Marie Antoinette

Sofia Coppola's third film exploits her 'œgift for capturing the loneliness of individuals in limbo,' said Peter Rainer in The Christian Science Monitor. Like Bill Murray's character in Lost in Translation, Kirsten Dunst's Marie Antoinette is at once cloistered and exposed. At just 14, the Austrian princess married a sexually clueless Louis XVI and ascended to the top of an indulgent French aristocracy. Coppola piles on the bonbons, wigs, and sumptuous furnishings and dresses, and watches as the teenage Marie goes from displaced confusion to spoiled entitlement. Coppola flouts period film conventions, dumping those annoying pan-Euro accents for teenager lilt and stocking her soundtrack with '80s pop anthems. As a textbook history lesson, 'œthe movie is mostly useless,' said Gary Thompson in the Philadelphia Daily News. Here, Marie's greatest worry is not that the masses will swarm Versailles, but that her dolt of a husband won't figure out how to get her pregnant. Similarly, Coppola forgoes the crowded street scenes for shoe-shopping montages, said Bill Zwecker in the Chicago Sun-Times. It's the perfect metaphor for a blissfully ignorant aristocracy. 'œAs the film progresses, it becomes obvious that we are being made aware of just why the French Revolution came to be.'

Rating: PG-13

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