The Notorious Bettie Page Critic Reviews

It's a handsome, often funny piece of work with a nearly fatal inability to settle on a tone.Read the full review

Gretchen Mol is finally the key to the mysterious appeal of the film, to its sweetness and sadness.Read the full review

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 the full review

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 the full review

The film takes a little time to explore the political landscape of the time, and features an Oscar-worthy lead performance.Read the full review

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 the full review

Floats on the charm and the labors of its lead actress, Gretchen Mol, who single-handedly makes the picture worth seeing.Read the full review

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 the full review

While Gretchen Mol delivers a delightfully exuberant lead performance, the film itself seldom goes beyond skin deep.Read the full review