamping everything up just a notch, in order to better lean into the film’s melodramatic, paranoiac and absurdist swerves.
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The GuardianSep 3, 2021
Kristen Stewart proves entirely compelling in the title role. She gives an awkward and mannered performance as Diana, and this is entirely as it should be when one considers that Diana gave an awkward and mannered performance herself, garnishing her inbred posh hauteur with studied coquettish asides.
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Nov 4, 2021
The royal family’s travails have long been likened to that of a soap opera, but Spencer, even as it conjures the emotional extravagance of a first-rate melodrama, refuses to be hemmed in. It’s a historical fantasia, a claustrophobic thriller and a dark comedy of manners, all poised on a knife’s edge between tabloid trash and high art.
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Nov 2, 2021
The acting is outstanding all the way around. But Stewart is brilliant. She looks, sounds and moves amazingly like the real Diana, but this is no impersonation. Instead it’s Stewart getting to the heart of the truth through her performance, her Diana a prisoner of the fame and adherence to tradition at all costs that trapped her.
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Nov 4, 2021
Co-fabulists Pablo Larraín and writer Steven Knight have made a film that marries the former’s elliptical, experimental style with the latter’s penchant for alternative histories stuffed with archetypes. But it is Stewart’s performance at the center of it all that is the most startling aspect of Spencer. She brings a theatricality in the way she moves and speaks that transcends impersonation yet falls thankfully shy of camp.
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Nov 8, 2021
The film plays with and deconstructs the familiar repertoire of Diana myths and images, to offer an empathetic, intelligent insight into the prison of fame and privilege, with Kristen Stewart offering a lead performance that is brittle, tender, sometimes playful and not a little uncanny.
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Nov 8, 2021
Playing out over three excruciating days at Sandringham – from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day – and carried shoulder high by a note-perfect Kristen Stewart, Spencer (the very title of which seems to present a challenge to the House of Windsor) dances between ethereal ghost story, arch social satire and no-holds-barred psychodrama, while remaining at heart a paean to motherhood.
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Nov 2, 2021
Sep 7, 2021
Spencer is a narratively ambitious film that remixes reality and fiction to get us inside the head of the Princess of Wales, exploring mental illness and past trauma with high camp that captures the suffering of its main character. Kristen Stewart gives a career-best performance while Pablo Larrain cements himself as a go-to director for unique and thoughtful biopics.
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Nov 17, 2021
Spencer relies quite heavily on Kristen Stewart’s central performance. Once you adjust to the repetitive rhythm of speaking she employs—a rush of words, followed by a pregnant pause, then another rush with a single syllable of emphasis—you can appreciate some of the more delicate work she’s doing, particularly her darting eyes and changing posture.
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Nov 3, 2021
About a third or so of Spencer doesn’t work: flashbacks to Diana’s childhood, hallucinations involving Anne Boleyn, a secret visit to her old house, a Boxing Day pheasant shoot that turns into a battle of wills between Diana and Charles (Jack Farthing). But Stewart’s performance makes those things immaterial and the rest of the movie seem all the finer.
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IndieWireSep 3, 2021
Doing away with any pretense of docu-realism, Spencer is neither a film about specifics nor any of conventional biopic; it is instead a sort of haunted house chamber piece that doesn’t try to locate the real woman behind the legend — as the title might suggest — as it does to reimagine her within a wholly different pop lexicon.
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Nov 4, 2021
Sep 5, 2021
Stewart gives her all, as she always does. But she plays Diana as a mannered doe—all wrong, given that does are the most unmannered creatures on Earth. Her performance is clearly stylized, but it’s also packed with calculation and guile. Larraín turns this Diana into exactly the thing the royal family accused the real-life Diana of being, a willful and pouty constant complainer.
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Nov 11, 2021
Spencer treats Diana as if she was kidnapped into all this, being held against her will. It depicts her life as such a demeaning, excruciating, maddening spectacle that you wonder why she doesn’t just leave. That Diana was a prisoner is a perspective meant to flatter that actually flattens.
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