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Reviews provided by RottenTomatoes
Allison Benedikt, Chicago Tribune: It does a bang-up job of illuminating why many a contemporary pop icon and, online, a whole new generation of men have taken to Bettie. Read more
Rex Reed, New York Observer: Like Bettie herself, the movie is wholesome and sexy at the same time. I liked it immensely. Read more
Andrew Sarris, New York Observer: Smugly anti-erotic in the extreme. Read more
John Hartl, Seattle Times: Feels like a rough draft in which one element -- Mol's performance -- stands out as the real thing. Read more
Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle: The Notorious Bettie Page is about the mundane but living humanity behind the pictures, the regular person behind a decade's fantasies. Read more
Richard Roeper, Ebert & Roeper: [Mol] delivers the best performance of her career. Read more
Steve Murray, Atlanta Journal-Constitution: ... the movie's worth a look simply for Mol's career-boosting performance. Read more
Keith Phipps, AV Club: Turner and Harron load Notorious with the details of '50s-shutterbug and nude-modeling culture and surround Mol with a talented supporting cast, but otherwise let Mol's faded smiles and enigmatic glances suggest what's going on inside Read more
Richard Nilsen, Arizona Republic: It isn't a bad film, but it isn't a good film, either. Basically, it's a movie that doesn't have a good reason for having been made. Read more
Ty Burr, Boston Globe: It's a handsome, often funny piece of work with a nearly fatal inability to settle on a tone. Read more
Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times: The new film captures the look of the period and, in star Gretchen Mol, has an actress who capably counterfeits Page's exuberance. What it doesn't have is a reason for being. Read more
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader: We can't always be sure what's archival and what's simulated because sometimes the filmmakers are trying to fool us. But their preoccupation with the manufacture of images keeps this exercise in exposure and concealment interesting. Read more
Bruce Westbrook, Houston Chronicle: This listless biopic of the famed 1950s model is as timid and tame as her photos seem today. Read more
Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor: Gretchen Mol is unrelentingly charming in the role and she almost -- almost -- makes you believe that someone as unclouded as this could actually exist. Read more
Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post: Astute -- even frisky -- as it is, Notorious Bettie Page never shakes being enamored of the mystery of Page. Read more
Tom Long, Detroit News: But still, who was Bettie Page? The film offers not a clue. Read more
Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: A comedy of high freakishness that invites us to climb deep into the mystique of Bettie Page's image, her phenomenon. Read more
Terry Lawson, Detroit Free Press: About a time when taking off one's clothes for a camera was notorious. We can't go back there, but this is an enjoyable, uncritical visit. Read more
Chris Vognar, Dallas Morning News: Manages to work as a subtle send-up of '50s film sensibilities and as a tentative study of an earlier sex symbol. Read more
Ella Taylor, L.A. Weekly: The Notorious Bettie Page's arid fixation on period over character comes at a price. Read more
Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald: The movie's exploration of its supposedly sleazy milieu from a distinctively female point of view is invigorating, and the recreations of the period ... are a retro-kick. Read more
Jan Stuart, Newsday: Harron and her co-screenwriter Guinevere Turner chart Page's ascension as reigning diva of decadence with the sort of historic expansiveness usually reserved for dead presidents and Nobel winners. Read more
David Edelstein, New York Magazine/Vulture: With her blue-black hair, Mol looks so much like Page that this could be a documentary, and her swings between modesty and exhibitionism are amazingly fluid. Read more
Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger: The movie never seems to make up its mind but, far worse, it never quite gets inside Betty's. Read more
Jack Mathews, New York Daily News: Page [is] played as if on a mission by Gretchen Mol. Read more
Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel: In Mary Harron's film biography of the nude and naughty pin-up girl, Notorious is synonymous with 'joyless.' Read more
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: The tone of the movie is subdued and reflective. It does not defend pornography, but regards it (in its 1950s incarnation) with subdued nostalgia for a more innocent time. Read more
Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com: Mol's portrayal of Bettie Page is likely to at last earn her the recognition she deserves. Read more
Troy Patterson, Slate: No moral, little plot, a lead character deliberately left unknowable. Read more
Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune: There are interesting parallels between the hemmed-in culture of America's paranoid postwar years and the enforced restraint and caged sexuality of the fetish photos that flourished at the time, but they go unexplored. Read more
Geoff Pevere, Toronto Star: Because its interest is in Page as an inadvertent erotic icon, Harron's movie plays more like a gentle conceptual satire on all-American 1950s hypocrisy than an attempt to probe the person herself. Read more
Richard Schickel, TIME Magazine: 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 more
Claudia Puig, USA Today: Bettie Page more closely resembles a TV movie than a probing feature. Read more
Todd McCarthy, Variety: A superficial look at the '50s sex icon, pic feels like it was researched via press clippings rather than attempting a fresh rethinking of its era and provocative subject. Read more
J. Hoberman, Village Voice: There's no snake in Bettie's Eden and no narrative to Harron's movie. Read more
Stephen Hunter, Washington Post: About controlling the means of production; she is her own raw material, and she is not about to let someone else take over. Read more