| HBO | Release Date: August 13, 2022 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
16
Mixed:
5
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
RogerEbert.comAug 12, 2022
I was blown away by the film’s use of mostly archival news footage after its premiere at Sundance earlier this year. Upon a second watch I found it even more compelling the way Perkins, and editors Jinx Godfrey and Daniel Lapira, expertly deploy this footage to tell not a biography of ‘The People’s Princess,’ but rather of the way the media shaped the perception of her public life.
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Aug 12, 2022
It’s a startlingly intimate experience, carrying the viewer from Diana’s engagement to the Prince of Wales in 1981 to her death in 1997, and Perkins largely focuses on Diana’s reactions to various circumstances. It’s easy to see her unhappiness, even when she’s putting on a happy face.
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Aug 13, 2022
The amount of new information in "The Princess" will likely depend on one's personal Royals-related media consumption, but the packaging of this stark and intimate documentary -- marking the 25th anniversary of Princess Diana's death -- serves as a sobering reminder of how the press hounded her from the moment of her engagement until her tragic death.
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The GuardianJun 29, 2022
It is captivating and agonising all over again to see how dazzling Diana was, how simple and spontaneous she was compared with both the stuffy royals but also the secular celebrity class – how she instinctively knew to work with the press when it was still essentially sympathetic, but how panicky and dysfunctional she became when this same press became boorish and predatory.
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Jan 28, 2022
A perfectly timed, compulsively watchable once-over-lightly documentary. ... After all [the recent] dramatic treatments, it’s galvanizing to see the real story laid out exactly as it happened — or, more precisely, as it happened and as it was presented to the public, those being, quite often, two very different things.
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Aug 12, 2022
More than anything, The Princess is a documentary that makes you think about its editing choices. There’s a curious lack of clarity or transparency around many of the unidentified voices (from broadcasters, presumably) that can be heard speaking over the assembled images and you’re left to wonder if this commentary originally accompanied said footage or if Perkins, the director, is mixing and matching.
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Aug 12, 2022
There’s no narrator, no interviews, no dramatic re-creations of events—simply an admittedly well-edited but ultimately unenlightening mash-up of archival footage, person-on-the-street interviews from the time, snippets from chat shows and audio and video clips of various newscasters and pundits. We’re left wondering: What. Is. The. Point.
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