Madeline's Madeline
Oscilloscope Laboratories | Release Date: August 10, 2018 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
82
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 31 Critic Reviews
Positive:
26
Mixed:
5
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Boston GlobeTy BurrSep 12, 2018
In a way I’ve never before seen done onscreen, Madeline’s Madeline fuses triumph and tragedy until the two feel strong and indistinguishable. Read full review
100
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternAug 9, 2018
Ms. Howard is nothing less than mesmerizing. She seems to be giving a master class in unswerving focus and absolute simplicity. It’s a superb piece of acting about acting, and a harbinger of great things to come in this young actor’s future. Read full review
100
The New YorkerRichard BrodyAug 7, 2018
Decker pushes the action to the breaking point of fury, which the cast—and especially Howard, in one of the most accomplished teen performances ever—embodies with a flaying and self-scourging vulnerability. Read full review
100
Village VoiceBilge Ebiri
Who’s telling this story? you might wonder, and therein lies the radical, breathtaking beauty of this film. Madeline’s Madeline is at once intoxicated by the world and deeply terrified of it. Read full review
100
IndieWireDavid Ehrlich
In an overwhelmingly dense film that never feels as if it’s only ever doing one thing, Decker’s form never forces you to choose between the story and its very meta shadows. Read full review
100
Screen DailyAnthony Kaufman
It’s a distinctive world that Decker and her team have created. Among this year’s coming-of-age films, it’s got to be one of the most original. But it’s also one of the more perplexing. Read full review
100
The Hollywood ReporterDeborah Young
Madeline’s Madeline is both heady and head-scratching. Anyone who has ever taken an acting class and witnessed the psychodramas brewed there will relate to this bubbling kettle of raw, unleashed emotions stirred up in shifting power grabs. Read full review
91
The PlaylistGregory Ellwood
From a narrative standpoint, Decker and her three writing collaborators have fashioned a reasonably compelling story. What makes the film transcendent is how she uses the art of cinema to convey it and Howard’s phenomenal performance. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangAug 16, 2018
Madeline’s Madeline is the product of a lengthy, improvisation-heavy collaboration between Decker and her star, an astonishing teenage discovery named Helena Howard. It is also a skillful and imaginative blurring of fact and fiction, albeit one that insistently calls the act of such blurring into question. Read full review
90
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinAug 7, 2018
Thrillingly confounding. Read full review
85
The AtlanticDavid SimsAug 10, 2018
A tense, loopy look at acting and writing, the movie is at times deliberately off-putting. But it’s anchored by a star-making turn from Helena Howard, who plays the fascinating, inscrutable figure at the story’s center. Read full review
83
ConsequenceCaroline SiedeAug 14, 2018
Whether or not the film fully lands will come down to how much you’re willing to give yourself over to its theatrical world. Like the immersive artform it’s examining, Madeline’s Madeline is frequently truthful and sometimes indulgent. Read full review
83
Entertainment WeeklyLeah GreenblattAug 8, 2018
Madeline is the kind of movie that won’t come anywhere near the mainstream, and clearly wasn’t meant to. But for the dozens of viewers it will almost certainly baffle or exasperate, there will be one or two completely captured by its peculiar magic. Read full review
83
The Film StageJordan Raup
There will never be easy answers when dealing with the soul-baring act of producing truly great art, but Josephine Decker’s film is as mesmerizing a plunge into the process as one is likely to find in modern cinema. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 18, 2019
It’s an immersive and exotic experience. Howard is a revelation. Read full review
80
The Observer (UK)Simran HansMay 14, 2019
The dilemma she presents is ethical: is it fair to ask someone to traumatise (or retraumatise) themselves for the sake of art? Rather boldly, it seems as though Decker is also asking the question of herself. Read full review
80
EmpireIan FreerMay 9, 2019
A film as much about its form as content, Madeline’s Madeline is a difficult-to-watch but heady mixture of raw emotion, big ideas and cinematic fireworks. If for no other reason, see it now to be on the ground floor at the unveiling of a new star: Helena Howard. Read full review
80
CineVuePatrick Gamble
A display of dazzling and disorientating technique, this interior tale of a young girl’s mental disintegration is like falling through a hall of mirrors, with each performance reflecting and refracting a portion of Madeline’s personality as fantasy and reality become impossible to separate. Read full review
75
Movie NationRoger MooreSep 9, 2018
Howard’s magnetic performance, delivered in a blizzard of mood-swing close-ups, hints at any number of possibilities. Read full review
75
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsAug 30, 2018
The ideas aren’t exactly new here, and one need only look at the entire career of Chicago filmmaker Joe Swanberg (a producer here) to realize the difficulty of shaping living, breathing, vital art out of gormless improv techniques. Here, clearly, the actors have been well and truly guided along the way, and Howard is a serious find. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleDavid LewisAug 23, 2018
Even if it’s a film that will challenge any viewer, it benefits from a strong premise, a story line that more or less holds up, and three knockout performances. Rarely has the acting process been explored in such a cinematically provocative way. Read full review
75
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd Aug 10, 2018
Madeline’s Madeline, the third feature from writer-director Josephine Decker, is a self-devouring thing: a movie about artistic process that doubles as a document of—and even a commentary on—its own artistic process. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineChuck BowenJun 29, 2018
True to the implications of its title, the devotional insularity of Madeline's Madeline is suffocating, which is appropriate for a film about a mentally imbalanced teenage artist but suffocating nonetheless. Read full review
70
VarietyPeter DebrugeAug 17, 2018
Madeline’s Madeline mistakes intimacy for honesty, and it mis-assumes that audiences care nearly as much about the creative process as actors and directors do. Read full review
70
The New York TimesA.O. ScottAug 9, 2018
if Madeline’s Madeline is sometimes unconvincing and frequently unnerving, it is never uninteresting. In its final moments it ascends into heady, almost visionary territory, like a balloon caught in a sudden updraft, and becomes a singular and strange experience. Read full review
63
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Johanna SchnellerAug 23, 2018
Decker evolved her project with her actors over five months, and it’s both pro and con that, boy howdy, it sure feels improvised. Read full review
60
Film ThreatMatthew PassantinoAug 10, 2018
Over the course of 93 minutes, Madeline’s Madeline simultaneously feels like nothing happens and everything happens. It’s a strange, sometimes frustrating dichotomy that ultimately gives the film its bizarre edge. Read full review
60
Film Journal InternationalSimi HorwitzAug 7, 2018
In the end, the fine acting cannot salvage the uninspired material that fancies itself cutting-edge yet is paradoxically dated. Madeline’s Madeline might have been innovative in the mid-’60s, but its novelty has long expired. Read full review
50
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenAug 23, 2018
Despite the strong lead performance and these immersive aesthetics, Madeline remains frustratingly at a distance. Even as the movie puts us inside her head, it somehow fails to illuminate her. Read full review
50
RogerEbert.comMonica CastilloAug 10, 2018
Sticky racial politics aside, there are a few inspired moments in Madeline’s Madeline, and most of them belong to the fiercely talented Helena Howard. Read full review
40
Austin ChronicleRichard WhittakerAug 29, 2018
Unfortunately, what should have naturalistic depth seems oddly superficial, and an attempt to dispose of traditional structure becomes episodic. As with many failed experiments, there are still, at least, some interesting takeaways. Read full review
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