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“Blonde” abuses and exploits Marilyn Monroe all over again, the way so many men did over the cultural icon’s tragic, too-short life. Maybe that’s the point, but it creates a maddening paradox: condemning the cruelty the superstar endured until her death at 36 while also reveling in it.

And yet writer/director Andrew Dominik ’s film, based on the fictional novel by Joyce Carol Oates , remains technically impeccable throughout, even though it feels like an overlong odyssey at nearly three hours. The craftsmanship on display presents another conundrum: “Blonde” is riveting, even mesmerizing, but eventually you’ll want to turn your eyes away as this lurid display becomes just too much. My personal breaking point was a POV shot from inside Marilyn’s vagina as she was having a forced abortion performed on her. A lengthy, extreme close-up of a drugged-up Monroe fellating President Kennedy while he’s on the phone in a hotel room also feels gratuitous and is probably why the film has earned a rare NC-17 rating.

Did any of this really happen? Maybe. Maybe not. What you have to understand from the start is that “Blonde” is an exploration of the idea of Marilyn Monroe. It’s as much a biopic of the film star as “ Elvis ” is a biopic of Elvis Presley . It touches on a series of actual, factual events as a road map, from her movies to her marriages. But ultimately, it’s a fantasia of fame, which increasingly becomes a hellscape. That’s more exciting than the typical biography that plays the greatest hits of a celebrity’s life in formulaic fashion, and “Blonde” is consistently inventive as it toys with both tone and form. By the end, though, this approach feels overwhelming and even a little dreary.  

As Marilyn Monroe—or her real name of Norma Jeane, as she’s mostly called in the film— Ana de Armas is asked to cry. A lot. Sometimes it’s a light tear or two as she draws from her traumatic childhood for an acting class exercise. Usually, it’s heaving sobs as the cumulative weight of mental illness and addiction takes its toll. When she’s not crying, she’s naked. Frequently, she’s both, as well as bloody. And in nearly every situation, she’s either a pawn or a victim, a fragile angel searching for a father figure to love and protect her.

Certainly, some of this is accurate—the way Hollywood power brokers regarded her as a pretty face and a great ass when she wanted them to consider her a serious actress and love her for her soul. De Armas gives it her all in every moment; she’s so captivating, so startling, that you long for the part to provide her the opportunity to show more of Marilyn’s depth, to dig deeper than the familiar cliches. She’s doing the breathy, girlish voice, but not perfectly—traces of her Cuban accent are unmistakable—and that’s OK given the film’s unorthodox approach. More importantly, she captures Monroe’s spirit, and often looks uncannily like her. Following standout supporting turns in movies like “ Knives Out ” and “ No Time to Die ,” as well as the delicious trash that was “ Deep Water ,” here is finally the meaty, leading role that showcases all she can do. She’s so good that she makes you wish the role rose to her level.

“Blonde” is a fever dream from the very start. Working with cinematographer Chayse Irivn (“ BlacKkKlansman ,” Beyonce’s “Lemonade”) and frequent musical collaborators Nick Cave and Warren Ellis , Dominik sets the scene with impressionistic wisps of sight and sound. Shadows and ethereal snippets of score mix with ash from a fire in the Hollywood hills blowing through the night sky. The phone rings loudly. The camera swish pans to the left. We’re immediately on edge. It’s Los Angeles 1933, and young Norma Jeane (a poised and heartbreaking Lily Fisher ) is enduring horrific physical and emotional abuse from her volatile and hyperverbal mother (a haunting Julianne Nicholson , always great).

Dominik (“ The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford ”) proclaims his restless style from the beginning—jumping around not just in time, but from high-contrast black and white to rich Technicolor and in between various aspect ratios. Sometimes, the color palette is faded, as if we’re looking at Marilyn in a long-ago photograph. Sometimes, the sound design is muted—as in her classic performance of “I Wanna Be Loved by You” from “ Some Like It Hot ”—to indicate the confusion of her inner state. It’s all thrilling for a while, and de Armas strikes a magnetic figure as the young Marilyn in both her vulnerability and her ambition.

An imagined three-way romance with Charlie Chaplin Jr. ( Xavier Samuel ) and Edward G. Robinson Jr. ( Evan Williams ) brings a welcome vibe of fun and frolic; they’re both beautiful and flirtatious, smoldering and seductive. And it becomes clear as the movie progresses that they’re the only men who loved her for her true self as Norma Jeane while also appreciating the beguiling artifice of Marilyn. This relationship also teaches Norma Jeane to lose herself in the mirror in order to find the famous persona she’ll present to the outside world: “There she is, your magic friend,” “Cass” Chaplin purrs as he caresses her from behind. And Dominik will return to that image of Norma Jeane beseeching her own reflection as a means of conjuring strength. The character’s stark duality gives de Armas plenty of room to show off her impressive range and precise technique.

But too much of “Blonde” is about men chewing Marilyn up and spitting her back out. A studio executive known only as “Mr. Z”—presumably as in Zanuck—rapes her when she visits his office about a part. New York Yankees legend Joe DiMaggio ( Bobby Cannavale ) seems like a decent and tender husband until he turns controlling and violent. Her next husband, playwright Arthur Miller (an understated Adrien Brody ), is patient and kind yet emotionally detached—but by the time Marilyn is married to him, anxiety, booze and pills have wrecked her so significantly that no one could have helped.

She calls these men “Daddy” in the hope that they’ll function in place of the father she never knew but desperately craved, but in the end, everyone lets her down. And “Blonde” does, too, as it strands de Armas in a third-act sea of hysteria. As for the film’s many graphic moments—including one from the perspective of an airplane toilet, as if Marilyn is puking up pills and champagne directly on us—one wonders what the point is. Merely to shock? To show the extent to which the Hollywood machinery commodified her? That’s nothing new.

“Blonde” is actually more powerful in its gentler interludes—when Marilyn and Arthur Miller are teasingly chasing each other on the beach, for example, hugging and kissing in the golden, shimmering sunlight. “Am I your good girl, Daddy?” she asks him sweetly, seeking his approval. But of course, she can’t be happy here, either. All her joyous times are tinged with sadness because we know how this story ends.

More often, Dominik seems interested in scenes like the garish slow-motion of the “Some Like It Hot” premiere, where hordes of ravenous men line the sidewalks for Marilyn’s arrival, frantically chanting her name, their eyes and mouths distorted to giant, frightening effect as if they wish to devour her whole. He similarly lingers in his depiction of the famous subway grate moment from “The Seven Year Itch,” with Marilyn’s ivory halter dress billowing up around her as she giggles and smiles for the crowds and cameras. (The costume design from Jennifer Johnson is spectacularly on-point throughout, from her famous gowns to simple sweaters and capri pants.) We see it in black-and-white and color, in slow-motion and regular speed, from every imaginable angle, over and over again.

After a while, it becomes so repetitive that this iconic, pop culture moment grows numbing, and we grow weary of the spectacle. Maybe that’s Dominik’s point after all. But we shouldn’t be.

In limited theatrical release tomorrow. On Netflix on September 23rd.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

Blonde (2022)

Rated NC-17 for some sexual content.

166 minutes

Ana de Armas as Norma Jeane

Adrien Brody as The Playwright

Bobby Cannavale as The Ex-Athlete

Garret Dillahunt

Sara Paxton as Miss Flynn

Lucy DeVito

Julianne Nicholson as Gladys

Scoot McNairy

Xavier Samuel as Cass Chaplin

Caspar Phillipson as The President

Evan Williams as Eddy G. Robinson Jr.

