Film
Jackie
Jackie is a 100-minute portrait of grief and composure in extremis. Natalie Portman inhabits the hours after Kennedy's assassination with stunning interiority, moving between devastation and steely duty. It's a film about performance, about how grief becomes history, and about a woman discovering she has no choice but to endure. For anyone drawn to character-driven drama and the private costs of public moments.
Should you watch it?
Watch it if you are drawn to portraits of grief built from fractured memory, where a lead performance carries the film through tight interiors and a restless, uneven sense of time.
Skip it if you want a conventional history lesson or a brisk plot; this is intimate and repetitive, circling the same mourning in a way that can feel deliberately airless.
What it asks of you: Give it a hundred minutes of close-ups, mostly indoors, with long stretches of silence and stares that keep you inside one mood.
Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.
If you liked this
The Crown2016
If Jackie's appeal is watching a woman navigate impossible pressure with grace and strategy, The Crown extends that across decades. Olivia Colman and Claire Foy both deliver the same quiet intensity about duty strangling desire.
But It's a commitment—multiple seasons, 50+ hours. Some find the soap-opera plotting around real people uncomfortable.
Darkest Hour2017
Gary Oldman as Churchill, another leader in their darkest hours, forced to decide how much of themselves to reveal and when. Like Jackie, it's intimate portraiture of someone performing for history while falling apart.
But The pacing is deliberately slow and internal. If you want action or clear narrative momentum, it won't deliver.
Spencer2021
Kristen Stewart as Diana at a breaking point, confined and watched. Another woman in impossible circumstances, another film about how the institution consumes its own. Similar formal elegance and emotional precision.
But It's bleak and repetitive by design. Some find the narrowness of focus suffocating rather than moving.
Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Jackie
The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
Contempt1963
Both films are obsessed with how performance becomes a cage, and how the act of being watched transforms the watcher. Godard is the formal extreme Jackie reaches for emotionally.
Godard's meditation on performance, spectacle, and the gap between public image and private anguish. Brigitte Bardot performs glamour while her marriage collapses. It's about cinema itself as a machine that consumes people.
But It's abstract and formally radical. If you want narrative or emotional clarity, Godard denies you both—the style is the point.
More like this (8)
Hairspray2007
A different era of First Lady-adjacent glamour, but with genuine warmth beneath. Shows how to make 1960s aesthetics feel alive without kitsch. Pure joy where Jackie is ash.
But It's a broad musical comedy. The tonal whiplash from Jackie's severity might feel jarring.
Jackie Brown1997
Pam Grier gives a performance of intelligence and self-possession under pressure. The film is unhurried, character-focused, and genuinely interested in how a woman makes impossible choices.
But It's a crime film first, character study second. The plot moves slowly and the violence, though realistic, might intrude on what you're there for.
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans1927
Silent cinema's greatest meditation on marriage and performance. A woman navigates betrayal and forgiveness with almost no dialogue, communicating everything through movement and expression. Pure cinema, like Jackie.
But It's nearly a century old. The pacing, the intertitles, the emotional register—it's going to feel distant if you're not patient with silent film.
Hidden Figures2016
Set in the same era, another film about intelligent women doing impossible work while white America watches and judges. It has warmth where Jackie is cold, but shares the seriousness and emotional intelligence.
But It's a more conventional narrative with clearer arcs. After Jackie's ambiguity, it might feel like a statement rather than a question.
Phantom Thread2017
Another 2016/17 chamber piece about power dynamics and artistic obsession. Paul Thomas Anderson's film, like Jackie, privileges observation over explanation—you have to work to understand the emotional mathematics.
But It's glacial and baroque. The relationship at its center is perverse. That's the point, but it's a lot of work for a film that doesn't love its characters.
A Serious Man2009
The Coen Brothers' portrait of someone having their life dismantled while the world watches. Different in tone—black comedy rather than tragedy—but the same interest in how people perform under impossible stress.
But It's cryptic and offers almost no catharsis. The ending frustrates many viewers who want answers.
The Death of Stalin2017
Both films use the death of a powerful figure as a lens to examine how institutions perpetuate themselves, and how protocol becomes a way to avoid feeling.
A black-and-white satire about power, succession, and the theatre of state at the moment of a tyrant's death. Witty where Jackie is mournful, but equally precise about how institutions survive grief by consuming it.
But It's in Russian, and it's genuinely funny about atrocity—the tonal registers are unstable. That's intentional, but it jars.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford2007
Both films treat assassination as a hinge point, but they're interested in what happens to the people left afterward—not in the violence itself, but in its aftermath and how it gets told.
A three-hour Western about myth-making and assassination, shot with devastating precision. Like Jackie, it's interested in how historical moments transform into narrative, and in the gap between the person and the legend.
But It's glacially slow and repetitive. Some find the philosophical languor comes at the cost of engagement. It's also extremely long.
People
Cast
Natalie PortmanJackie Kennedy
Peter SarsgaardRobert Kennedy
Greta GerwigNancy Tuckerman
Billy CrudupThe Journalist
John HurtThe Priest
Richard E. GrantBill Walton
Caspar PhillipsonJohn Fitzgerald Kennedy
Beth GrantLady Bird Johnson
John Carroll LynchLyndon B. Johnson
Max CasellaJack Valenti
Sara VerhagenMary Gallagher
Hélène KuhnPam Turnure
Directing
- Hubert EngammareAssistant Director
- Pablo LarraínDirector
- Bénédicte DarblayScript Supervisor
Writing
- Noah OppenheimWriter
Production
- Maria Teresa BacigalupeAccountant
- Jessica KellyCasting
- Lindsay Graham AhanonuCasting
- Mary VernieuCasting
- Mathilde SnodgrassCasting
- Lavonna CupidCasting Associate
- Rebecca DealyCasting Associate
- Jayne HongExecutive Producer
- Josh SternExecutive Producer
- Pete ShilaimonExecutive Producer
- Wei HanExecutive Producer
- Teddy AuLine Producer
- Aaron Glenn HollowayLocation Manager
- Patrick BurnLocation Manager
- Ari HandelProducer
- Benjamin ToussaitProducer
- Darren AronofskyProducer
- Grégoire SorlatProducer
- Juan de Dios LarraínProducer
- Mickey LiddellProducer
- Pascal CaucheteuxProducer
- Scott FranklinProducer
- Laetitia DomProduction Coordinator
- May TamProduction Coordinator
- Frances A. CheeverProduction Manager
Recommended by
W., The Special Relationship, Spencer, Neruda, Hyde Park on Hudson, The Kennedys, The Good Shepherd, Rhubarb, Albatross