For most Britons the week between August 31st and September 6th 1997 was one of the strangest they are ever likely to live through. It was as if normality had decided to get on a plane, head for Vegas and get out of its head for seven days. From the first vague radio reports in the middle of the night of a Paris car crash in which the Princess of Wales had been hurt, to the wall-to-wall media coverage of her life and death, to the rumours that pursuing paparazzi might have caused the crash, and finally to the unexpected and breath-taking tirade against the royal family at Diana's funeral by her brother, Charles Spencer, Britain found itself walking around in a spontaneous and collective daze, wondering what had happened to a woman that most believed they knew intimately thanks to several years of almost continuous celebrity magazine coverage. After a few days they were starting to wonder what had happened to another woman – one they thought they knew well but whose motives they were beginning to question.

'The Queen', directed by Stephen Frears (The Grifters, Dangerous Liaisons, My Beautiful Laundrette), is a study of how two worlds collided during that week - the formality and protocol of the British royal family, and the slickness of the recently-elected Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) and his media-savvy spinmeister, Alistair Campbell (Mark Bazeley). While the House of Windsor were sitting tight at their holiday retreat in Scotland, steadfastly remaining invisible to the nation, Blair had already managed to get his face onto every TV screen and newspaper front page, dubbing her ‘The People’s Princess’.

The politicking between Blair and the Queen (Helen Mirren) is played out thanks to some meticulous research, a little artistic licence, an acclaimed script from Peter Morgan and some blisteringly accurate performances. Mirren has already won the best actress award at the Venice Film Festival and is hotly tipped for both a Golden Globe and an Oscar for her portrayal of a much-loved monarch who is rapidly losing the respect of her people and facing what might be the biggest crisis of her reign.

In 1966 Fred Zinneman made a film about a clash between a monarch and a politician - 'A Man For All Seasons'. That film oozes quality, from the casting to the acting to the writing to the cinematography to the direction. Forty years later Stephen Frears has repeated the exercise featuring a descendant of one of the two protagonists in Zinneman's historical masterpiece. 'The Queen' is a fascinating look behind the scenes during one of the most extraordinary weeks in British living memory. To be sure, there's a measure of artistic licence here, as there always will be in a movie, but meticulous research and interviews with people involved have, along with some incredible performances, produced a screenplay which I found impossible to dismiss as a mere dramatisation. Centuries of protocol and tradition come head-to-head with brash modernism in this exceptional film. The reasoning behind the reticence of the Royals to leave their holiday retreat in Scotland and return to London is patiently explained at the same time as the public clamour for them to do so slowly builds to a point where they can no longer resist it without doing serious harm to the institution of the monarchy. A handful of poignant moments will have you reaching for the tissues as in one scene the Queen is revealed as being as human as the rest of us, and in another the British public show that they can be more forgiving than the press were prepared to believe they could be. Everyone involved in this production should be immensely proud of having created a superlative film that stands head and shoulders above the majority of mainstream Hollywood output.