The Notorious Bettie Page
Picturehouse Entertainment | Release Date: April 14, 2006 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
64
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 38 Critic Reviews
Positive:
28
Mixed:
10
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert
Gretchen Mol is finally the key to the mysterious appeal of the film, to its sweetness and sadness. Read full review
83
Entertainment WeeklyOwen Gleiberman
The movie, in a sense, is just like Bettie's photos: all glorious surface. The Notorious Bettie Page captures, with seductive finesse, how Bettie Page happened, yet what it leaves us with is the tantalizing enigma of a girl who couldn't truly be ''bad'' because she made sex divinely delicious. Read full review
80
SalonStephanie Zacharek
A picture that's fully open to some pretty rough truths. But it's also a joyful, heartfelt movie, one that speaks to the openness and vitality we see in Bettie's pictures. Read full review
80
Dallas ObserverJim Ridley
Neither a mock-heroic cockeyed success story like "Ed Wood" nor a "Walk the Line"-style hagiography, Mary Harron's facile but hugely entertaining black-and-white biopic seems most interested in its subject--a studious southern girl who became the world's most celebrated fetish pinup--as an object. Read full review
75
The A.V. ClubKeith Phipps
Mol nails it, in a performance that should earn her a comeback on a Heath Ledger-like scale. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames Berardinelli
The film takes a little time to explore the political landscape of the time, and features an Oscar-worthy lead performance. Read full review
75
New York Daily NewsJack Mathews
The playfulness evident in the hundreds of bondage photos that made a pious young Tennessee model semi-famous in the 1950s and an 82-year-old legend today is also the driving force of Mary Harron's superb The Notorious Bettie Page. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalle
Floats on the charm and the labors of its lead actress, Gretchen Mol, who single-handedly makes the picture worth seeing. Read full review
75
Chicago TribuneAllison Benedikt
It's a joy to see so many cheerful and contented characters on screen, especially on a screen that looks this good. Read full review
75
Rolling StonePeter Travers
Harron needed just the right actress to play Bettie. And she lucked out big time. Gretchen Mol (The Shape of Things) is hot stuff in every sense of the term. She delivers the first performance by an actress this year that deserves serious Oscar consideration. Read full review
75
Baltimore SunMichael Sragow
This movie will be remembered not for the notorious Bettie Page but for its showcase of the burgeoning Gretchen Mol. Read full review
70
The New York TimesManohla Dargis
Principally a work of gorgeous surfaces, shot mostly in silvery black-and-white film by the cinematographer Mott Hupfel, with an occasional splash of saturated color. Read full review
70
SlateTroy Patterson
Harron, working from a script she wrote with Guinevere Turner, doesn't solve the inherent problems of that narrative, but she evades them quite elegantly. She's made a poem instead of a biopic, an ode to intuition, iconography, seamed stockings, and star power. Read full review
70
TimeRichard Schickel
This cheeky movie does not impose heavy-duty meaning on Page's life and times. It just lets us draw our own ambiguous conclusions about what she did. It is the better, the more enticing, for so doing. Read full review
70
Washington PostStephen Hunter
Director Mary Harron may have more courage than talent -- and she's got a lot of talent. It's too bad Bettie's story isn't more dramatic. Read full review
70
Chicago ReaderJonathan Rosenbaum
The notion that Page, like Marilyn Monroe, was too ditzy to know what she was doing is more a mythological construct than an observation. Read full review
70
The New RepublicStanley Kauffmann
Harron's work here is unclear in its theme or purpose. Was she showing how a woman managed to find a woman's way to success in a man's world? Was Harron interested in Page's delusion about what she was doing? Or did she want to scoff implicitly at the customers who made Page's career possible? We are left wondering. Read full review
70
New York Magazine (Vulture)David Edelstein
Its tone is semi-parodic, with lurid black-and-white cinematography and brassy, tongue-in-cheek music. But Harron stops well short of camp. Read full review
70
The New YorkerDavid Denby
