Ana de Armas is soon making her debut as Marilyn Monroe in Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, an NC-17 movie that doesn’t sugarcoat anything when it comes to the sexually charged and sometimes violent life of the blonde bombshell.
This is the first NC-17 movie to ever grace the streaming scene, so even if we didn’t have de Armas as Monroe to look forward to, many viewers would find Blonde intriguing as the first movie of its kind to find its way on Netflix. Dominik fought with the streamer for a while about trimming down some of the most explicit scenes, but it seems that the director ultimately got his way.
Was the explicit content worth it for a better film? Critics so far are divided.
While outlets like Vulture and Variety gave the movie an extremely positive review and noted that Blonde is “beautiful, mesmerizing, and, at times, deeply moving,” other reviewers simply weren’t impressed with Dominik’s filmmaking chops, and for that matter, what his latest flick aspires to be.
The Hollywood Reporter, for instance, had a more critical take, writing: “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.”
Empire echoed those statements by adding that “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 on the right side of that line.”
As of writing this, Blonde holds a score of 63/100 on Metacritic and an 82% certified fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, though these aggregations will be subject to change as more reviews pour in over the next week or so.