Kristen Stewart is incredible and she’s been turning in singular performances since long before she made her movies with Assayas and every day should be her day in the sun. Unsurprisingly, she is doing great stuff here. On top of that, Jonny Greenwood’s score is titanic and Claire Mathon’s cinematography is lush beyond words. 

But Steven Knight’s script… is the weak link? If you showed me an outline for this movie and told me Pablo Larrain and Kristen Stewart were teaming up for a Diana biopic I would have howled at the moon until you told me to shut up. But the scene work is clunky! And all of the dialogue is so on the nose I felt like someone was beating me over the head with a mallet! It’s criminal that the script can’t match the specifics of Stewart’s performance because she’s fucking doing it.

[48 hour update: bumping this up a half star because the good things have been dancing around in my brain since I got over my frustrations. I’ll revisit in a couple months.]