QUEEN OF MANHATTAN - Mark Reviews Movies

Queen of Mahattan, Level 33 Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 18, 2025

Who was Vanessa Del Rio? That's the question posed by Queen of Manhattan, and it's also the one that remains at the end of this shallow and unfocused biography.

The very, very basic answer, which is only broadly addressed by this movie that's supposedly about her, is that Del Rio was a popular pornographic star of the 1970s and '80s. The first scene of writer/director Thomas Mignone's movie sees her set for one of those hurried and cheap productions. It's mostly played as a joke, a piece of the set goes out of control, but Vanessa takes the error into her own hands, which is also a gag, since she winds up grabbing her co-star's genitals as a way of stopping him from swinging on a malfunctioning rig.

This quality is the one thing the movie wants communicate about Vanessa, played by Vivian Lamolli. She tries to maintain control of every part of her life, whether that be her career, which goes from working at a peep show in Times Square to becoming recognized by fans on the street in a matter of years, or her attitude toward how to live. Vanessa wants to get as much pleasure out of life while she's alive, so the notion of being paid for doing so and being celebrated for it is essentially a bonus.

There isn't much to this character apart from that, and we can early on as Mignone repeatedly stages Vanessa behind a moving panel, a la the kind of private show in a seedy little club that gets her noticed in the first place. Vanessa fourth wall-breaking monologues, spoken with the kind of breathless seduction that she adopts while with clients or on the couple of porno shoots the movie actually portrays, end up coming across as phony. To be clear, Vanessa obviously believes everything she says during them, but the movie uses them as a gimmick to make it seem as if we are actually learning something about her. There's nothing more in those monologues than the rest of the movie shows repeatedly.

What's strange is that Vanessa often feels like a background player or a second thought among the rest of the plot. It revolves around her boss Dominique (Drea de Matteo) trying to keep Vanessa working once things start to go wrong in her personal life, because the boss' boss Mickey (David Proval) is a rough gangster who's willing to threaten, injure, and even kill to keep his profits coming.

Meanwhile, Jesse Metcalfe plays Carley, an undercover cop who wants to stop Mickey and doesn't play by the rules. The vice detective has his own personal motive for wanting to put an end to the gangster's assorted sex trades, because Carley has a boyfriend at home who's dying of AIDS. As for how that connects to Mickey and why it makes the cop so determined on such a personal level, a movie that is so generally disinterred in its main character certainly isn't going to work out the details of the motivation of a supporting one.

The screenplay moves back and forth between Vanessa's life, both in the present and in her past, and that other bit of plotting. It's clear that Mignone wants to paint a larger picture of this place, time, and business, and an early shot of Vanessa and her friend/fellow sex worker Sandy (Taryn Manning) on the blatantly green-screened streets of '70s New York City kind of embodies how that effort comes across. It vaguely looks right, but we can see right through the illusion.

Much of this becomes a series of scenes of characters explaining what has happened off-screen, such as Vanessa sudden fame or even the death of her mother (played by Elizabeth Rodriguez), a religious woman who attempted to shelter her young daughter (played by Isla Farris) from the world but kept news clippings of Vanessa's time as a more "legitimate" dancer and performer. Her father, played by Esai Morales, left the two of them when Vanessa was a kid, and a pair of gimmicks, in which an adult Vanessa imagines a conversation with her father and the young Vanessa imagines him as a masked wrestler who promises to protect her, come across as generic, unconvincing bits of psychoanalysis.

That's an odd choice, too, since Queen of Manhattan otherwise doesn't judge or look down upon Vanessa. To suggest that the entirety of her life comes down to some father issues is both a cheap cliché and kind of counter to the notion that this character is as strong as she repeatedly says she is. Unfortunately, that sort of undercooked storytelling and character development, though, fits in just fine with the rest of the movie.

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