Winner of the Platform Prize at the Toronto Film Festival, director Pablo Larraín's first English-language film is a bolt from the blue, a fugue-like study of Jackie Kennedy, brilliantly acted by Natalie Portman, the odds-on favorite for this year's Best Actress Oscar. Dramatizing events from just before, during, and after JFK's assassination, this carefully reconstructed, beautifully visualized film is grounded in Jackie's interaction with her children, her social secretary (Greta Gerwig), LBJ's special assistant Jack Valenti (Max Casella), her brother-in-law Bobby (Peter Sarsgaard), a priest (John Hurt), a journalist (Billy Crudup), and others. In this emotionally urgent film, from a Venice Film Festival prize-winning script by Noah Oppenheim, we feel not only Jackie's tragic solitude but also her precise awareness that every move she makes carries historical ramifications.