{"id":117972,"date":"2026-01-31T00:23:13","date_gmt":"2026-01-31T00:23:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/117972\/"},"modified":"2026-01-31T00:23:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-31T00:23:13","slug":"what-critics-are-saying-about-the-melania-documentary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/117972\/","title":{"rendered":"What Critics Are Saying About the \u2018Melania\u2019 Documentary"},"content":{"rendered":"

Writes William Thomas at Empire<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In 1935, Adolf Hitler commissioned director Leni Riefenstahl to make\u00a0Triumph Of The Will, a highly nationalistic and likely heavily staged account of the Nazi Party\u2019s 1934 Nuremberg rallies. It was a key moment in the history of propaganda films, a coldly fascistic conceptualisation of Germany as the Nazis hoped to recast it, produced with full participation and collaboration of an authoritarian regime.\u00a0Melania, on the other hand \u2014\u202fa new documentary about Melania Trump, wife of President Donald Trump \u2014 is more like Triumph of the Shill. It is political propaganda at its most transparent \u2014 cynical, pointless, and very, very boring.<\/p>\n

He also notes the missed opportunity:<\/p>\n

There is no drama to speak of, no tension, no narrative arc. Melania\u2019s life story is undeniably fascinating: a former model and beauty queen, born in Soviet-era Yugoslavia, an immigrant who improbably clawed her way to the top, making the White House her home \u2014 twice. Within her life, you can surely find the story of America in microcosm: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to start a luxury jewellery line! As a public figure who rarely gives interviews, she is a mystery, a cipher hiding behind designer sunglasses, surely waiting for her story to be told.<\/p>\n

But this film is uninterested in backstory, in delving even remotely under the surface.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Writes William Thomas at Empire: In 1935, Adolf Hitler commissioned director Leni Riefenstahl to make\u00a0Triumph Of The Will,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":117973,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[13699,48303,7391,9,11,10,87,51981,51982,41103],"class_list":["post-117972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-early-and-often","tag-melania","tag-melania-trump","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-politics","tag-review-roundup","tag-roundup","tag-tremendous-content"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117972\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}