Maybe director Brett Ratner should stick to making Rush Hour films. Definitely not X-Men films. Or just go back under a rock. The rollout for Amazon MGM’s documentary Melania has been as carefully stage-managed and oddly hollow as the film itself. Framed as a prestige documentary offering “perspectives, insights, and moments,” the glossy portrait of the former first lady arrived with the trappings of cultural importance but immediately collapsed under critical scrutiny.
From its red-carpet premiere to its aggressively polished marketing language, the film presents itself as weighty and revealing. Critics saw something else entirely: an expensive exercise in image control that mistakes access and production value for substance.
Reviews landed swiftly and brutally. Across outlets, critics struggled to find a reason for the film’s existence beyond brand maintenance, describing it as inert, overly reverent, and emotionally vacant. The consensus was not merely that the documentary failed to illuminate its subject, but that it actively avoided doing so.
The Guardian led with a headline calling the film “a gilded trash remake of The Zone of Interest,” before sharpening its critique even further. Variety dismissed it as a lifeless promotional artifact. Decider used the occasion to revisit and criticize Brett Ratner’s broader filmography, arguing that Red Dragon was “about as bad as a movie one could possibly make with Anthony Hopkins playing Hannibal Lecter backed by an all-star cast.”
Given that level of critical hostility, the box office performance might seem beside the point. Still, numbers matter. The National Research Group estimates Melania will gross around $5 million in theaters, a steep gap when measured against the reported $40 million Amazon paid for the film. In a media landscape shaped by billionaire math, however, that gap appears less like a failure than a shrug.
What has proven harder to shrug off is the broader discomfort surrounding the film: its timing, its creative leadership, and what many critics view as a tone deaf flex of power and access.
Below are some of the most scathing reactions, presented verbatim.
“No doubt there is a great documentary to be made about Melania Knauss, the ambitious model from out of Slovenia who married a New York real-estate mogul and then found herself cast in the role of a latter-day Eva Braun, but the horrific Melania emphatically isn’t it. It’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality. I’m not even sure it qualifies as a documentary, exactly, so much as an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch and proffered like a medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.” — Xan Brooks, The Guardian
“To say that Melania is a hagiography would be an insult to hagiographies. This is a film that fawns so lavishly over its subject that you feel downright unpatriotic not gushing over it. Fittingly, it was directed by Brett Ratner, whose feature film career was derailed in 2017 after numerous sexual assault allegations that he has denied. But like many unsavory people associated with Donald Trump, he’s apparently received a pardon.” — Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter
“It is galling to think about Jeff Bezos (whose wife is a former TV news anchor) deciding to invest so much money apparently to buy the president’s good graces while reportedly preparing to cut hundreds of jobs at The Washington Post. (Amazon reps have insisted that the company invested so heavily in the movie purely ‘because we think customers are going to love it.’) It is also galling, to me at least, that Apple CEO Tim Cook attended the premiere of Melania this week while the Trump administration’s militarized forces are killing Americans and detaining preschoolers.” — Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic
“Kicking off your movie with a one-two punch of needle-dropping Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones and Billie Jean by Michael Jackson means you’re probably one of three things: Martin Scorsese, Baz Luhrmann, or an idiot. Brett Ratner, accused sex pest and filmmaker behind the Rush Hour trilogy, is not either of the first two.” — Jesse Hassenger, Decider
“Melania is a documentary that never comes to life. It’s a ‘portrait’ of the First Lady of the United States, but it’s so orchestrated and airbrushed and stage-managed that it barely rises to the level of a shameless infomercial. Is it cheesy? At moments, but mostly it’s inert. It feels like it’s been stitched together out of the most innocuous outtakes from a reality show. There’s no drama to it. It should have been called ‘Day of the Living Tradwife.’” — Owen Gleiberman, Variety
“Melania is the worst movie I’ve ever seen.” — Natasha Jokic, BuzzFeed
The running joke is that Melania will not be shown on airplanes for fear of passengers walking out.
