Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette came to the French court at Versailles an unsophisticated teenager and left, nearly two decades later, a reviled symbol of royal excess bound for the guillotine. The short shrift Sofia Coppola gives the larger political context within which Marie's life unfolded prompted derision when the film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, but her focus is clear from the start: Marie's discontents are trivial in the grand scheme of history, but to her they were everything and the movie is about her. Vienna, 1770: The arranged marriage of pretty teenage princess Maria Antonia Josefa Johanna von Habsburg-Lothringen (Kirsten Dunst), daughter of Empress...