| Netflix | Release Date: September 16, 2022 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
21
Mixed:
26
Negative:
10
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Critic Reviews
Sep 16, 2022
A dreamlike fictional biopic about Marilyn Monroe, Blonde features a stunning, volatile performance from Ana de Armas, whose daring vulnerability is matched by director Andrew Dominik’s equally daring formal approach, which keeps Marilyn in constant conversation with her iconic photographs, with the camera, and with the public at large.
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Sep 8, 2022
Blonde is beautiful, mesmerizing, and, at times, deeply moving. But it’s also alienating — again, by design — constantly turning the camera on the viewer, sometimes with Marilyn directly addressing it. That’s going to be a tough sell, especially for a film that’s so nonlinear and elliptical.
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Sep 24, 2022
Marilyn Monroe was a confusing, alluring contradiction, and so, necessarily is Blonde, over reductive when it isn’t inscrutably impressionistic. But it’s also mesmerizing, hard to watch and impossible not to watch almost in equal measure, a somewhat guilty pleasure, compelling in spite of, partly because of, the fact that you don’t quite understand.
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The Film StageSep 9, 2022
Ana de Armas’ portrayal of Norma is powerful, her performance suggesting layers and levels Dominik just isn’t interested in probing, perhaps because it would disrupt the headlong intensity of his thesis, and of course, the often brilliant cinematic language through which he creates a woozy sucker-punch impact on the audience––though there’s no question the rush of momentum he harnesses also manifests in a sadism towards her.
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The Observer (UK)Sep 26, 2022
Sep 8, 2022
With a passion that’s inquisitive, nearly meditative, and often powerful, Blonde focuses on the mystery we now think of when we think of Marilyn Monroe: Who was she, exactly, as a personality and as a human being? Why did her life descend into a tragedy that seems, in hindsight, as inevitable as it is haunting?
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The TelegraphSep 8, 2022
Blonde is severe and serious-minded almost to a fault: you rather wonder how many viewers at home will soldier on to the end when it lands on Netflix after a limited theatrical release. In the cinema, though, it swallows you up like an uneasy dream, at once all too familiar and pricklingly unreal.
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Oct 5, 2022
Blonde is a precisely engineered nightmare. From Monroe’s childhood to superstardom, Dominik presents her as a passive victim of never-ending tragedy: neglect, abuse, heartbreak, addiction. And in doing so, Dominik creates a cinematic experience so repellent that it is destined to be loathed and misunderstood, written off as crass and opportunistic just like those who profited off Monroe’s body during her own life.
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Sep 16, 2022
The PlaylistSep 8, 2022
This is a nasty, queasy, unforgiving piece of work. It is utterly devoid of hope. It’s as shocking as any slasher, as horrifying as any grizzly bit of wartime realism — yet there’s something so compelling about the director’s broader argument, and it’s rendered with rare visual deftness, with some big swing moments that land terrifically.
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Sep 8, 2022
Blonde is a film partly about exploitation that might be exploitative itself. If the film is aware of that meta function, then there’s something interesting happening in it. If not, and Dominik thinks he is genuinely ennobling Monroe and expressing some kind of radical pity for her, then Blonde is a little perverse.
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Sep 20, 2022
What Ana de Armas does in Blonde is nothing short of transformative, but unfortunately, the film will likely do little to change the way people see Marilyn Monroe—once again, a victim of people doing what they think is best for her, perhaps with consent but certainly not enough consideration.
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Sep 8, 2022
The GuardianSep 21, 2022
Sep 8, 2022
The tragic dimension of a woman adored by the world, devoured by Hollywood and ultimately abandoned to her own despair in an ordinary little house in Brentwood resonates because we know Marilyn’s sad story. But it’s hard to ignore the queasy feeling that Dominik is getting off on the tawdry spectacle. De Armas holds nothing back in connecting with the character’s pain. She deserves better.
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The GuardianSep 8, 2022
This is a portrait of Monroe that accentuates her suffering and anguish, canonising her into a feminist saint who died for our scopophilic sins, that we might feast on her beauty and talent. Maybe it’s not an opera but a kind of religious ritual for the modern age, visiting the stations of the crosses Monroe bore, the Passion of the Marilyn.
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IndieWireSep 8, 2022
It’s not that Andrew Dominik has made an implausible film about the experience of a poor young beauty haunted by fears of madness who was chewed up by the Hollywood machine, the issue is that he has made a film inspired by Marilyn Monroe where she is monotonously characterized as a victim.
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SlashfilmSep 8, 2022
Movie NationDec 19, 2022
Sep 26, 2022
A lot of skill and imagination went into making Blonde. It’s just that they’re misplaced. The movie has its own cracked integrity. That long runtime allows Dominik to give it a slow, inexorable rhythm. Everything has a slightly underwater quality. Stardom here has more to do with miasma than glamour.
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Sep 24, 2022
Ana de Armas is magnificent as Norma Jean, her every expression and movement embodying the late star and suggesting countless hours of research and rehearsal. But the movie surrounding this possibly career-best performance is an overheated dud save also some genuinely novel camera work, notably in a threesome scene where intertwined bodies melt into a rolling taffy wave.
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Sep 21, 2022
Sep 20, 2022
Blonde is a maddening watch, a frustrating fumbling of the delicate tonal balance required to say what Dominik’s angling to say about his subject. It both condemns the conditions Marilyn suffered under while elevating it to the status of beautiful sacrifice. It’s demonstrably not a biopic, and yet its usage of a real-life figure, and the miseries she experienced, feels too cavalier to completely separate the two.
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Sep 26, 2022
Nobody could deny that Dominik layers sympathy on Monroe, but the reduction of her life to a catalogue of torments betrays the complicated, intelligent and — God forbid this were acknowledged — funny person we knew her to be. Defining her solely by misery feels like more postmortem abuse.
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Sep 15, 2022
Ultimately, Blonde falls short of the noble goals it sets out for itself. What we get instead is a stunning, surreal nightmare that fails to let Marilyn Monroe be a complicated, full person. Even if it’s packaged well, what you’ll find at the heart of Blonde is something acrid and hollow.
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Sep 15, 2022
The main thing the movie misses in portraying Marilyn solely as a tragic sex bomb isn't just the pleasure that Monroe herself brought to millions, but de Armas's inner light too. The spark and vitality so evident in previous projects like Knives Out and No Time to Die has been smothered down to one note: walking wound. What's left is mostly empty iconography and a few indelible images, a bombastic curiosity wrapped in the guise of high art. Some like it cold.
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Sep 27, 2022
Any truthful portrait of Norma Jeane Baker, the woman who became Marilyn Monroe, would of course have to reckon with the tightly coiled double helix of her art and her tragedy. But Blonde is all tragedy, and its single-mindedness isn’t just dull and punishing but also wearyingly unimaginative.
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Sep 26, 2022
Ana de Armas is inspired and flawless as Marilyn Monroe, and yet “Blonde” is a total bomb. Intuitively, that would seem impossible, for someone to be that good in a failed picture. Here’s something else that would seem impossible: “Blonde” has seriousness of purpose and a strong director, Andrew Dominik, who clearly made the movie he wanted to make. It’s still bad.
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