Rebecca Wisocky as Yvet

Toby Huss as Whitey

Catherine Dent as Jean

Haley Webb as Brooke

Eden Riegel as Esther

Spencer Garrett as President's Pimp

Tygh Runyan as Father

David Warshofsky as Mr. Z

Lily Fisher as Young Norma Jeane

Michael Masini as Tony Curtis

Chris Lemmon

Ned Bellamy as Doc Fell

Sonny Valicenti as Casting Director

Colleen Foy as Pat

Brian Konowal

Tatum Shank as Dick Tracy

Andrew Thacher as Jiggs

Dominic Leeder as Bugs Bunny

Lidia Sabljic as Sweet Sue

Isabel Dresden as Doc Fell's Nurse

Skip Pipo as Dr. Bender

Tyler Bruhn as NYC Acting Student

Ravil Isyanov as Billy Wilder

Tim Ransom as Rudy

Judy Kain as Severe Woman

Time Winters as George Sanders

Rob Brownstein as The Acting Coach

Danielle Jane Darling as L.a. Actor #3

Mia McGovern Zaini as Young Norma Jeane

Rob Nagle as Radio Announcer

Emil Beheshti as Brentwood Doctor

Jeremy Shouldis as Tuxedo #2

Ethan Cohn as Assistant to the Director

Steve Bannos as Brentwood Doctor

Mike Ostroski as The Writer

Danielle Lima as Swimsuit Model

Christopher Kriesa as Joe E. Brown

Eric Matheny as Joseph Cotten

Jerry Hauck as Tuxedo #1

Scott Hislop as Marilyn Dancer

Dieterich Gray as Photographer's Assistant

Kiva Jump as Ward Nurse at Norwalk

Patrick Brennan as Joe

Chris Moss as Dancer

Ryan Vincent as Uncle Clive

Brian Konowal as Pissing Man

• Andrew Dominik

Writer (novel)

• Joyce Carol Oates

Cinematographer

• Chayse Irvin
• Adam Robinson
• Warren Ellis

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Blonde movie reviews: What are the critics saying about Netflix’s Blonde?

By diana nosa | sep 29, 2022.

After months of anticipation, Netflix has finally released  Blonde , the stunning biopic about the life of the late Marilyn Monroe.

From Kim Kardashian wearing Monroe’s infamous John F. Kennedy birthday dress to this year marking the 60th anniversary of the icon’s heartbreaking death, some believe the 2022 film could not have come at a better time, as it is very important to know all about the legacy of Marilyn Monroe.

However, there are those who believe that the film shouldn’t have been created at all, especially because there are many other ways to honor Monroe’s life other than making a biopic. Nevertheless, the Netflix film is here, and so are the many reviews and ratings of the 2022 film.

Did  Blonde  do Marilyn Monroe justice, or is this film yet another exploitative title that should be tossed into the sea of forgetfulness? Here’s the verdict.

How critics feel about Blonde

As we stated before, there are some who are all for this new biopic and there are those who couldn’t be anymore against it. This could explain why, as of today,  Blonde  is receiving mixed reviews and ratings.

Rohan Naahar of The Indian Express praises director Andrew Dominik’s choice to depict the most traumatizing aspects of Monroe’s life in a way that highlights her humanity as opposed to giving her abusers the spotlight.

"“But this isn’t an exploitative movie,” Naahar states. “The perspective never shifts from Marilyn; the film never leaves her side. In moments that could be perceived as dehumanising, Dominik’s camera trains its focus on Marilyn’s face. He isn’t going to dignify the abuse by showing it on screen; he’s concerned only about what Marilyn is feeling, as he implores viewers to lock eyes with her and stay until the end.”"

Austin Chronicle ‘s Jenny Nulf also felt that  Blonde  did a stellar job at removing the rose-colored glasses we often have when remembering Monroe’s fame, stating:

"“Marilyn Monroe was every American’s fantasy – a desirable beauty with a sublime balance of sex appeal and approachability, a ‘cool girl’ of her time. Blonde seeks to destroy that perfect pinup and topple the pristine myth of Monroe’s celebrity.”"

Though the film was able to do Marilyn Monroe’s trials and tribulations justice without glamorizing her trauma, in many ways, some feel that this feat simply wasn’t enough to overshadow the otherwise “hollow” film.

Screenrant ‘s Mae Abdulbaki gave the film two out of five stars because it failed to show anything other than Marilyn Monroe’s pain and struggles. Like many, Abdulbaki believes that Monroe’s trauma wasn’t why she is noted as a Hollywood legend.

"“And while Blonde is uplifted by a passionate performance by Ana de Armas, it isn’t interested in the life of Norma Jeane Mortensen so much as it is in the pain and suffering she faced,” Abdulbaki expresses. “If anything, Blonde is a tedious, hollow, one-note take on a woman who was so much more than her trauma.”"

In considering both sides, it’s easy to understand why some are withholding from streaming  Blonde . But here’s the bottom line.

Should I stream or skip Blonde?

In our humble opinion, if you’re watching  Blonde  because you wish to be entertained with a new Netflix release , then we believe you should 100% stream the film. Ana de Armas’s performance is extremely captivating and moving. So much so that you may be entranced by the actress at several points in the movie.

The acting and aesthetics of  Blonde  are more than enough to appease your wish to be thoroughly enthralled by the 2022 title. However, we believe being entertained is the only feeling you may receive.

If you are opting to watch  Blonde  because you desire to know more about Marilyn Monroe, mainly about many her awe-inspiring impact on feminism and body positivity, then this is not the film for you.

As the aforementioned reviewers touched on,  Blonde  puts an immense amount of focus on the low points of Monroe’s life. And while Dominik’s choice does serve to remind us that the superstar was a human underneath all the diamonds, it takes away from the important revelation that Marilyn Monroe was a survivor that went on to do many, many great things in spite of her dark past.

Monroe loved giving to those in need. She loved speaking out against injustice ; she loved fighting for other remarkable women, such as Ella Fitzgerald, to have a seat at the Hollywood table. She loved being a conqueror, and, unfortunately,  Blonde  didn’t capture too many of her greatest achievements.

Next. Netflix Blonde cast guide: Who stars in the Marilyn Monroe movie?. dark

Perhaps you’ll have a different opinion on the matter. The only way to find out is to stream  Blonde today on Netflix .

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

The story of American actress Marilyn Monroe, covering her love and professional lives. The story of American actress Marilyn Monroe, covering her love and professional lives. The story of American actress Marilyn Monroe, covering her love and professional lives.

• Andrew Dominik
• Joyce Carol Oates
• Ana de Armas
• Lily Fisher
• Julianne Nicholson
• 1.1K User reviews
• 496 Critic reviews
• 50 Metascore
• 12 wins & 35 nominations total

• Norma Jeane

• Young Norma Jeane

• Norma Jeane's Father

• Deputy Will Bonnie

• Uncle Clive

• Marilyn Singing Voice

• Joe (Photo Shoot Photographer)

• Acting Coach

• Eddy Robinson Jr.