A lightweight retelling of Page's life, a sketch, really, which doesn't probe very deeply into Page's bizarre mixture of exhibitionism and piety. But some scenes that might have been borderline exploitation, or just corny…turn out to be ineffably beautiful. Read full review
67
Christian Science MonitorPeter Rainer
Gretchen Mol is unrelentingly charming in the role and she almost - almost - makes you believe that someone as unclouded as this could actually exist. This film would go well on a double bill with "The Stepford Wives." Read full review
67
Seattle Post-IntelligencerPaula Nechak
Who was Bettie Page? You won't find out in Mary Harron's chirpily cheery chronicle. Read full review
67
Austin ChronicleMarc Savlov
It's less cheesecake than angel-food: frothy, light, and delicious, sure, but two hours later you're ready for something slightly more substantive. Read full review
63
USA TodayClaudia Puig
Because we are left with so many questions, the film emerges as emotionally lacking and flat when it should be moving, or at least enlightening. Read full review
63
TV Guide MagazineMaitland McDonagh
An oddly lifeless affair, though Gretchen Mol's sunny performance almost hauls it out of its doldrums. Read full review
63
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Liam Lacey
Anyone expecting another dark satiric film in the same vein of Harron's earlier movies will be disappointed. Perhaps as befits a bondage-themed picture, The Notorious Bettie Page is very restrained, even a little starchy. Read full review
63
Boston GlobeTy Burr
It's a handsome, often funny piece of work with a nearly fatal inability to settle on a tone. Read full review
63
Philadelphia InquirerCarrie Rickey
In the odd, and oddly compelling, biopic The Notorious Bettie Page, Gretchen Mol is a delight as the saucy brunette. Read full review
63
Miami HeraldRene Rodriguez
The script, which Harron co-wrote with Guinevere Turner, presents a disappointingly superficial portrait of Page as a person. Read full review
60
Film ThreatMatthew Sorrento
Without much help from a weak script, and barely in need of some carefully tuned cinematography, Mol fuels so much of the film that a handful of lackluster elements seem to work. Read full review
60
EmpireOlly Richards
A small, strangely sweet tale well told. But this is all about Mol, who puts in a performance that gives her a very early lead on next year's Oscar race. Read full review
60
The Hollywood ReporterMichael Rechtshaffen
While Gretchen Mol delivers a delightfully exuberant lead performance, the film itself seldom goes beyond skin deep. Read full review
58
Portland OregonianShawn Levy
A feature film has to be more than just an interesting theme; it needs something that constitutes drama -- conflict, journey, adventure, what have you. The Notorious Bettie Page is a perfect example of a film that has a subject but no story. Read full review
50
Village VoiceJ. Hoberman
Not for nothing is this movie opening on Good Friday. It can be as boring as church. There's no snake in Bettie's Eden and no narrative to Harron's movie. It's more of an altar piece: Our Lady of the Garter Belt, the Fastidious Bettie Page. Read full review
50
L.A. WeeklyElla Taylor
While it's true that most of us make our way through life without a plan, the studied arbitrariness of Page's accommodating ramble from Hicksville to Smutsville doesn't make for thrilling cinema. Read full review
50
Los Angeles TimesKenneth Turan
Harron has said she was determined to be nonjudgmental about Page, to do justice to the woman's "mystery and ambiguity." In practice, however, that attitude plays as coldness, and Page, for all her remarkable zest, comes off as a not terribly interesting person we're given no incentive to become involved with. Read full review
50
Wall Street JournalJoe Morgenstern
In spite of the film's surface allure -- no, not the leather, the period evocation -- and a fine performance by Gretchen Mol in the title role, Bettie is in bondage to a shallow, black-and-white script.
50
New York PostLou Lumenick
Disappointingly skin-deep and almost shockingly wholesome, Mary Harron's The Notorious Bettie Page lives up to neither its title nor its advertising slogan, "the pin-up sensation that shocked the nation." Read full review
50
VarietyTodd McCarthy
A superficial look at the '50s sex icon, picture feels like it was researched via press clippings rather than attempting a fresh rethinking of its era and provocative subject. Read full review
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