Critics reviews

The saving grace is that the film offers no unpicking of the subject’s psyche, no embellishments beyond the record. The record is the point. The mode is archive-only, shards of TV news mosaicked in the style of Asif Kapadia’s collage biographies Senna and Amy.

The Princess is a slick, compulsive round-up of all the things you already know about Princess Diana. Made without talking heads, retrospective commentary or even particularly niche archive footage, it is a fast-paced ride from her engagement to Prince Charles through to her untimely death...

Perhaps the goal is to celebrate the singularity of the woman whose privacy was invaded beyond belief – but the resulting documentary feels awfully hypocritical instead.

The miracle of The Princess is that, despite so much of the material being familiar, it somehow manages to avoid redundancy. Working with no voiceover, no captions and no contemporary talking heads, the director cuts together archival footage into an impressively seamless whole.

Like Asif Kapadia’s portraits of Amy Winehouse and Ayrton Senna, The Princess is less interested in offering juicy scoops than in deftly editing archive footage to reveal truths hiding in plain sight.

This documentary is more satisfying than Pablo Larraín’s overheated and essentially credulous fiction-fantasy Spencer, amusingly acted by Kristen Stewart...

Presenting its information with grace and creative flair, Perkins does well to hold the audience’s attention, without the hand-holding of narration or talking head interview sections, perfectly editing the piece with a frenetic energy that gives life to an otherwise studious piece of cinema.

A sense of the era, when paparazzi were particularly hungry and the monarchy was losing its mojo, is viscerally evoked with neither nostalgia nor scorn.

Austere as it may be, The Princess is highly directed, skilfully edited. All selection is thesis-driven, and the film does occasionally indulge in over-symbolic imagery... Yet, for such a familiar story, The Princess is in its way quite the revelation, not so much of Diana herself but of the way we were then, and where we are now.

The Princess turns her [Diana's] tumultuous life into a found-footage horror movie. Like other films of this ilk – Amy, Senna, LA 92 – it eschews talking-head interviews and analysis in favour of judiciously edited in-the-moment footage. But rather that striving to provide an intimate portrait of its subject... director Ed Perkins keeps us forever at one step removed...

Combining news footage, interviews, blustering commentators and vox pops, the film serves as an accusatory finger pointed at public appetites and the press that fed them, and a cautionary tale.

The Princess ultimately eschews speculation surrounding the princess’s tragic demise, but it provides a riveting, if unavoidably voyeuristic, front-row seat on the claustrophobia in being a box office princess plunged into fame’s most fiery furnace. In the process, we’re reminded that behind the headlines lay a human being.