• Cass Chaplin

• Casting Director

• Assistant to Director

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia This film is based on the 2000 novel "Blonde" by Joyce Carol Oates , which is a fictionalized account inspired by the life of Marilyn Monroe , not an actual biography. Oates insisted that the novel is a work of fiction that should not be regarded as a biography. Oates said that she didn't have anything to do with the making of this film, though once in a while, director Andrew Dominik would get in contact with her, and that she was given an almost-final cut in 2020 and she has praised the film ever since. The novel had been previously adapted into a two-part miniseries: Blonde (2001) , starring Poppy Montgomery as Monroe.
• Goofs Marilyn greets the Secret Service agents at her door with: "You were expecting maybe Mother Teresa ?" Mother Teresa had not gained international recognition in 1962. It's highly doubtful Marilyn would have known who she was.

Norma Jeane : Marilyn doesn't exist. When I come out of my dressing room, I'm Norma Jeane. I'm still her when the camera is rolling. Marilyn Monroe only exists on the screen.

• Connections Featured in How Fight Scene Props Are Made for Movies & TV (2022)
• Soundtracks Ev'ry Baby Needs a Da-Da-Daddy Written by Lester Lee and Allan Roberts

User reviews 1.1K

• wisewebwoman
• Sep 29, 2022
• How long is Blonde? Powered by Alexa
• Is this film a biography?
• September 28, 2022 (United States)
• United States
• Official Netflix
• Los Angeles Theatre - 615 S. Broadway, Downtown, Los Angeles, California, USA ("Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" premiere)
• Plan B Entertainment
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $22,000,000 (estimated)

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 47 minutes
• Black and White
• Dolby Digital

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‘Blonde’ Review: Exploiting Marilyn Monroe for Old Times’ Sake

She was an actress of uncommon talent. But once again a director is more interested in examining her body (literally, in this case) than getting inside her mind.

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By Manohla Dargis

Given all the indignities and horrors that Marilyn Monroe endured during her 36 years — her family tragedies, paternal absence, maternal abuse, time in an orphanage, time in foster homes, spells of poverty, unworthy film roles, insults about her intelligence, struggles with mental illness, problems with substance abuse, sexual assault, the slavering attention of insatiable fans — it is a relief that she didn’t have to suffer through the vulgarities of “Blonde,” the latest necrophiliac entertainment to exploit her.

Hollywood has always eaten its own, including its dead. Given that the industry has also always loved making movies about its own machinery, it’s no surprise that it also likes making movies about its victims and martyrs. Three years ago in the biopic “Judy,” Renée Zellweger played Judy Garland near the end of her troubled life. “Blonde” goes for a more comprehensive biopic sweep — it runs nearly three hours — embracing a bleakly familiar trajectory that begins with Monroe’s unhappy childhood, revisits her dazzling yet progressively fraught fame, her depressingly abusive relationships, myriad health issues and catastrophic downward spiral.

After a brief prelude that introduces Marilyn at the height of her fame, the movie rewinds to the sad, lonely little girl named Norma Jeane, with a terrifying, mentally unstable single mother, Gladys (Julianne Nicholson). Childhood is a horror show — Gladys is cold, violent — but Norma Jeane crawls into adulthood (a fine if overwhelmed Ana de Armas). She models for cheesecake magazines, and before long breaks into the film industry, which is another nightmare. Soon after she steps onto a lot, she is raped by a man, here called Mr. Z and seemingly based on Darryl F. Zanuck, the longtime head of 20th Century Fox studio, where Monroe became a star.

“Blonde” is based on the 2000 Joyce Carol Oates hefty (the original hardback is 738 pages) fictionalized account of Monroe’s life. In the novel, Oates draws from the historical record but likewise plays with facts. She cooks up a ménage a trois for Monroe and channels her ostensible thoughts, including during a lurid tryst with an unkind President John F. Kennedy. In the introduction to the book, the critic Elaine Showalter writes that Oates used Monroe as “an emblem of twentieth-century America.” A woman, Showalter later adds without much conviction, “who was much more than a victim.”

The writer-director of “Blonde,” Andrew Dominik, doesn’t seem to have read that part about Monroe. His Norma Jeane — and her glamorous, vexed creation, Marilyn Monroe — is almost nothing more than a victim: As the years pass and even as her fame grows, she is mistreated again and again, even by those who claim to love her. Prey for leering men and a curiosity for smirking women (unlike Monroe, this Marilyn has no women friends), she is aware of her effect on others but also helpless to do, well, anything. With her tremulous smile, she drifts and stumbles through a life that never feels like her own.

All that’s missing from this portrait is, well, everything else, including Monroe’s personality and inner life, her intelligence, her wit and savvy and tenacity; her interest in — and knowledge of — politics; the work that she put in as an actress and the true depth of her professional ambitions. (As Anthony Summers points out in his book “Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe,” she formed her own corporation: Marilyn Monroe Productions, Inc.) Mostly, what’s missing is any sense of what made Monroe more than just another beautiful woman in Hollywood: her genius. Watching “Blonde,” I wondered if Dominik had ever actually watched a Marilyn Monroe film, had seen the transcendent talent, the brilliant comic timing, the phrasing, gestures and grace?

Fictionalized histories play with the truth, hence the hedges that filmmakers stick on movies, that they’re “inspired by” or “based on” the truth. “Blonde” doesn’t announce itself as fiction right off, though it carries the usual mealy-mouthed disclaimer in the credits. But of course this is all about Monroe, one of the most famous women of the 20th century, and it revisits her fame and life — Bobby Cannavale plays a character based on Joe DiMaggio, and Adrien Brody on Arthur Miller — with enough fidelity to suggest that Dominik is working in good faith when he’s simply exploiting her anew.

That the first image of Marilyn in “Blonde” is of her ass makes that clear. The movie opens with a short black-and-white sequence that re-creates the night Monroe filmed the most famous scene in Billy Wilder’s garish 1955 comedy, “The Seven Year Itch,” about a married man lusting after a neighbor played by Monroe. During the film, her character stands on a subway grating and coos as a gust of air twice whooshes up her pleated white dress, exposing her thighs. “The Seven Year Itch” only bares her legs, although apparently the massive crowd that watched the scene while it was being shot saw more.

As camera flash bulbs pop, flooding the screen white, Dominik shows some fleeting images of the crowd and then cuts to Marilyn as her dress billows. Her back is to the camera — the framing of the shot lops off most of her head and legs — and she’s leaning a bit forward, so that her butt is thrust toward the viewer, as if in invitation. Dominik does get around to showing her face, which is beaming as the camera points up toward Marilyn in outward supplication. The high-contrast of the images makes the color black seem bottomless (metaphor alert!) while the white is so bright that it threatens to blot her out.

For the rest of “Blonde,” Dominik keeps peeping up Marilyn’s dress, metaphorically and not, while he tries to make his filmmaking fit his subject: He uses different aspect ratios and switches between color and black-and-white (she made films in both); reproduces some of the most indelible photos of her; and now and again employs some digital wizardry, as when a bed she’s sharing with two lovers during a vigorous romp turns into a waterfall, which happens around the time Marilyn makes “Niagara.” In other words, again and again, Dominik blurs the line between her films and her life.

But by so insistently erasing the divide between these realms, Dominik ends up reducing Marilyn to the very image — the goddess, the sexpot, the pinup, the commodity — that he also seems to be trying to critique. There’s no there there to his Marilyn, just tears and trauma and sex, lots and lots of sex. It’s a baffling take, though particularly when he takes us inside Marilyn’s vagina — twice (!), once in color and once in black-and-white — while she’s having abortions. I’m still not sure if this is meant to represent the point of view of her cervix or fetuses, who also make appearances . It certainly isn’t Marilyn’s.

