A Life Lived Louder Than Headlines

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MOVIE REVIEW
Queen of Manhattan
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Genre: Drama, Romance, Biography
Year Released: 2022, 2025
Runtime: 1h 42m
Director(s): Thomas Mignone
Writer(s): Thomas Mignone
Cast: Vivian Lamolli, Esai Morales, Drea de Matteo, Shane West, Taryn Manning, Jesse Metcalfe, Elizabeth Rodriguez, David Proval, Joshua Malina, Dita Von Teese, Sebastian Quinn
Where to Watch: in select theaters September 19, 2025, and On Demand October 14

RAVING REVIEW: The movie begins where myth and rumor often intersect: a cramped apartment, a hungry city, and a young woman seeking a way out. QUEEN OF MANHATTAN isn’t just recreating a time and place; it’s arguing that 1970s–80s Times Square functioned like an engine—one that chewed people up, spit them out, and occasionally turned someone into a legend. In centering Vanessa Del Rio’s rise, the film threads a needle biopics often miss: it treats the adult industry as labor, not a punchline, and it respects the performer’s intelligence about her own image. The result is a pulpy, neon-drenched portrait with moments of tension, even when it leans a bit too hard on familiar rags-to-riches cliches.

Vivian Lamolli’s turn as Vanessa is the hook. She plays her role not as an idea, but as a working professional—instinctual, adaptable, and with force. Lamolli’s Vanessa understands the difference between being watched and directing the gaze. The performance continually draws the film back to questions of authorship: who owns the image, who profits from it, and who decides what gets remembered. She’s magnetic without losing the sense of someone still learning, and the voiceovers (when they appear) work best when they read like diary pages rather than statements.

Esai Morales brings texture as a gatekeeper with his own code—worldly enough to recognize a star when they walk in, yet compromised sufficiently to bend that toward his interests. Drea de Matteo and Taryn Manning supply lived-in New York energy; they’re particularly effective when the film relaxes into conversation and lets the women negotiate power among themselves, away from men who think they’re running everything. Jesse Metcalfe, David Proval, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Joshua Malina, and a cameoing Dita Von Teese fill out a bench that makes the world feel cast rather than populated—people with angles, not extras with lines.

The Times Square interiors feel just big enough to breathe and just small enough to feel claustrophobic; peeling posters, nickel-and-dime cash windows, the hum of marquees—these details keep the film from glossing over itself into fantasy. The palette is saturated without becoming cartoonish, allowing the grime and glamour to coexist in the same frame. That approach suits a story about agency in a market that wants total access. The camera is often close but not predatory, interested in faces, hands, and the heat of negotiation more than in ogling bodies. It’s a crucial tonal choice that honors Del Rio’s legacy while acknowledging the mercenary realities around her.

Structurally, the movie favors an episodic structure, characterized by discovery, ascendancy, the new name on a marquee, new contracts, and new compromises. That rhythm mirrors how stories from the adult industry tend to get told—through flashes of notoriety and moral panics. When the film slows down—letting Vanessa draw a hard boundary, or navigate a room where everyone thinks they already know her—it finds a sharper spine. Those quieter beats, where the city’s noise drops out, give Lamolli room to show calculation and tenderness in the same breath.

On the thematic front, QUEEN OF MANHATTAN is strongest when it sits in the contradictions: sex work as empowerment vs. exploitation, performance as liberation vs. product, community as shield vs. trap. It tips its hat to the era’s broader cultural storms—obscenity battles, the AIDS crisis, shifting attitudes around queer and straight desire—and it’s here the film could have pushed harder. The groundwork is in place, especially in scenes that intersect with LGBTQIA2S+ nightlife and the ecology of Times Square, but the script mostly keeps those moments on the periphery of Vanessa’s journey.

As a biopic, it’s refreshingly unembarrassed about sexuality. That matters. The adult industry is often portrayed as a morality tale or a smirking joke; however, it is treated as a workplace with hazards, hierarchies, and uncommon visibility. The film doesn’t sanitize the era’s anger or the dangers of organized crime either, though those elements sometimes read like texture rather than inescapable structure.

The film lands. It respects its subject, refuses to apologize for the work, and captures a city that manufactured icons as ruthlessly as it sold postcards of them. QUEEN OF MANHATTAN has the neon sheen of a crowd-pleaser and the bones of something more complicated. It may not reinvent the biopic, but it claims the room for a story too often told about, not with. The crown fits, not because it’s heavy, but because the wearer chooses how to hold her head.

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[photo courtesy of LEVEL 33 ENTERTAINMENT]

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