No vivacity, no choice, just tragedy. Nothing more to see here, folks.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 18, 2024

Ana de Armas (Knives Out) delivers a truly extraordinary performance as the platinum superstar and icon, while Dominik and his collaborators discover endlessly inventive ways to recreate highlights from Monroe’s iconography.

| Original Score: B- | Oct 14, 2022

Blonde is a strange movie. There’s no ducking that. I like it, especially for de Armas’s tour de force, but I can see how others may not.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 6, 2022

Andrew Dominik’s bludgeoning Marilyn Monroe biopic has all the signs of a passion project, but none of the rewards.

| Oct 5, 2022

Watching Blonde, it feels like Oates and Dominik hate Marilyn Monroe. In this film’s telling, she is doomed from the beginning, made of pain. You watch Ana de Armas’s Marilyn and think: where is the drive that must have existed?

| Oct 3, 2022

In its resolute focus on just one aspect of what being Marilyn Monroe must have been like, the movie simply caricatures her once again.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Oct 2, 2022

Other choices, like the frequent shifts in aspect ratio, are ambitious but not as affecting. Some are outright disastrous...

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 1, 2022

It’s two hours and 46 minutes of agony after agony.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 30, 2022

Blonde is ghoulishly obsessed with Monroe’s pregnancies and reproductive organs. Shots of floating fetuses fill the screen so often that I wondered whether Operation Rescue had invested in the film.

| Sep 30, 2022

Is the movie a success because Dominik puts us inside Marilyn’s head and makes us experience life through her sad eyes in a way that is off-putting and difficult? Or is this yet another person exploiting her and her sadness?

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 30, 2022

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.

| Sep 29, 2022

It’s a towering achievement, just not a pleasant one -- a maelstrom of emotions and effects, like trying to look through a kaleidoscope while being thrown about in a dodgem car.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 29, 2022

Reductive, ghoulish and surpassingly boring, “Blonde” might have invented a new cinematic genre: necro-fiction.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Sep 29, 2022

A lot of skill and imagination went into making “Blonde.” It’s just that they’re misplaced.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 29, 2022

Andrew Dominik's insufferable NC-17 adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates' novel of the same name is to Marilyn Monroe what cubic zirconia are to diamonds.... Monroe wants to be taken seriously, but "Blonde" never feels sincere.

| Sep 28, 2022

... A horrifying indictment of fame, men and the American Dream itself. It's a tough watch, and is equally tough to shake.

| Original Score: B | Sep 28, 2022

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?

| Sep 28, 2022

Blonde seeks to destroy that perfect pinup and topple the pristine myth of [Marilyn] Monroe’s celebrity.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 27, 2022

Feels hollow and left me cold, despite the visual splendor and a committed turn from Ana de Armas as Marilyn.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 27, 2022

It’s not the frequent nudity that edges 'Blonde' toward exploitation; it’s the film’s nearly singular focus on the overlapping tragedies of the icon’s life ... which all start to blend together after almost three hours.

| Original Score: C | Sep 27, 2022