Blonde (2022)

Ana de Armas is truly brilliant in a role I never would've picked her for. She both looked the part and seemed to embody Marilyn better than anyone who's tried to do so. The movie is often dazzling -- it shifts from black and white to color often and switches up the style as well. The scene that most stunned me was was when she was having active sex in a threesome and the bed sheets morphed into a movie screen with Niagara Falls playing and her hand gripped the edge of the water. Gorgeous.

But the story is problematic. Take that threesome: it doesn't seem to have actually happened. Now I know that this movie is based on Joyce Carol Oates's novel, but that should've been made more clear. I can't be the only one who was expecting a biography and got a collection of easily disproved vignettes. Yet despite this and the movie's unnecessarily long runtime, my attention was held throughout -- mostly due to de Armas.

C+