Priscilla premiered at the 80th Venice International Film Festival on September 4, 2023, where Spaeny won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress.

Elvis quickly shows interest in Priscilla, and they start dating casually, despite her parents' concerns about their age difference and his celebrity status.

In 1963, professing his love, Elvis asks her parents if Priscilla can live with his father, Vernon, and stepmother, Dee, in Memphis and attend a private Catholic girls' school.

In February 1968, Priscilla gives birth to their daughter, Lisa Marie, as Elvis is preparing for his NBC 1968 comeback special.

While visiting Elvis in his hotel room after a performance in 1973, Priscilla sees him in a mild haze of drug abuse.

I was supposed to start this big Edith Wharton project that was gonna take five months to shoot and felt really daunting.

[8] In emails exchanged with Coppola on September 2, 2022, and later obtained by Variety, Lisa Marie Presley, who died in January 2023, criticised the film's script for its portrayal of her father.

The website's consensus reads: "With Cailee Spaeny's performance in the title role leading the way, Priscilla sees Sofia Coppola taking a tender yet clear-eyed look at the often toxic blend created by mixing first love and fame.

"[33] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 79 out of 100, based on 59 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.

[28] Positive reviews praised the casting of Spaeny and Elordi, with some commenting that the actors highlight the vast power disparity between Priscilla and Elvis.

[35][36][37] Ben Kenigsberg of The New York Times described Spaeny’s performance as "sensitive" and "protean,"[36] while Marlow Stern of Rolling Stone wrote, "Spaeny, who is 25 but makes for a convincing teenager, is an absolute marvel, nailing Priscilla's complicated mélange of emotions — the wide-eyed wonderment and youthful desire, the apprehension and fear — while Elordi’s Elvis feels more grounded in reality than Austin Butler's pouty hip-shaker.

[39][36][37] Stern added, "You couldn’t ask for a better person to handle this material than Coppola, who's no stranger to depicting young female protagonists and the powerful men who enjoy keeping them locked in gilded cages, whether it be the Park Hyatt Tokyo, the Chateau Marmont, the Palace of Versailles or Graceland.

[38] Alison Willmore of Vulture wrote, "The marvel of Priscilla is in its dual awareness, how it’s able to immerse us in the bubble-bath-balmy perspective of a teenager experiencing an astonishing bout of wish fulfillment and, at the same time, always allow us to appreciate how disturbing what’s happening actually is.

"[39] Willmore’s review noted, "Priscilla is a teenage fantasy and wouldn’t work without acknowledging the headiness of being romanced by the most famous man in the country, though it’s telling that the film feels thinner and more rushed as its main character tires of her husband’s acting out and compartmentalizing of her within his life and realizes she can push back".

[39] In his review for The New Yorker, Anthony Lane wrote, "To point out that Priscilla is superficial, even more so than Coppola’s other films, is no derogation, because surfaces are her subject.

She examines the skin of the observable world without presuming to seek the flesh beneath, and this latest work is an agglomeration of things—purchases, ornaments, and textures.

Closeups tell the tale: bare toes, at the start, sinking deep into the nap of a carpet; false eyelashes and china knickknacks; a single pill (the first of many) that Elvis lays on Priscilla’s palm, as if it were a Communion wafer; and a mini-sphinx, gilded and ridiculous, that we glimpse as she eventually flees from Graceland.

"[35] Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times reviewed the film positively, writing, "There is much more to Priscilla Presley's story left untold here: motherhood (Lisa Marie appears briefly here, at different ages), her own infidelity, her future romances, her friendship with Elvis until his death in 1977, her film career, The Naked Gun movies...But with piercing matter-of-factness, Coppola ends this movie, her strongest in more than a decade, at just the right moment: when a dream finally dies, and the thrill is well and truly gone.

[40] Commenting on Priscilla and Luhrmann's film, Lane said, "We need both movies, I would argue: last year’s frenzied act of worship and now this irreverent response, all the more potent for being so still and small.