“Yes, Priscilla’s darkly muddy visual palette must be celebrated….not. I felt as if I’d been locked in a realm of relentless gloom — confined like a kind of political prisoner with minimal access to sunlight.

“Director Sofia Coppola and dp Philippe Le Sourd are using oppressive under-lighting, of course, to convey how Priscilla Presley felt during that bizarre confining marriage.

“On one hand this is a respectable aesthetic strategy, but on the other it’s a strategy that punished me, Jeffrey Wells, as I sat there in my AMC auditorium.

“And by the way the under-lighting is evident during Priscilla’s life in Germany with her parents (gloom, gloom) so the visual confinement aesthetic lacks discipline.

“All I know is that Le Sourd’s cinematography made me feel like I was an inmate at Abu Ghraib.”

— response to K. Bowen’s effusive praise for Coppola’s film.