I won't be the first person, or the last, to observe that pairs of films produced independently but released around the same time often have uncannily similar themes. (Think Fight Club and American Beauty; A Bug's Life and Antz; Invincible and Gridiron Gang.) Springing from a cultural current that I can neither locate nor fully apprehend, The Queen and Marie Antoinette are the latest set of movie twins: preoccupied with royalty as poignant anachronism, exploring the apex and dawn of celebrity culture, putting the national character of the British (reserve) and French (hedonism) on ritual display.

I'm not the least bit interested in constitutional monarchy, and to make matters duller, Helen Mirren, as Queen Elizabeth II, wears sensible shoes in place of Kirsten Dunst's far more cinematic Manolo fetishwear. The central conflict in The Queen is, literally, whether Her Majesty Schoolmarm will deign to mention the unseemly death of an ex-princess—but no one in the whole supposedly accurate movie even notices that Mother Teresa has gone tits up. Nevertheless, The Queen's myopia is so complete, the performances so meticulous, that you can't help but start to care about, or pine for, or want to overthrow the British monarchy.

Basically, The Queen is The West Wing populated by stuck-up twits, and in addition to the studiously wooden figurehead (a metaphor that's never seemed so apt), there are a whole crew of politicians and staffers conducting surreptitiously from backstage. Michael Sheen, as Tony Blair, is excellent as the sort of squishy leader celebrity-era democracy is prone to. And the minutiae of public relations have never seemed so stupid—or so fascinating.

annie@thestranger.com