Get the latest gossip
Becoming Madonna review – a megastar’s extraordinary ascent to pop royalty
The singer’s journey to the top is retold through archive clips and audio, efficiently albeit perhaps too straightforwardly
It tracks the period from her tough beginnings as a dancer in late 70s New York to the early 90s days of the Blonde Ambition tour and her once-controversial Mapplethorpe-type book of photos entitled Sex. It’s watchable enough, with some interesting things to say about Madonna’s instinctive knack for appropriating a gay aesthetic and repurposing it for her own heterosexual spectacle, and then repaying the debt by becoming an outspoken advocate for HIV/Aids research. And there is something exasperating in the way the film won’t reveal the exact dates and provenance of its audio; Madonna will sometimes speak about her past and her family in a British accent, showing that the interview comes from the later era of her marriage to Guy Ritchie, and sometimes her voice will switch back to her native Michigan.
Or read this on The Guardian