Dominik is so far up Marilyn Monroe’s vagina in “Blonde” that he can’t see the rest of her. It’s easy to dismiss the movie as arty trash; undoubtedly it’s a missed opportunity. Monroe’s life was tough, but there was more to it than Dominik grasps, the proof of which is in the films she left behind — “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” “How to Marry a Millionaire,” “Some Like It Hot,” “The Misfits” — the whole damn filmography. To judge from “Blonde,” her performances were shaped by her agonies and somehow happened by chance, by fate, or because she’s a mystical, magical sex bomb. That’s grotesque, and it’s wrong. But if Dominik isn’t interested in or capable of understanding that Monroe was indeed more than a victim of the predations of men, it’s because, in this movie, he himself slipped into that wretched role.

Blonde Rated NC-17 for sex, nudity and substance abuse. Running time: 2 hours 46 minutes. Watch on Netflix .

Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic of The Times since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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Blonde Is Garish, Unfair, and No Fun At All

Ana de Armas's screen glories will come. They aren't here.

Not one of the directors who provided the roles that brought out her incandescence, what George Cukor called “her absolutely unerring sense of comedy,” or the others who, in Don’t Bother to Knock and especially in the astounding Niagara found something hard, dark, mean? Not any of the photographers, male and female, who, creating some of the most indelible images of the 20th Century, often spoke of her more as a collaborator than as a camera subject? Not Whitey Snyder, the loyal friend who did her makeup from her first screen test at Twentieth Century Fox in 1946 to her funeral in 1962? Not any of her husbands in any private moment? Not Arthur Miller’s father, who Marilyn called every week even after her divorce from his son? Not one of the moviegoers who, from the time she made her presence felt in cheesecake photos and then in movies right up the moment you are reading with, has never ceased to delight in this singular creature?

I don’t know if it’s possible to create a savior fantasy in which the whole point is that the protagonist is doomed but it’s the hubris of both Dominik, who adapted the novel as well as directed and, in that novel, Oates to position themselves as the ones who are able to get past the fantasies and slanders of the studio moguls and directors and paparazzi and gossip columnists and hangers on and pimps and controlling husbands and see poor Marilyn—sorry, Norma Jeane—for who she was. And what do they see? A woman who spent her life searching for the father she never had, haunted by the abandonment of a mother who went mad.

No kidding. That’s what they’ve come up with.

Blonde, laid out in shifting aspect ratios and film stock, distorted lenses, switching from color to black & white, is a garish expressionistic illustration of what was already in Oates’ novel: claptrap Freudianism, victimization feminism, and the moral shock over the squalidness of Hollywood that, whether it’s being sold via scandal sheets or novels with a literary pedigree, never fails to attract people who want to indulge their own sanctimonious voyeurism. Oates, the most morbid of celebrated American writers, has always filtered her tabloid sensibility through a cold high-Gothic approach that affords her literary cache while fending off charges of sensationalism. It’s a decidedly anti-sensual approach and particularly unsuited to a figure as sensual as Marilyn Monroe—unless your goal is to depict Marilyn as nothing but a victim trafficked by powerful men and then used up by us, the public who, going to her movies, thrilled by her photo shoots, charmed or turned on or just made happy by the fact of her, were little more than her johns.

Blonde proceeds through a flash-card chronology in which Marilyn, played by Ana de Armas, is used or abused by, in turn, her mad mother; the studio system (when she goes for her interview at 20 th Century Fox with Darryl Zanuck he rapes her); the two sexually ambiguous sons of Hollywood stars—Charlie Chaplin, Jr. and Edward G. Robinson, Jr.—who form a throuple with Marilyn while using her for what they can get; her second husband, Joe DiMaggio, played by Bobby Cannavale and referred to in the movie’s mythic terms as “the Ex-Athlete” who regards her movie career as little more than prostitution; her third husband, Arthur Miller (“the Playwright”) played by Adrien Brody, who worries about what being married to a sex symbol does to his intellectual status; and of course the public, never presented as individuals who, by themselves, might act rudely or kindly or starstruck but as a uniformly voracious and threatening mass.

When Oates recreated the famous New York City nighttime location shoot for The Seven Year Itch where Marilyn stood on the subway grating while her dress was blown up around her, she described it like the climactic scene in The Day of the Locust (the touchstone Hollywood novel for people who hate Hollywood), a movie premiere that turns into a riot. As Oates wrote it, it was a human sacrifice in the making. The one person in the crowd who doesn’t want to devour Marilyn, DiMaggio, beats her when she returns to their hotel because he thinks she displayed herself like a whore.

Dominik shoots the scene in much the same way. It’s one of several times in the movie where the crowds turned out to see Marilyn, here overwhelmingly men, are shot in harsh glaring black-and-white, their open screaming mouths distended to appear like maws, like the onlookers in a Weegee photo. The movie tells us that Marilyn is being exploited for the sake of this rabble. But who’s doing the exploiting when Dominik sticks his camera up Marilyn’s dress so that de Armas’s behind fills the screen (giving us a view no one on Lexington Avenue and 52nd St had on that night in 1954)? Who’s doing the exploiting when, in a later scene, Marilyn is summoned to New York to service JFK and, as the President pushes her head down onto his crotch, there is a repeated shot of de Armas, eyes tearing and nearly gagging as her head bobs up and down in the frame?

I’m not doubting that Marilyn was subjected to all kinds of boorish behavior or that JFK treated her as callously as any of his other trophy lays. My argument is not with what Blonde is about—the exploitation of this singular star—but with how it’s about what it’s about. We see Marilyn, having undergone an abortion in order to star in Gentleman Prefer Blondes , saying of the acclaim showered on her at the movie’s premiere, “For this I killed my baby?”, surely a line to confirm every certainty in Samuel Alito’s meager little soul. It’s not that there’s something inherently retrograde about suggesting a woman might regret having an abortion but when we’re given a line like that, or later when Marilyn is expecting Miller’s baby and Dominik introduces a talking fetus—I swear to God—asking if mommy will kill him too, the movie is dealing in the cheapest Operation Rescue tactics.

Blonde has been talked about as if it were going to be Ana de Armas’s breakout role and I wouldn’t trust anybody who’s seen her work before this and not been excited by the prospect of what’s to come. Her sequence in No Time to Die , both when she’s engaging in badinage with Daniel Craig and then joining him to fight off the bad guys, showed a real sense for play. She made everything she did look like a good time, and she suggested that she might be one of those rare movie presences who’s at her sexiest when being funny. Here, her rendition of the breathy Marilyn voice we know from the movies and her physical bearing in the photographs and film sequences that Dominik recreates are often startlingly precise. But there’s no room for her to play beyond those imitations. De Armas has been directed to play Marilyn as if Marilyn were a Marilyn Monroe character. And that is the film’s point. Blonde wants us to believe Marilyn has been swallowed up by the screen persona, leaving nothing behind but gestures and inflections. This Marilyn is a breathless doll who exists solely as a plaything for the powerful.

