God, I hate all the damned Tory fawning over royalty in America. But there's something in The Queen for the rest of us (thank you, Cherie Blair). Here is a suitably irreverent take on the film, from Peter Bradshaw in the UK's The Guardian (Charles Spencer's eulogy for his sister follows the review below):

The film is a sharp reminder that the Queen has doggedly survived, because she has never been required to expend mental energy and political capital in shows of sincerity. She must have been relieved to discover that, unlike her annus horribilis five years previously, when she was forced to pay income tax, it was soon business as usual. It was almost 10 years ago. Before 9/11, before Big Brother, before blogging and Popbitch and MySpace, there was the death of Princess Diana, which was the media-political event to end all media-political events - or so we thought.

No one was more cowed and more disorientated by it all than the Queen, who found that her own rank had been decisively trumped by the nuclear fission of Diana's new global celebrity in death, and by the extravagant emotions of an angry public.

It is this extraordinary time that Stephen Frears' hugely enjoyable film revisits, aided by a cracking impersonation of the Queen by Helen Mirren who, though appreciably taller and younger than our head of state, achieves an eerie transformation with the aid of hairpiece, glasses, frumpier-than-thou couture and brilliant mimicry of the Queen's walk. It is a walk that Frears correctly senses is best seen from the rear, at the head of a bobbing train of corgis. The voice is less outrageously grand than the real thing, a restraint born perhaps of fear of going down the Spitting Image route. "Off" becomes "orf" only once. Under the clothes, there has evidently been some prosthetic augmentation of the royal middle, and indeed the royal behind. Michael Sheen revives his hilarious turn as Tony Blair in the bright springtime of his administration: dark of hair, unlined of face - Sheen is becoming the Jon Culshaw of legitimate acting; his Kenneth Williams on BBC4 was a treat, and his David Frost is a white-hot ticket at London's Donmar theatre.

The best moments of the film are probably the opening scenes, before the great crash, and also the final autumnal encounter between Blair and the Queen after the cataclysm has died down - when the Queen is not at bay, when she is extrovert, droll, forthright and very, very good at putting people not at their ease.

It's very funny when Blair, our twitchy new PM, is ushered into the palace for his first weekly meeting, and Mirren's Queen meets him with the unreadable smile of a chess grandmaster, facing a nervous tyro. She begins by reminding him that she has worked with 10 prime ministers, beginning with Winston Churchill, "sitting where you are now". As put-downs go, that's like pulling a lever and watching a chandelier fall on your opponent's head.

When the terrible news unfolds, Frears is good at showing New Labour's compulsive eagerness to bully and chivvy the Queen and its skill at shaping events for the administration's own ends: to promote its own identity as the caring moderniser. The film, however, neglects to note how both party and country had already had a dummy-run in converting grief into New Labour politics with the death of the much-loved John Smith - a spasm of public sadness which has become the most utterly forgotten event in modern British history.

While the public mood worsens, the Queen goes to Balmoral with Philip, the Queen Mother and the princes, ostensibly to keep the boys away from the media, but really to retreat, woundedly and angrily, from this mass demonstration of lèse majesté. It is here that a little of the heat goes out of the movie, because the Queen becomes opaque, mentally circling the wagons, and we can't hear everything that she is thinking. Peter Morgan's smart script sensibly does not contrive an agonised, tearful dark night of the soul for her. This is, after all, famously the woman who cried in public only for the decommissioning of the royal yacht Britannia. But Morgan does invent a brilliant anti-Disney encounter on the secluded Highland acres, between a deeply depressed Queen and a magnificent stag that has wandered over from a neighbouring estate. She had been crying, but we see only the back of her head. Crying for whom? Not for Diana, that's for sure. Later, the Queen is shaken into action by seeing the same stag's horribly decapitated carcass, shot by some corporate suit on a hospitality jaunt: an unsubtle, but ferociously unsentimental piece of symbolism.

It's such a shame that the Queen is at bay so much, and displayed so often in terms of brow-furrowed silence and worry. That is probably what she is actually like, and all Helen Mirren's wit and asperity is wishful thinking and dramatic licence. But there were times I felt, that, in art as in life, she was being upstaged by Diana's ghost. How much more revealing, and entertaining, to have had more unfettered dialogue, and the transgressive thrill of hearing her express an opinion, what Mirren's Queen calls "the sheer joy of being partial". I remember Prunella Scales' performance as HMQ in the TV version of Alan Bennett's A Question of Attribution in 1992, and feeling a frisson in seeing an actor presuming to play the living Queen with sympathy and intimacy. More subversive than any latex satire.

Now in 2006, this taboo feeling isn't there, but the film is a sharp reminder that the Queen has doggedly survived, because she has never been required to expend mental energy and political capital in shows of sincerity. She must have been relieved to discover that, unlike her annus horribilis five years previously, when she was forced to pay income tax, it was soon business as usual. No great changes or concessions were ever demanded of her. Now it is President Blair who is in retreat, and all the hopes and idealism of 1997 have crumbled. This is, after all, a period movie that leaves you with a feeling of sadness at how little has changed.

Eulogy to his sister Diana, from Charles Spencer:

I stand before you today the representative of a family in grief, in a country in mourning before a world in shock. We are all united not only in our desire to pay our respects to Diana but rather in our need to do so. For such was her extraordinary appeal that the tens of millions of people taking part in this service all over the world via television and radio who never actually met her, feel that they too lost someone close to them in the early hours of Sunday morning. It is a more remarkable tribute to Diana than I can ever hope to offer her today.

Diana was the very essence of compassion, of duty, of style, of beauty. All over the world she was a symbol of selfless humanity. All over the world, a standard bearer for the rights of the truly downtrodden, a very British girl who transcended nationality. Someone with a natural nobility who was classless and who proved in the last year that she needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic.

Today is our chance to say thank you for the way you brightened our lives, even though God granted you but half a life. We will all feel cheated always that you were taken from us so young and yet we must learn to be grateful that you came along at all. Only now that you are gone do we truly appreciate what we are now without and we want you to know that life without you is very, very difficult.

We have all despaired at our loss over the past week and only the strength of the message you gave us through your years of giving has afforded us the strength to move forward.

There is a temptation to rush to canonise your memory, there is no need to do so. You stand tall enough as a human being of unique qualities not to need to be seen as a saint. Indeed to sanctify your memory would be to miss out on the very core of your being, your wonderfully mischievous sense of humour with a laugh that bent you double.

Your joy for life transmitted where ever you took your smile and the sparkle in those unforgettable eyes. Your boundless energy which you could barely contain.

But your greatest gift was your intuition and it was a gift you used wisely. This is what underpinned all your other wonderful attributes and if we look to analyse what it was about you that had such a wide appeal we find it in your instinctive feel for what was really important in all our lives.

Without your God-given sensitivity we would be immersed in greater ignorance at the anguish of Aids and HIV sufferers, the plight of the homeless, the isolation of lepers, the random destruction of landmines.

Diana explained to me once that it was her innermost feelings of suffering that made it possible for her to connect with her constituency of the rejected.

And here we come to another truth about her. For all the status, the glamour, the applause, Diana remained throughout a very insecure person at heart, almost childlike in her desire to do good for others so she could release herself from deep feelings of unworthiness of which her eating disorders were merely a symptom.

The world sensed this part of her character and cherished her for her vulnerability whilst admiring her for her honesty.

The last time I saw Diana was on July 1, her birthday in London, when typically she was not taking time to celebrate her special day with friends but was guest of honour at a special charity fundraising evening. She sparkled of course, but I would rather cherish the days I spent with her in March when she came to visit me and my children in our home in South Africa. I am proud of the fact apart from when she was on display meeting President Mandela we managed to contrive to stop the ever-present paparazzi from getting a single picture of her - that meant a lot to her.

These were days I will always treasure. It was as if we had been transported back to our childhood when we spent such an enormous amount of time together - the two youngest in the family.

Fundamentally she had not changed at all from the big sister who mothered me as a baby, fought with me at school and endured those long train journeys between our parents' homes with me at weekends.

It is a tribute to her level-headedness and strength that despite the most bizarre-like life imaginable after her childhood, she remained intact, true to herself.

There is no doubt that she was looking for a new direction in her life at this time. She talked endlessly of getting away from England, mainly because of the treatment that she received at the hands of the newspapers. I don't think she ever understood why her genuinely good intentions were sneered at by the media, why there appeared to be a permanent quest on their behalf to bring her down. It is baffling.

My own and only explanation is that genuine goodness is threatening to those at the opposite end of the moral spectrum. It is a point to remember that of all the ironies about Diana, perhaps the greatest was this - a girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting was, in the end, the most hunted person of the modern age.

She would want us today to pledge ourselves to protecting her beloved boys William and Harry from a similar fate and I do this here Diana on your behalf. We will not allow them to suffer the anguish that used regularly to drive you to tearful despair.

And beyond that, on behalf of your mother and sisters, I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition but can sing openly as you planned.

We fully respect the heritage into which they have both been born and will always respect and encourage them in their royal role but we, like you, recognise the need for them to experience as many different aspects of life as possible to arm them spiritually and emotionally for the years ahead. I know you would have expected nothing less from us.

William and Harry, we all cared desperately for you today. We are all chewed up with the sadness at the loss of a woman who was not even our mother. How great your suffering is, we cannot even imagine.

I would like to end by thanking God for the small mercies he has shown us at this dreadful time. For taking Diana at her most beautiful and radiant and when she had joy in her private life. Above all we give thanks for the life of a woman I am so proud to be able to call my sister, the unique, the complex, the extraordinary and irreplaceable Diana whose beauty, both internal and external, will never be extinguished from our minds.