Blonde
Netflix | Release Date: September 16, 2022 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
50
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 57 Critic Reviews
Positive:
21
Mixed:
26
Negative:
10
Watch Now
Stream On

Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
60
Wall Street JournalJohn AndersonSep 29, 2022
At two hours and 47 minutes, Andrew Dominik’s pseudo-biography is one long slog into sadness and more-than-predictable tragedy, despite a touching portrayal by Ana de Armas and the deliberately artful and often startling filmmaking of Mr. Dominik. Read full review
60
The GuardianPeter BradshawSep 21, 2022
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. . . . Her performance is great; the film itself is self-satisfied and incurious. Read full review
60
BBCRafa Sales RossSep 8, 2022
Blonde is less preoccupied with building a faithful portrayal of the real-life figure than with translating the brutal ruthlessness of celebrity, holding an uncomfortable mirror up to the people who enjoy dabbling in voyeurism neatly packaged as entertainment. Read full review
60
EmpireCatherine BraySep 8, 2022
There’s a fine line between depicting the way Marilyn Monroe was underestimated, and joining in with that assessment. Blonde doesn’t always wind up the right side of that line, but has spectacular visual fireworks to spare. Read full review
60
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneySep 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. Read full review
60
The GuardianLeslie FelperinSep 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. Read full review
58
IndieWireSophie Monks KaufmanSep 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. Read full review
55
SlashfilmLex BriscusoSep 8, 2022
De Armas' dazzling screen presence is inarguable. But with a disjointed directorial eye and a messy script, de Armas is simply doing the best she can within the chaotic world of Monroe's life, but also the chaotic world the film itself forces her to be a part of. Read full review
50
Movie NationRoger MooreDec 19, 2022
Blonde is too ambitious and too important a cinematic subject to dismiss out of hand. Wildly uneven, misguided, bluntly exploitive at times, it also has moments of wrenching pathos and a mournful tone that will never let a film fan look at a Monroe movie the same way again. Read full review
50
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliSep 28, 2022
The director may be able to make a compelling case for why he made Blonde the way he did but I can make an equally compelling case for why only a masochist would want to sit through the whole thing. Read full review
50
New York PostJohnny OleksinskiSep 27, 2022
There’s so much anguish, we eventually become numb to it over the nearly three-hour film. We come to know her only as a victim, not a fleshed-out person. Is that take enlightening? Meh. Entertaining? Not really. Long? Extremely. Read full review
50
USA TodayBrian TruittSep 26, 2022
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. Read full review
50
Boston GlobeMark FeeneySep 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. Read full review
50
Original-CinKim HughesSep 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. Read full review
50
ABC NewsPeter TraversSep 23, 2022
Ana de Armas is raw and riveting as Marilyn Monroe in Andrew Dominik’s surreal journey through a star’s subconscious that leaves out the fun parts to cloak her life in abject misery. The nearly three hour result is hard to watch, but oddly impossible to forget. Read full review
50
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzSep 21, 2022
It’s exceptionally well made, daring and experimental, with a powerful performance from Ana de Armas at its center. At its everything, really — she dominates the film, as well she should. But the film is also too long, too self-indulgent, just too much. It is a marathon of misery. Read full review
50
ConsequenceClint WorthingtonSep 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. Read full review
50
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenSep 20, 2022
Blonde so wholly commits to its vision of Monroe as a damaged soul—with the filmmaking acumen of a gripping psychological horror film—that it drowns out any sense of the rare talent she was and the rarified art she helped make. Read full review
50
ObserverEmily ZemlerSep 19, 2022
Ultimately, Blonde mirrors our surface-level conception of Monroe herself: beautiful but vapid. Its flaws lie mostly within the storytelling rather than the filmmaking, and it’s not a boring watch by any means. Read full review
40
The Irish TimesDonald ClarkeSep 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. Read full review
40
SlateDana StevensSep 19, 2022
Once again, in trying to find our way past the icon to the woman underneath, we have only pushed Norma Jeane further away. Read full review
40
Rolling StoneK. Austin CollinsSep 19, 2022
Blonde is no truer or more intelligent than a more openly sleazy rendition of this story. It leaves too little room (despite its two hour and 40 minute runtime) to reconcile the fuller reality of this woman. Read full review
40
We Got This CoveredAlejandra MartinezSep 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. Read full review
40
CNNBrian LowrySep 15, 2022
Once you get past admiring de Armas’ immersion into the role, that’s the only itch that Blonde seems to know how to scratch. Read full review
40
Time OutPhil de SemlyenSep 8, 2022
For all its freedom to reimagine her life and rescue her from cultural victimhood, Blonde is just a bit too willing to chuck her overboard and watch her flounder. Read full review
40
Screen DailyFionnuala HalliganSep 8, 2022
Technically-skilled, well-acted and fatally over-long, it’s hard not to see Blonde as a chronicle of exploitation and abuse which merrily carries on the tradition – a sensation reinforced by Ana de Armas’s poignant performance as Marilyn. Read full review
More From This Movie

50 Critic Reviews

4.7 User Reviews

Details & Credits|Trailers

Current Movie Releases
By MetascoreBy User Score
1 81 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
2 77 Project Hail Mary
3 75 Send Help
4 73 Hoppers
5 71 The Sheep Detectives
SEE ALL
Essential Links
New on Amazon Prime Video
New on Netflix
Coming Soon to DVD/Blu-ray
SEE ALL