Diane

DIANE is writer/director Kent Jones’ (HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT) textured, spiritual and highly personal feature debut. Executive produced by Martin Scorsese and starring veteran actress Mary Kay Place (BEING JOHN MALKOVICH; THE BIG CHILL), who gives a career-defining performance opposite a remarkable cast that includes Jake Lacy (OBVIOUS CHILD; CAROL) and Estelle Parsons (BONNIE AND CLYDE; RACHEL, RACHEL), DIANE premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival, where it won Best Narrative Feature, Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography, and went on to play at the 2018 Locarno Film Festival and the 2019 Palm Springs International Film Festival.

For Diane (Place), everyone else comes first. Generous but with little patience for self-pity, she spends her days checking in on sick friends, volunteering at her local soup kitchen, and trying valiantly to save her troubled, drug-addicted adult son (Lacy) from himself. But beneath her relentless routine of self-sacrifice, Diane is fighting a desperate internal battle, haunted by a past she can’t forget and which threatens to tear her increasingly chaotic world apart. Built around an extraordinary, fearless performance from Place, Kent Jones’ narrative debut is a profound, beautifully human portrait of a woman rifling through the wreckage of her life in search of redemption.

“Mary Kay Place is superb as a regretful boomer who has grown older, but maybe no wiser, in the haunting first dramatic feature from Kent Jones. It’s a tender, wrenching, and beautifully made movie… DIANE has a marvelous atmosphere of New England melancholy, with eerie glass-harmonica music and images of thick bare foliage, often shot from a driver’s-seat-eye-view, that are suffused with a luminous but lonely twilight glow… it’s intensely enjoyable and alive.” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

“The cast imbues each scene with a gentle vibrancy… the film acquires the hallucinatory feeling of life itself. Jones’ fiction debut embraces the disconnect between the modesty of its size and the infinitude of its scale… it’s a pinhole portrait of life on Earth; a non-judgmental story about trying to reconcile meaning with meaningless before the well runs dry and it rains again.” – David Ehrlich, Indiewire

“Raw, real and quietly affecting… what a pleasure it is to see an undersung treasure of the American acting profession given a leading role she can fully inhabit. That's the case with the wonderful Mary Kay Place as the title character in DIANE, breathing backbone, fine-grained sensitivity, layers of subsumed hurt and resilient warmth into a part that in less resourceful hands might simply have melted into the wintry landscape.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter