Jackie
Fox Searchlight Pictures | Release Date: December 2, 2016 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
81
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 53 Critic Reviews
Positive:
45
Mixed:
7
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The TelegraphRobbie CollinJan 3, 2017
Jackie, the English-language debut from the Chilean director Pablo Larraín, shows you the past in a hall of shattered mirrors – fractured and unsettling, with every surface sharp enough to draw blood. Read full review
100
St. Louis Post-DispatchCalvin WilsonDec 20, 2016
Portman is simply brilliant, getting to the essence of Jackie without resorting to a mere impersonation. Read full review
100
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottDec 20, 2016
Larrain's film offers something human, something insightful, and something altogether unforgettable. Read full review
100
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzDec 8, 2016
To watch Portman’s every move is to not only watch history being recreated, but to also witness history being made. No one will ever be able to touch this role again. Or, at least, no one should. Read full review
100
ObserverRex ReedDec 8, 2016
Never embroidered or rehearsed, the way so many biopics are, this is a wonderful movie that feels freshly observed, like an uninvited peek through some forbidden White House keyhole, at the woman we called Jackie. Read full review
100
Washington PostAnn HornadayDec 8, 2016
Superbly shot and accompanied by an alternately angular and lyrical score by Mica Levi, Jackie would have been an exceptionally smart, intriguing movie as an astutely conceived, well-crafted meditation on political mythmaking. In Larraín and Portman’s hands, it becomes something deeper and more emotionally potent. Read full review
100
Boston GlobeTy BurrDec 7, 2016
Jackie is a chamber drama rather than an epic; an impressionistic work of emotional opera rather than a chronological parade. What is this movie trying to do? Simply dramatize everything that can go on inside a woman simultaneously marginalized and revered. Read full review
100
SalonNico LangDec 4, 2016
Jackie transcends mimicry to achieve something greater — bringing the first lady’s grief and resolve in the face of unspeakable loss to vivid life. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranDec 1, 2016
Larraín told his producers he wouldn't do Jackie unless Natalie Portman agreed to take on the role, and her superb performance, utterly convincing without being anything like an impersonation, vindicates his determination. Read full review
100
Village VoiceApril WolfeNov 30, 2016
Every scene is visceral. Every note played tells a story. Read full review
100
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneySep 16, 2016
Extraordinary in its piercing intimacy and lacerating in its sorrow, Jackie is a remarkably raw portrait of an iconic American first lady, reeling in the wake of tragedy while at the same time summoning the defiant fortitude needed to make her husband's death meaningful, and to ensure her own survival as something more than a fashionably dressed footnote. Read full review
100
Time OutJoshua RothkopfSep 16, 2016
Jackie pummels you with grandeur, with its epic visions of the funeral and that terrible moment in the convertible (all of it rendered in pitch-perfect detail and a subtle 16-millimeter shudder). Yet the film's lasting impact is dazzlingly intellectual: Just as JFK himself turned politics into image-making, his wife continued his work when no one else could. Read full review
100
VarietyGuy LodgeSep 16, 2016
Eschewing standard biopic form at every turn, this brilliantly constructed, diamond-hard character study observes the exhausted, conflicted Jackie as she attempts to disentangle her own perspective, her own legacy, and, perhaps hardest of all, her own grief from a tragedy shared by millions. Read full review
100
The GuardianNigel M SmithSep 16, 2016
It’s a singular vision from an uncompromising director that happens to be about one of the most famous women in American history. Jackie is not Oscar bait – it’s great cinema. Read full review
91
NPRScott TobiasDec 20, 2016
More than merely offering a backstage pass to history, Larraín draws us into the utter uniqueness of a situation where personal loss and national duty collided so violently. Read full review
91
Entertainment WeeklyLeah GreenblattDec 1, 2016
In its audacious strangeness, the movie manages to do something history hardly ever gets to: surprise us. Read full review
91
ConsequenceAllison ShoemakerNov 30, 2016
It’s as complex and surprising a character study as any you’ll see this year, a fact made all the more impressive when you remember that the woman in question has been turned into a collectible doll. Read full review
91
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd Nov 30, 2016
Jackie shows us the facade and the beneath, which is just one way this boldly off-kilter movie puts its biopic brethren to shame. Read full review
91
IndieWireBen CrollSep 16, 2016
Anchored by Natalie Portman’s achy-eyed performance, Jackie is, despite a few wrinkles at the end, about the best version of this story you can get. Read full review
91
The PlaylistJessica KiangSep 16, 2016
Jackie is what happens when two distinct sensibilities — the Goliath of the Hollywood prestige pic and the David of Pablo Larraín’s playful, idiosyncratic intelligence — throw down. Read full review
90
Little White LiesSophie Monks KaufmanDec 1, 2021
The result is a gorgeous, layered portrait of a woman determined to put public image ahead of private feelings. Read full review
90
The New York TimesManohla DargisDec 1, 2016
The film has the requisite surface fidelity.... But it also has moments of lightness and strangeness, as well as kinks and sour notes, which strengthen the sense that these are people, not figurines in a dutiful, paint-by-numbers biopic. Read full review
90
Screen DailyJonathan RomneySep 16, 2016
Larraín’s highly varied visual invention and command of complex structure serve as a reminder of how vitally an imaginative director can skew what otherwise might have emerged in more mainstream colours. Read full review
88
The Seattle TimesMoira MacdonaldDec 14, 2016
Jackie is mesmerizing; a familiar story told from an entirely different angle. It’s voyeuristic, to be sure — the scenes of Jackie alone in her White House bedroom, after the shooting, feel almost unbearably intimate — but you can’t look away. Read full review
88
Movie NationRoger MooreDec 8, 2016