So you can’t feel insulted for her when a casting director scorns her claim that she’s read Dostoevsky or when Miller thinks she’s been fed a line comparing one of his plays to Chekov (you’d have to be fed a line to make that claim). Dominik, though, seems to think we will be, not seeing his far greater insult. De Armas has some fine moments when Marilyn prepares to speak in auditions, when you feel her summoning the power to make the scene real, and when Marilyn and Miller first meet, she and Brody are allowed an extended scene in which they can connect with each other and communicate the pleasure in this unexpected introduction without any interference from Dominik. But de Armas has been given a thesis to play, not a character. Her screen glories will come. They aren’t here.

Blonde , both movie and book, seem awfully taken by the notion that “Marilyn Monroe” was a creation. Do Oates and Dominik think the movies are meant to be real? And don’t they understand just how real the movies can seem? In one of the greatest films ever made, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo , a detective falls in love with a woman and then, when she dies, tries to remake her in another woman. The detective finds out the woman he loved never really existed in the first place, she was made up to lure him into a plot. And yet he’s real to her. He’s held her in his arms and kissed her. And for us in the audience who have only seen this woman as shadows and light projected on a screen, she’s no less real. Of course, Marilyn Monroe was made up and of course she was real. That’s what art is—the fictive, the created striking a chord in us to produce real emotion. Would Oates think the characters in her novels are less because they’re fictions? And why is Dominik, a movie director, buying into this nonsense?

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Blonde , book and movie, is that neither Oates or Dominik seem to even like Marilyn that much. There is scarcely a mention of a performance in Oates’s novel unmarked by the scorn she pours on how the film was received by the crude public. Marilyn can’t even sneak disguised into a theater to watch The Seven Year Itch without being driven away by a man masturbating a few seats over from her. And in a remarkably revealing interview with Dominik in the current issue of the British film magazine Sight & Sound , the interviewer Christina Newland writes in her intro that Dominik “seems genuinely gobsmacked when I tell him many of my friends and colleagues watch—and enjoy— Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), which he regards, like most of Monroe’s films, as what he calls “cultural artefacts.” A director still early in his career regards the work of, among others, Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder, Henry Hathaway, and John Huston as no more than cultural artefacts? Jump up and down Andy and let us hear ‘em clank together.

Oates’s novel is 738 pages in its current paperback edition. Dominik’s movie is two hours and forty-six minutes. Those respective lengths are not the result of an expansive vision or a gathering cumulative force. They are the result of their creators’ determination, by sheer volume and repetition, to bludgeon the audience into accepting their puny, constricted view of Marilyn Monroe. There isn’t, in a page of Oates’ novel or a moment of Dominik’s film, that contains a laugh, a smile, a grace note. And yet they put forth this grinding grimness in what seems clearly intended to be a feminist statement.

But when you deny a character’s capacity for pleasure and joy; when, her famous fragility notwithstanding, you take away every bit of her ability to make her own decisions; when (as Newland confronted Dominik with) you leave out the facts that Marilyn started her own production company, that she publicly supported Miller when he was being hounded by HUAC, that she used her celebrity to get Ella Fitzgerald a headlining engagement in a Hollywood club when Black singers weren’t given those gigs; when you reduce her talent to nothing more than lewd sex jokes and tawdry exploitation; when you insist that the happiness and pleasure and yes, the love that people have felt for her for seventy years is nothing more than the collective gross appetite of the lumpen; when you put forth that view even though your protagonist is one of the most famous women in the world and the public record is there to refute you; when you reduce someone’s artistry to the machinations of a dumb-bunny sex robot then who is it that’s using Marilyn Monroe to fulfill their fantasies and prejudices and favored shibboleths? Among the many not-very-bright things Dominik says in that Sight & Sound interview, there’s this: “She was the Aphrodite of the 20th century, the American goddess of love. And she killed herself. So what does that mean?” Clearly, for both Dominik and Oates, it means that Marilyn died for our collective sexist sins. I’ll be damned if I accept any vision of Marilyn Monroe from these two, both so eager to perform their own sordid crucifixion.

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Blonde review – Ana de Armas gives her all as Monroe in otherwise incurious film

Glossy horror perpetuates the tradition of portraying the brilliant actor as an infantile, sacrificial sex-lamb on the altar of celebrity

H ere is a horror film about the life of Marilyn Monroe, based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates : a glossily expensive nightmare about the great movie actor as bleating sacrificial sex-lamb on the altar of celebrity. Andrew Dominik’s movie throbs with her radioactive victimhood.

It benefits from a showstopping central performance by Cuban-Spanish actor Ana de Armas, who eerily incarnates the legendary star with a weird little hint of Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby , although it is Marilyn’s impending and repeated childlessness which is shown as the real emanation of evil. Like Polanski’s stricken heroine, she is surrounded by a secretly complicit male priest-caste: a brotherhood of misogyny, exploitation and rape, including doctors, agents, producers, directors, early lovers (the movie amplifies Hollywood-Babylon-type rumours about Charlie Chaplin Jr and Edward G Robinson Jr into a full-tilt bisexual threesome), two husbands – Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller – and one president, JFK.

It has the ring of truth, up to a point. As for Norma Jeane, as she originally was, the film shows her as the peroxide prisoner of the character “Marilyn Monroe” which she created, or had created for her by the studio, and regards her as a fascinating but essentially infantile victim of an absent father obsession – a neurotic byproduct of neglect at the hands of an unstable and depressed single mom. Julianne Nicholson gives a very good performance as Marilyn’s unhappy mother Gladys (although there’s nothing about her job as an assistant editor at Consolidated Film Industries); Bobby Cannavale is DiMaggio, the retired ball player not understanding Marilyn but vainly hoping to be her blue-collar kindred spirit in the world of stardom, and then Adrien Brody as Arthur Miller, the intellectual dramatist, with whom Marilyn hopes for a meeting of minds and finds only a supercilious intellectual fetishising her as a primitive, childlike creature. It is a tradition carried on by this film. Caspar Phillipson has a cameo as Kennedy, reclining on his hotel bed naked except for his corset for back pain, forcing Monroe to attend to his sexual needs. And all the time, Monroe becomes more unwell, more overworked, more dependent on drugs, more passionately convinced that she doesn’t deserve any of it.

Perhaps the key dialogue exchange comes when DiMaggio, on his uneasy first date with Marilyn, asks her how she got her start in movies. It’s a question which appears to stump Marilyn – she eventually says something about being “discovered” – and it stumps this film as well. Blonde shows her as a terrified little girl (Lily Fisher) and then later, with the “Marilyn” persona more or less fully formed. How did she get there? How and when did she get her hair cut, styled and dyed? How did she learn to speak that way? The film isn’t interested: it is at once knowing and naive, simply buying into “Marilyn” as a mysterious phenomenon to be proprietorially swooned over. The one moment when Marilyn comes most alive here as a recognisably fierce, shrewd person is her rage at hearing that Jane Russell is getting $100,000 for her role in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but she is only getting her studio wage of around $5,000.

You wouldn’t see from this film that Monroe was a brilliant comic actor or a great musical talent. Like many Monroe fans, I am mildly obsessed by the extended, brilliantly argued memorandum she wrote criticising the 1957 film The Prince and the Showgirl in which she starred with Laurence Olivier: a memorandum in which she revealed she was not a shaman victim-sex-goddess, but a tough, smart movie professional.

Well, there’s no doubting that de Armas gives this everything she’s got and that is a very great deal, an expert analogue performance digitally deepfaked into various hallucinations. She has striking scenes with DiMaggio’s disapproving Italian in-laws, and with Brody’s Miller, reducing him suddenly to tears with her artless insights into his work. Her performance is great; the film itself is self-satisfied and incurious.

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2022, Biography/Drama, 2h 46m

What to know

Critics Consensus

Ana de Armas' luminous performance makes it difficult to look away, but Blonde can be hard to watch as it teeters between commenting on exploitation and contributing to it. Read critic reviews

Audience Says

It doesn't matter how well-acted or creatively filmed it is -- watching Blonde is a really unpleasant experience. Read audience reviews

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Blonde videos, blonde   photos.

Based on the bestselling novel by Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde boldly reimagines the life of one of Hollywood's most enduring icons, Marilyn Monroe. From her volatile childhood as Norma Jeane, through her rise to stardom and romantic entanglements, Blonde blurs the lines of fact and fiction to explore the widening split between her public and private selves.

Rating: NC-17 (Some Sexual Content)

Genre: Biography, Drama

Original Language: English

Director: Andrew Dominik

Producer: Dede Gardner , Jeremy Kleiner , Tracey Landon , Brad Pitt , Scott Robertson

Writer: Andrew Dominik

Release Date (Theaters): Sep 16, 2022  limited

Release Date (Streaming): Sep 28, 2022

Runtime: 2h 46m

Distributor: Netflix

Production Co: Plan B Entertainment

Cast & Crew

Ana de Armas

Marilyn Monroe

Adrien Brody

Arthur Miller

Bobby Cannavale

Joe DiMaggio

Evan Williams

Eddy G. Robinson Jr.

Xavier Samuel

Cass Chaplin

Caspar Phillipson

Julianne Nicholson

Gladys Pearl Baker

Lily Fisher

Sara Paxton

David Warshofsky

Spencer Garrett

Rebecca Wisocky

Garret Dillahunt

Scoot McNairy

Lucy DeVito

Andrew Dominik

Screenwriter

Dede Gardner

Jeremy Kleiner

Tracey Landon

Scott Robertson

Chayse Irvin

Cinematographer

Jennifer Lame

Film Editing

Adam Robinson

Florencia Martin

Production Design

Peter Andrus

Art Director

Set Decoration

Jennifer Johnson

Costume Design

Victoria Thomas

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'Blonde' review: Ana de Armas is a bombshell but Netflix's Marilyn Monroe movie is brutal misery

Like last year’s “ Spencer ,” “ Blonde ” aims to capture the horror show of a famous woman’s life. That's where the similarities end: Whereas the Princess Diana drama was a beautiful nightmare, the ballyhooed new Marilyn Monroe  drama is brutal misery.

Written and directed by Andrew Dominik ("Killing Them Softly") – and slapped with an extremely adult rating – “Blonde” (★★ out of four; rated NC-17; streaming now on Netflix ) finds Ana de Armas at her career best. She  inhabits the iconic Hollywood bombshell in a fictionalized narrative that separates and explores her public and private personas. 

Although there are insightful moments and surreal bits that pop, it’s overall a bizarre – and at nearly three hours, bloated – film that attempts to honor its subject and instead lets her down.

'Blonde': Everything we know about Netflix's NC-17-rated Marilyn Monroe movie

Based on the Joyce Carol Oates novel, “Blonde” introduces Norma Jeane as a 7-year-old girl who survives a traumatic event and is essentially orphaned when her mentally ill mother (Julianne Nicholson) is hospitalized and all she knows of her absent dad is a single picture. (We’ll get back to him in a minute.) The movie quickly shifts to adult Norma Jeane embarking on an acting career, adopting the Marilyn persona and having to submit sexually to a Tinseltown power player.

As Marilyn becomes a huge celebrity, Norma Jeane has difficulty keeping it together behind the scenes, struggling with drugs and her tumultuous love life. Norma Jeane’s relationships with men, for better and worse, are a key focus of the narrative momentum: There are her well-known husbands, of course – ex-Yankees slugger Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale), followed by writer Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody) – but also the constant. unnerving attention from leering male strangers. One headscratcher (of many): “Blonde” credits DiMaggio and Miller as The Ex-Athlete and The Playwright but they’re not named, unlike Cass Chaplin (Xavier Samuel) and Eddy Robinson Jr. (Evan Williams), two sons of classic movie stars involved in an early ménage à trois with Marilyn. 

'It feels like serendipity': Ana de Armas' improbable transformation into Marilyn Monroe in 'Blonde'

Constantly waiting for her real father to show up, she’s a woman with daddy issues who calls her lovers “Daddy,” which is more infantilizing than it is endearing. De Armas gamely plays the character through a wide gamut of emotions and psychological breakdowns, including one weird scene where she has a conversation with a computer-generated image fetus. Dominik frequently puts the viewer in her dreamy, discombobulating perspective, yet Marilyn's torturous journey – involving so many crying jags – is equally painful to watch.

That said, a few of Dominik’s scenes astonish when using aspects of Marilyn’s mythology to examine larger themes of celebrity toxicity. Hollywood red carpets grow more hallucinatory and dreadful as “Blonde” rolls on, and the infamous subway grate sequence in “The Seven Year Itch” is shown with the actress grinning, men around her laughing in ecstasy at the sight of her steam-swept dress and underwear, and Cannavale’s retired ball player stewing.

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The instance no one will soon forget is a sexual encounter involving Marilyn and The President – one guess as to which one – where her internal monologue wonders how she got there, really driving home the division between the main character’s dueling identities. Although de Armas spends a lot of time in a state of undress, the NC-17 rating seems like overkill and suggests a more hardcore movie than it actually is. (There are instances of sexual assault and abusive violence, but they’re more implied than seen.)

Armed with a strong performance from de Armas, Dominik’s film takes some big swings, and at times finds thoughtful nuance about a woman defined by pop culture and those around her. There is a really good Marilyn Monroe movie somewhere here, but it's woefully buried in a ruthlessly dour and joyless biopic.

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Blonde review: a striking and tough Marilyn Monroe biopic

Andrew Dominik’s Blonde opens, quite fittingly, with the flashing of bulbs. In several brief, twinkling moments, we see a rush of images: cameras flashing, spotlights whirring to life, men roaring with excitement (or anger — sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference), and at the center of it all is her, Marilyn Monroe (played by Ana de Armas ), striking her most iconic pose as a gust of wind blows up her white dress. It’s an opening that makes sense for a film about a fictionalized version of Monroe’s life, one that firmly roots the viewer in the world and space of a movie star. But to focus only on de Armas’ Marilyn is to miss the point of Blonde ’s opening moments.

Not your usual biopic

A technical triumph, a great lead performance, less is more.

As the rest of Dominik’s bold, imperfect film proves, Blonde is not just about the recreation of iconic moments, nor is it solely about the making of Monroe’s greatest career highlights. It is, instead, about exposure and, in specific, the act of exposing yourself — for art, for fame, for love — and the ways in which the world often reacts to such raw vulnerability. In the case of Blonde , we’re shown how a world of men took advantage of Monroe’s vulnerability by attempting to control her image and downplay her talent.

