Marie Antoinette

Writer-director Sofia Coppola, working from the biography by historian Antonia Fraser, traces the life of France’s last, doomed queen (Kirsten Dunst) from her teenage marriage to the future King Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman) to the boiling cauldron of the French Revolution. Coppola uses a late-20th century soundtrack (Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure, Bow Wow Wow and others) to emphasize her cheeky concept of Marie Antoinette as a teenage naif whom any Lindsay Lohan fan can relate to: a vallée girl hanging around the palace at Versailles in panniers and powdered wigs, dishing on the dorks and squealing over the latest shoes. Coppola’s approach doesn’t humanize the past, it trivializes it, and subtleties of history and psychology are glossed over in deference to the movie’s teeny-bopper sensibility.