Maybe director Brett Ratner should stick to making Rush Hour films. Definitely not X-Men films. Or just go back under a rock. The rollout for Amazon MGM’s documentary Melania has been as carefully stage-managed and oddly hollow as the film itself. Framed as a prestige documentary offering “perspectives, insights, and moments,” the glossy portrait of the former first lady arrived with the trappings of cultural importance but immediately collapsed under critical scrutiny.
From its red-carpet premiere to its aggressively polished marketing language, the film presents itself as weighty and revealing. Critics saw something else entirely: an expensive exercise in image control that mistakes access and production value for substance.
Reviews landed swiftly and brutally. Across outlets, critics struggled to find a reason for the film’s existence beyond brand maintenance, describing it as inert, overly reverent, and emotionally vacant. The consensus was not merely that the documentary failed to illuminate its subject, but that it actively avoided doing so.
The Guardian led with a headline calling the film “a gilded trash remake of The Zone of Interest,” before sharpening its critique even further. Variety dismissed it as a lifeless promotional artifact. Decider used the occasion to revisit and criticize Brett Ratner’s broader filmography, arguing that Red Dragon was “about as bad as a movie one could possibly make with Anthony Hopkins playing Hannibal Lecter backed by an all-star cast.”
Given that level of critical hostility, the box office performance might seem beside the point. Still, numbers matter. The National Research Group estimates Melania will gross around $5 million in theaters, a steep gap when measured against the reported $40 million Amazon paid for the film. In a media landscape shaped by billionaire math, however, that gap appears less like a failure than a shrug.
What has proven harder to shrug off is the broader discomfort surrounding the film: its timing, its creative leadership, and what many critics view as a tone deaf flex of power and access.
Below are some of the most scathing reactions, presented verbatim.
“No doubt there is a great documentary to be made about Melania Knauss, the ambitious model from out of Slovenia who married a New York real-estate mogul and then found herself cast in the role of a latter-day Eva Braun, but the horrific Melania emphatically isn’t it. It’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality. I’m not even sure it qualifies as a documentary, exactly, so much as an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch and proffered like a medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.” — Xan Brooks, The Guardian
“To say that Melania is a hagiography would be an insult to hagiographies. This is a film that fawns so lavishly over its subject that you feel downright unpatriotic not gushing over it. Fittingly, it was directed by Brett Ratner, whose feature film career was derailed in 2017 after numerous sexual assault allegations that he has denied. But like many unsavory people associated with Donald Trump, he’s apparently received a pardon.” — Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter
“It is galling to think about Jeff Bezos (whose wife is a former TV news anchor) deciding to invest so much money apparently to buy the president’s good graces while reportedly preparing to cut hundreds of jobs at The Washington Post. (Amazon reps have insisted that the company invested so heavily in the movie purely ‘because we think customers are going to love it.’) It is also galling, to me at least, that Apple CEO Tim Cook attended the premiere of Melania this week while the Trump administration’s militarized forces are killing Americans and detaining preschoolers.” — Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic
“Kicking off your movie with a one-two punch of needle-dropping Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones and Billie Jean by Michael Jackson means you’re probably one of three things: Martin Scorsese, Baz Luhrmann, or an idiot. Brett Ratner, accused sex pest and filmmaker behind the Rush Hour trilogy, is not either of the first two.” — Jesse Hassenger, Decider
“Melania is a documentary that never comes to life. It’s a ‘portrait’ of the First Lady of the United States, but it’s so orchestrated and airbrushed and stage-managed that it barely rises to the level of a shameless infomercial. Is it cheesy? At moments, but mostly it’s inert. It feels like it’s been stitched together out of the most innocuous outtakes from a reality show. There’s no drama to it. It should have been called ‘Day of the Living Tradwife.’” — Owen Gleiberman, Variety
“Melania is the worst movie I’ve ever seen.” — Natasha Jokic, BuzzFeed
The running joke is that Melania will not be shown on airplanes for fear of passengers walking out.