Blonde does not always succeed at correcting that very sin. There are moments when Dominik, unfortunately, seems to be further playing into the over-sexualization and infantilization of Monroe that has run rampant for decades, and which attempts to render her as nothing more than a naïve sexpot without any agency of her own. But there are also moments in which Blonde feels like it wants nothing more than to honor Monroe not just as a movie star for the ages, but as a brave and capable artist.

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Blonde , which is based on Joyce Carol Oates’ divisive 2000 novel of the same name, does not attempt to tell the true story of Marilyn Monroe’s life. Instead, what the film presents is an impressionistic portrait of how Norma Jeane Mortenson, the woman who became the movie star known as Marilyn Monroe, was used and abused by the very people who were supposed to protect and support her. The film’s culprits are many and wide-ranging — covering everyone from Marilyn’s abusive and emotionally unstable mother (Julianne Nicholson) to the retired baseball star who became her second husband (played by Bobby Cannavale) and, eventually, the leader of the free world himself (Caspar Phillipson).

Nearly everyone in the film is based upon people from Monroe’s real life, but its depictions of them are, at times, greatly separate from reality. It’s important to note that up front because, for some viewers, the film’s decision to envision Monroe’s life as being potentially more traumatic than it really was may simply be seen as too big of an ask. For others, like myself, the film’s lies may only help the truths about Monroe’s life and legacy — both the painful and euphoric ones — cut that much deeper. The film, to its credit, doesn’t try to present itself as a grounded biopic, either.

Clocking in at a whopping 166 minutes, Blonde floats through its story, adopting a leisurely pace and editorial style that actively bucks against any kind of traditional narrative structure. Watching it doesn’t feel like you’re being led through a typical three-act story but rather a neverending montage that only occasionally stops along the way to painstakingly recreate iconic images from Monroe’s career. There are certain scenes, in fact, where it’s hard to tell whether you’re watching de Armas’ version of Monroe or stock footage of the real woman, which only further heightens the disorienting effect that Blonde frequently achieves.

Dominik, who has always been prone to visual experimentation, also uses practically every aspect ratio known to man throughout Blonde . The film, therefore, not only repeatedly switches back and forth from pristine black and white photography to technicolor, but it does so while also flipping between vast widescreen 16:9 images and smaller 4:3 compositions. At times, these instances of visual invention feel random, as if they exist solely to further disorient and detach you from reality. In other moments, they feel purposeful and calculated.

Look, for instance, at how the film’s aspect ratio changes on the night Marilyn expects to meet her long-lost father. The film briefly becomes a widescreen picture as Marilyn walks into her hotel room, reflecting the emotional importance she has placed on the moment. Notice then how the aspect ratio begins to shrink, the scope of the scene slowly, visually dwindling, once she realizes it’s not her father waiting for her but Cannavale’s former ballplayer. Notice further how — in a moment of subtle but precise physical acting — Cannavale’s hand slowly surrounds de Armas’ neck as he professes his love for her, his own body unknowingly foreshadowing their relationship’s toxic and abusive future.

Working with cinematographer Chayse Irvin and editor Adam Robinson, Dominik also fills Blonde with some of the most ingeniously constructed dreamlike images you’ll see in a movie this year. One scene, in specific, comes early on in Blonde and finds de Armas’ Norma Jeane gripping the edge of a bed in a moment of sexual ecstasy. As she does, the bedsheets, which spill down the side of the bed, slowly and impossibly transform into Niagara Falls. Dominik then uses this moment to transition from a mid-afternoon tryst to a promotional trailer for the 1953 noir gem, Niagara . Playing over all of these scenes, meanwhile, is Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ ethereal, otherworldly score , which not only ranks as one of the year’s best but also lifts Blonde ‘s overwhelming tragic mood to cosmic heights.

At the center of Blonde ’s many surreal images and nightmarish sequences, though, is Ana de Armas, whose performance as Marilyn Monroe feels perfectly calibrated for the film she’s in. The actress looks strikingly similar to Monroe throughout all of Blonde , but much like the film itself, there is an ever-present, often haunting discontent between de Armas and the woman she’s playing.

Part of that has to do with de Armas’ real-life Cuban accent, which never fades even in the moments when the actress herself is leaning all the way into Monroe’s breathy way of speaking. There is also a raw quality to de Armas’ performance, which not only rises to the top of Blonde ’s many emotionally difficult scenes but also imbues the moments when she is recreating Monroe’s work in films like Some Like It Hot and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with added touches of tragedy and rage.

Her performance allows de Armas to predictably outshine nearly everyone else that appears opposite her in Blonde . Adrien Brody does, however, make a heartfelt, quiet mark with his lovestruck performance as Arthur Miller, the celebrated playwright who became Monroe’s third husband. Together, Brody and de Armas create a palpable, romantic warmth that permeates throughout Blonde ’s most emotionally bright, if not entirely happy, section.

As Marilyn, de Armas leaves next to nothing on the table, but the film asks too much of her and frequently fails to rise to her level. That’s evidenced by the fact that there are simply too many scenes in Blonde — especially in its second half — that require de Armas to be either topless or fully naked, a detail that threatens to further endorse the over-sexualization that has long plagued Monroe’s legacy. In order to communicate her inner longing and loneliness, Dominik also has de Armas’ Monroe constantly refer to every man in her life as “daddy,” which is a decision that could have been tolerable had it been used a bit more sparingly.

De Armas’ frequent use of “daddy” is ultimately a symptom of Dominik’s own inability to sense the moments when less would, indeed, be more. The same can be said for the multiple instances where Dominik’s camera goes inside Monroe’s belly to show CGI versions of her unborn children as they speak to her (yes, literally ). The film also features a handful of terribly on-the-nose music cues, including the time when “Bye Bye Baby” begins to play just seconds after de Armas’ Monroe has been coerced into having an abortion that she didn’t want.

These missteps are just a few of the imperfections that prevent Blonde from being as tonally and narratively successful as, say, Dominik’s 2007 directorial effort, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford . However, they’re not egregious enough to render Blonde a wholly unsuccessful endeavor. As a matter of fact, Dominik still tells a moving story of loneliness, regret, and emotional yearning with Blonde , a film that feels less like an outlandish Hollywood dream and more like a nightmarish descent into a dark void.

The film achieves that effect whenever it shifts its focus away from Monroe’s sex symbol status and more toward her merits as a performer and artist. In Blonde , Monroe is both a young woman searching for the father figure she never knew and an intelligent, talented artist who wants nothing more than to be given as much as she gives. It should go without saying which of those aspects of Blonde ’s Marilyn prove to be more compelling, but the film’s occasionally uneven handling of her legacy doesn’t stop its ideas about celebrity — both the costs and requirements of it — from ringing loud and clear.

In the end, it isn’t Blonde ’s various homages to Marilyn Monroe’s real-life career that prove to be its most fruitful moments, either. Instead, it’s the quietest scenes that end up leaving the biggest marks, like one that comes late in the film and follows de Armas as she desperately searches her house for a tip only to find her delivery boy long gone by the time she’s returned to give it to him. Pay attention in this scene to the way that de Armas’ hand lingers in the air, the five dollars still clutched in her palm, even after she realizes that there’s no one on the other side of her gate. It’s a specific kind of heartbreak, realizing only too late that you have yet to find someone willing to put in as much effort for you as you would for them.

Blonde is playing in select theaters now. It premieres Wednesday, September 28 on Netflix.

