Jackie (2016)

Jackie is an intimate, elegiac portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy (Natalie Portman) in the week after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The film unfolds largely through Jackie’s perspective — including a key interview she grants at her Hyannis Port home — and follows her as she steadies her children, coordinates her husband’s funeral, vacates the White House she restored, and struggles to shape how history will remember John F. Kennedy and the “Camelot” she helped create. Watching Jackie, you’ll experience a quiet, intense meditation on grief, image, and power. The movie is less a chronological retelling of events than a close study of a woman managing unimaginable loss while fiercely controlling the public narrative around her husband’s legacy. Natalie Portman’s performance anchors the film with restrained, haunting dignity; supporting performances (including Caspar Phillipson as JFK and Peter Sarsgaard as Robert Kennedy) add emotional and political context to Jackie’s turmoil. Visually and emotionally the film feels formal and precise: period detail and carefully composed scenes reinforce Jackie’s need for order amid chaos, and the pace lets the weight of each decision and memory register. Expect to be moved and unsettled — this is a contemplative drama about private sorrow played out on the public stage, and about the ways one grief-stricken woman shapes a nation’s memory.

Actors: Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig

Director: Pablo Larraín

Runtime: 100 min

Genres: Biography, Drama

6.0 /10 81 /100 6.6 /10 6.9 /10