Portman lets us feel the way her loss utterly empties life of meaning and purpose. But Chilean director Pablo Larrain (“The Club”) lets little John Jr. (Aiden and Brody Weinberg) provide the heart-wrenching release, just as he did back at that state funeral in 1963. Read full review
88
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsDec 8, 2016
It's an odd, hermetic and fascinating picture. Read full review
88
Rolling StonePeter TraversNov 30, 2016
Powered by a transfixing Portman, Larrain's film – one of the year's best – is appropriately hard to pin down and impossible to forget. Read full review
88
USA TodayBrian TruittNov 29, 2016
The iconic first lady is given emotional complexity and rich understanding through a stirring and ambitious performance by Natalie Portman. Read full review
83
The Film StageRory O'ConnorSep 16, 2016
This is remarkable stuff from a director on the cusp of the mainstream. You sense an American filmmaker might not have managed it. Read full review
80
EmpireOlly RichardsJan 16, 2017
Jackie does what the very best biopics should: it makes you view someone you’ve seen countless times as if you were seeing them anew. Read full review
80
Total FilmNeil SmithJan 16, 2017
Portman’s Oscar-worthy work crowns an unconventional study of an icon, while Mica Levi’s score is sublime. Read full review
80
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzDec 8, 2016
Calling Jackie, director Pablo Larrain’s absorbing film, a construction project is not to demean it but to praise it. Read full review
80
New York Daily NewsStephen Whitty Nov 29, 2016
Whenever the movie begins to falter — it cuts, sometimes confusingly, among at least three different timelines — Portman pulls it back together, and sets it back on course. Read full review
80
ScreenCrushE. Oliver WhitneySep 16, 2016
Instead of observing its historical subject from behind a glass case, Jackie offers a piercing portrait of a woman’s psychological and emotional journey. Read full review
80
CineVueJohn BleasdaleSep 16, 2016
Larraín is as good at navigating the treacherous waters of internal White House politics as he is capturing the moments of intense, if numbed, private suffering. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleMarc SavlovDec 21, 2016
Jackie has a nightmare vibe to it that’s palpable and unsettling, and Portman’s performance as the widowed first lady is a tour de force of conflicting emotions brought on by the impossibly ghastly reality bookending that sunny day in Dallas. Read full review
75
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallDec 19, 2016
Anchored by Natalie Portman's uncanny impersonation — wispy voice, aristocratic posture — Jackie fascinates and frustrates, sometimes at once. We can't be certain any of her actions here are true. Some don't seem likely. Read full review
75
Philadelphia InquirerSteven ReaDec 15, 2016
It is a fever dream of a movie, tracking its subject as she tries to maintain control, maintain her composure and her sanity, and as she tries — shellshocked, quaking with grief, but also fiercely determined — to shape and secure her husband’s legacy. Read full review
75
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperDec 7, 2016
Portman’s performance carries the day. Read full review
70
TheWrapClaudia PuigDec 1, 2016
He offers glimmers of what lies beneath the near-mythic, elegant exterior, but Larrain’s take is more impressionistic than revelatory, more presumptuous than knowing. Read full review
70
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinDec 1, 2016
Jackie is a hard movie to love, but its brittleness might be its most admirable quality. Read full review
70
We Got This CoveredMatt DonatoSep 19, 2016
Jackie is Natalie Portman's show, and she never wastes an opportunity to dazzle as JFK's glamorous grieving widow. Read full review
67
MTV NewsAmy NicholsonDec 7, 2016
Pablo Larraín's Jackie is an elegy to two slandered traits: self-consciousness and superficiality. Read full review
63
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliDec 17, 2016
The title character never emerges from the iconic shell she inhabits to become a fully fleshed-out individual and the filmmakers are perhaps too reverential to make her seem real. Like Camelot, she’s a mythic figure and Jackie doesn’t do enough to humanize her. Read full review
63
RogerEbert.comMatt Zoller SeitzDec 2, 2016
There are two movies in Jackie, Pablo Larraín's film about Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman) immediately before, during and after the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy. One of these movies is just OK. The other is exceptional. The first one keeps undermining the second. Read full review
60
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternDec 1, 2016
At the center of this swirl of events, poignant recollections and utter pandemonium, Ms. Portman’s Jackie is a mesmerizing presence. Read full review
60
TimeStephanie ZacharekDec 1, 2016
Where’s the line between a sensitive work of imagination and an invasion of real-life grief in the service of arty filmmaking? There’s a lot of clever technique in Jackie, like its canny, razor-precise editing. But there’s also something arch and distant about the picture. Read full review
60
SlateDana StevensDec 1, 2016
Through two viewings of Jackie, I was never able to pin down whether it was Portman’s performance or Larraín’s way of framing it that left me emotionally shut out. Read full review
58
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerDec 2, 2016
This meta-biopic is more about Jackie Kennedy as perceived in the popular imagination than it is about the woman herself. And what Larraín has to offer on this score is not terribly enlightening. Read full review
50
New York PostKyle SmithDec 1, 2016
Clipped, controlled and composed, Jackie Kennedy was a woman of her times, but since composure doesn’t win you Oscar nominations, Natalie Portman opts to play the part with a sort of emotional incontinence. Read full review
50
The New YorkerAnthony LaneNov 28, 2016
I happen to find the result intrusive, presumptuous, and often absurd, but, for anyone who thinks that all formality is a front, and that the only point of a façade is that it should crack, Jackie delivers a gratifying thrill. Read full review
50
Slant MagazineChristopher GrayNov 28, 2016
Pablo Larraín's film bluntly hammers home the notion that history is framed by perception rather than reality. Read full review
25
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleDec 7, 2016
It is a mess of a film, botched but also misconceived, with a central performance by Natalie Portman that evokes nothing about Jackie Kennedy, beyond the stylish clothes and the secret smoking. Read full review
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