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Pearl is a candy-coated piece of rotten fruit. The film, which is director Ti West’s prequel to this year's X, trades in the desaturated look and 1970s seediness of its parent film for a lurid, Douglas Sirk-inspired aesthetic that seems, at first, to exist incongruently with its story of intense violence and horror. But much like its titular protagonist, whose youthful beauty and Southern lilt masks the monster within, there’s a poison lurking beneath Pearl’s vibrant colors and seemingly untarnished Depression-era America setting.

Set around 60 years before X, West’s new prequel does away with the por nstars, abandoned farms, and eerie old folks that made its predecessor’s horror influences clear and replaces them with poor farmers, charming film projectionists, and young women with big dreams. Despite those differences, Pearl still feels like a natural follow-up to X. The latter film, with its use of split screens and well-placed needle drops, offered a surprisingly dark rumination on the horror of old age. Pearl, meanwhile, explores the loss of innocence and, in specific, the often terrifying truths that remain after one’s dreams have been unceremoniously ripped away from them.

The Woman King opens purposefully and violently. The film’s first sequence, which brings to life a brutal battle from its sudden beginning all the way to its somber end, is a master class in visual storytelling. Not only does it allow director Gina Prince-Bythewood to, once again, prove her worth as a capable action filmmaker, but it also introduces The Woman King’s central all-female army, sets up the film’s core conflict, and introduces nearly every important character that you’ll need to know for the two hours that follow it. The fact that The Woman King does all of this within the span of a few short minutes just makes its opening sequence all the more impressive.

The level of impressive craftsmanship in The Woman King’s memorably violent prologue is present throughout the entirety of its 135-minute runtime. For that reason, the film often feels like a throwback to an era that seems to reside farther in the past than it actually does, one when it was common for all the major Hollywood studios to regularly put out historical epics that were, if nothing else, reliably well-made and dramatically engaging.

The opening narration of See How They Run, which comes courtesy of Adrien Brody’s ill-fated Leo Köpernick, doesn’t just tell you what kind of movie it is. Brody’s sardonic voice-over also makes it clear that See How They Run knows exactly what kind of a story it’s telling, and so do its characters. As Köpernick is killed by an unknown assailant in See How They Run’s prologue, Brody’s voice even dryly remarks: “I should have seen this coming. It’s always the most unlikable character that gets killed first.”

In a less charming film, See How They Run’s streak of self-aware comedy would wear thin quickly. However, the new film from director Tom George is able to, for the most part, strike the right balance between tongue-in-cheek humor, mystery, and genuine sweetness. The film is a lean, not-particularly-mean whodunit, one that lacks the acidic strain of humor present in some of cinema’s other great murder mysteries, including 2019’s Knives Out, but which still boasts the kind of playful spirit that is at the heart of so many of its notable genre predecessors.

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‘Carol Doda Topless at the Condor’ Review: Her Breasts Shocked America, Her Documentary Plays It Safe

David ehrlich.

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It’s funny to think that the birth of our country’s strip clubs traces back to a total drip like Barry Goldwater , but that conservative also-ran was in San Francisco to accept the Republican Party’s nomination for president when — on the night of June 19, 1964 — a lounge singer by the name of Carol Doda decided to show the city what she thought about his “traditional American values.” 

Not that Doda ever claimed to be much of an activist. “I wanted to be in show business,” she said, “and I didn’t know any other way than showing my business.” Her business — in both senses of the word — would soon grow bigger than she had ever imagined.

Like so many pieces of light, streaming-era infotainment, McKenzie and Parker’s film is petrified of becoming too substantive for people to watch with one eye while the other looks at their phone, and so “Carol Doda Topless at the Condor” would rather blur itself into a Rorschach Test than make a more full-throated case that feminism can take any number of forms. Too safe and soft around the edges to meaningfully capture the spirit of an unsung American pioneer, this documentary is more valuable as a niche time capsule — one that vividly remembers a moment in history when North Beach nightlife was at the center of the universe.

Doda died in 2015, and so McKenzie and Parker are left to create an impression of their subject from the people who knew her. The trouble with that — if also the greatest source of this film’s squandered potential — is that no one really did. “Carol Doda Topless at the Condor” features interviews with just about every living person who was part of that scene (you can tell that many of them are speaking on camera about it for the first time, eager to ensure their memories won’t die along with them), and they lend this movie an overabundance of local color. 

It’s mentioned that Doda had two kids prior to her topless career, but her decision not to raise them goes unexplored as it pertains to her progressive interpretation of modern womanhood. She “never felt like a mother,” but did she feel a political justification in resisting that role? It’s a relevant question in a film that frequently wavers about whether Doda was subversive out of personal interest or financial necessity. 

She always claimed that she was in it for the money, and that if she didn’t keep raising the stakes — going bottomless, getting 44 silicone injections, etc. — some other girl would, but that doesn’t entirely square with the iconoclastic spirit of a woman who claimed she was “too stupid” to realize what she was doing, only to turn herself into a media superstar who leveraged her local renown into national fame, received a Harvard Business Person of the Year award, and gave Tom Wolfe a run for his money when he profiled her for “The Pump House Gang.” 

Picturehouse will release “Carol Doda Topless at the Condor” in theaters on Friday, March 22.

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Pornhub Disables Website in Texas Over Age-Verification Law

By Todd Spangler

Todd Spangler

NY Digital Editor

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Pornhub and other affiliated adult websites have blocked access to users in Texas, amid a legal battle with the Lone Star State’s attorney general over an age-verification law.

A new message displayed Thursday to users with internet addresses in Texas on Pornhub (and other sites operated by parent company Aylo ) explained that it was disabling access to comply with the law, as first reported by the Houston Chronicle.

“As you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. Not only does this impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech, it fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas’s stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors,” the message reads in part.

The Pornhub sites’ message continued, “Until the real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas. In doing so, we are complying with the law, as we always do, but hope that governments around the world will implement laws that actually protect the safety and security of users.”

According to the message, “While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, providing identification every time you want to visit an adult platform is not an effective solution for protecting users online, and in fact, will put minors and your privacy at risk.”

Pornhub called the Texas age-verification “ineffective, haphazard and dangerous” and asserted that it will drive users “from those few websites which comply, to the thousands of websites, with far fewer safety measures in place, which do not comply. Very few sites are able to compare to the robust Trust and Safety measures we currently have in place. To protect minors and user privacy, any legislation must be enforced against all platforms offering adult content.”

Reached for comment, the company provided a statement from Alex Kekesi, VP of brand and community at Aylo, which said in part: “This is not the end. We are reviewing options and consulting with our legal team… We will continue to fight for our industry and the performers that legally earn a living, and we will continue to appeal through all available judicial recourse to recognize that this law is unconstitutional.”

Keksi also said in the statement that Aylo “has publicly supported age verification of users for years, but we believe that any law to this effect must ensure minors do not access content intended for adults and preserve user safety and privacy. We believe that the real solution for protecting minors and adults alike is to verify users’ ages at the point of access — the users’ devices — and to deny or permit access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that verification.”

Pornhub and the company’s network of other sites are also blocked or restricted in at least seven other U.S. states — Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, Virginia and Utah — which have adopted similar laws.

Aylo is owned by Canadian private-equity firm Ethical Capital Partners , which acquired Pornhub’s predecessor company MindGeek for undisclosed financial terms last year. ECP has said it would focus on building the company’s “trust and safety” and to make it “the internet leader in fighting illegal online content.”

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