Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup, John Hurt, Richard E. Grant, Caspar Phillipson, Beth Grant, John Carroll Lynch, Max Casella, Sara Verhagen, Hélène Kuhn, Deborah Findlay, Corey Johnson, Aidan O'Hare, Ralph Brown, David Caves, Penny Downie, Georgie Glen, Julie Judd
Curator Review
Verdict
A formally elegant, emotionally controlled character study that turns a national tragedy into an intimate portrait of grief, image-making, and political theater. Natalie Portman’s performance, Mica Levi’s score, and Pablo Larraín’s fractured, memory-like style make it one of the more distinctive prestige dramas of the 2010s.
Best for
Viewers who like prestige dramas with a strong central performance
Fans of historical films that focus on private emotion over broad biography
People drawn to stylish, unconventional filmmaking and expressive sound design
Audiences interested in grief, legacy, and the construction of public myth
Skip if
You want a straightforward, comprehensive historical account
You prefer fast-paced plotting or conventional biopic structure
You dislike emotionally restrained films that are more impressionistic than explanatory
You are looking for a feel-good or uplifting historical drama
Overview
Jackie is less a presidential-history movie than a study of how a person performs dignity while collapsing inside. Pablo Larraín keeps the film close, unstable, and haunted, using memory and ritual to show grief as something staged for the public and endured in private.
Worth noting
Natalie Portman gives the film its spine: precise, brittle, and deeply wounded. The performance never feels merely imitative; it becomes a portrait of a woman trying to control the story of her life while history is already hardening into legend.
Bottom line
What lingers most is the film’s atmosphere: the wintry palette, the uneasy edits, and Mica Levi’s piercing score. It can feel emotionally distant by design, but that distance is part of the point, making the moments of vulnerability hit with real force.
Top Letterboxd reviews
guilherme (4.5★) · 3747 likes
end-credits have no music: a missed opportunity to play national anthem by lana del rey
cinéfila... 🕯️ (4.5★) · 2572 likes
jackie looking in the mirror, crying and wiping the blood off her face is one of the most heartbreaking, superbly acted and unforgettable scenes of 2016
davidehrlich (4.5★) · 2150 likes
this is monumental. like Under the Skin and Marie Antoinette swirled together in a kaleidoscope of American history. such a dense tapestry of ideas and emotions, all of which fit into the scale of a single woman enduring the worst week of her life. so smart on the balance between life and legacy, between being and performance, between grief and guilt... not only the first Larraín that i've loved, but the first time i — an american jew for whom the kennedys have always felt like royalty from another country — feel as though i've understand their myth in any real way.
what a movie.
issy 🥝 (5★) · 1703 likes
it’s so funny to me that the guy who plays jfk looks so much like jfk because you know he’s been told he looks like jfk a million times before so you know he’s been waiting his whole life to become an actor and play jfk in his own big blockbuster probably steven spielberg directed jfk movie and he finally gets to hollywood and his dream is so close he could almost touch it and instead what he gets is to play jfk for a total of about 8 minutes in a film completely about jackie
Anya Bo 🌹 (5★) · 1347 likes
WHAT A WOMAN!!!
natalie portman's performance was fucking majestic, i love emma stone and i'm glad she won best actress but natalie was on screen 95% of jackie and carried the movie all by herself, she deserved that oscar.