The Queen of Versailles Reviews
Top Critic
Seriously, if this was the American Dream, couldn't we have come up with something better?
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Although it's a guilty pleasure, "The Queen of Versailles" is artful enough that both the prosecution and the defense could invoke it when the peasants cry "Off with their heads!"
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
This rags-to-riches-to-almost-rags-again queen has an endearing knack for looking on the bright side. You find yourself, by the end, wishing her well.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
"The Queen of Versailles" is funny, sad, infuriating, instructive. It's the American Dream inflated to ridiculous extremes, until it bursts.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
More than a social morality tale, this is a character study, with the title well chosen.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
"The Queen of Versailles" ought to be required viewing for anyone who blames the rich for yanking the rug out from under America's economy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
By the end, the movie has pulled off a small miracle: You become absorbed in the lives of these people for who they are and not what they own.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
What I left with was not hatred. I disapprove of the values they represent, but I also find them fascinating and just slightly lovable.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
"The Queen of Versailles" turns out to be a portrait -- appalling, absorbing and improbably affecting -- of how, even within a system seemingly designed to ensure that the rich get richer, sometimes the rich get poorer.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Through a clear lens unclouded by politics or blame, it offers insight into the hazardous American practice of living beyond our means.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
There's more going on here than classist derision, and the filmmaker uses her footage to try to sort out her feelings.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The Queen of Versailles combines the voyeuristic thrills of reality TV with the soul-revealing artistry of great portraiture and the head-shaking revelations of solid investigative reporting.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
"The Queen of Versailles" is beautifully constructed and frequently uproarious.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The paradox of wealth without refinement remains unexamined but emerges as a metaphor for the American Dream itself.
Dig into your popcorn, and get ready for some snide schadenfreude.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The Siegels make the Kardashians and Donald Trump look like tasteful pikers when it comes to egregiously conspicuous consumption, sheer hubris and utter refusal to take responsibility for their actions.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Director Lauren Greenfield finds the pathos in an ultra-wealthy couple who willingly mortgaged their own future.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Director Lauren Greenfield's timing turned out to be extraordinarily fortuitous in its depiction of how the mighty also fall, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The Queen of Versailles is the lucky case of a documentary where life intervenes and deepens the film in completely unexpected ways.
[An] excellent and unexpectedly nuanced documentary...
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
Captures the tone of the times with a clear, surprisingly compassionate eye.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
I feel contempt for my contempt for these people. Whether that's my problem or the film's, I'm not entirely sure, but I'm leaning toward blaming Greenfield.
These are not horrible people, just ones who flung themselves enthusiastically toward the American dream as so many do.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The doc's post-Bush fallout is worth sifting through, even if it's hard to fully care for a pair so incognizant of their own culpability.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
The film hardly feels hastily pasted together: Greenfield filmed long enough to document physical changes in her subjects.
For Greenfield, the Siegels are a brilliant metaphor for everything farkakte about the U.S. economy and the culture that shaped it.
This timely and involving documentary elicits both sympathy and schadenfreude.
Like a Theodore Dreiser novel for our time, infused with the vivid, vulgar spirit of reality TV. It often had the sold-out Eccles Center howling, but also has elements of profound tragedy and allegory.
The Queen of Versailles will prompt loathing not only among the so-called 99 Percent, but among those in the top 1 percent who would like someone more sane to represent them on camera.
