Vox Lux
Neon | Release Date: December 7, 2018 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
67
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 39 Critic Reviews
Positive:
22
Mixed:
14
Negative:
3
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleDec 7, 2018
There are great movies every year, but every so often there’s a movie that’s not only great but new, that advances the form a little, that pushes movies to a different place. Such movies get remembered as the thing that happened in cinema that year. The thing that happened in 2018 is Vox Lux. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangDec 6, 2018
The movie doesn’t just feel coldly analytical; it’s raw and enveloping, darkly funny and terribly alive. Read full review
100
The TelegraphRobbie CollinSep 4, 2018
All-pervasive millennial unease – the sense the world no longer works as it used to, or should – is Vox Lux’s plangent root-position chord, and the film offers no easy cure – beyond Celeste’s genuinely great, and Gaga-like, music. Read full review
100
CineVueJohn BleasdaleSep 4, 2018
With Vox Lux, Corbet has delivered a towering film, a unique uncompromising vision that reveals the darkness on the edge of town that lurks in the depths of the spotlight. It’s funny, thrilling, deadly serious and achieves genuine depth. Read full review
91
The Film StageRory O'ConnorSep 15, 2018
Corbet’s second feature owes a debt or two to filmmakers reveling in provocation, but it is no doubt the work of a daring original. Read full review
90
The New York TimesManohla DargisDec 6, 2018
Vox Lux is an audacious story about a survivor who becomes a star, and a deeply satisfying, narratively ambitious jolt of a movie. Read full review
90
Rolling StonePeter TraversDec 5, 2018
You should prepare to be wowed by Natalie Portman, who delivers a take-no-prisoners performance as Celeste, a swaggering rock diva who tends to burn down everything in her path, especially when she’s crossed. Read full review
90
Screen DailyJonathan RomneySep 4, 2018
Vox Lux is intellectually charged spectacle, with one foot in the Euro-art tradition and the other ankle-deep in the pop zeitgeist. Read full review
90
VarietyGuy LodgeSep 4, 2018
Powered in its second half by a riveting performance of fiercely mannered bravado by Natalie Portman, as a kamikaze electropop diva running her Faustian fame off and under the rails, Vox Lux paints a sharp, shellacked portrait of a ghost in the celebrity machine. Read full review
90
The Hollywood ReporterStephen DaltonSep 4, 2018
Corbet's high-caliber melodrama combines food for thought with sense-blitzing spectacle. Between screaming tantrums and booming anthems, it leaves us with a nagging sense that history never quite repeats itself, but sometimes rhymes. Usually to a thumping disco beat. Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comSheila O'MalleyDec 7, 2018
The film is an onslaught, sometimes silly, sometimes profound, but always riveting and emotional, and dazzlingly sure of itself. Read full review
83
The PlaylistJessica KiangSep 4, 2018
Wrapped up in Portman’s like-it-or-loathe-it-you-cannot-ignore-it performance (I love it, for the record) and Corbet’s astonishingly confident filmmaking chutzpah — all fast-motion montages, off-kilter framing, and bravura soundtrack collisions between Walker’s score and Sia/Celeste’s pop tracks — it somehow becomes a jagged, messy but endlessly intriguing whole. Read full review
83
IndieWireMichael NordineSep 4, 2018
Vox Lux is a powerful, haunting film in part because Portman is a powerful, haunting presence — you can’t turn away from her, even if you occasionally want to. Read full review
80
EmpireIan FreerMay 1, 2019
Even if it doesn’t quite go beyond the bubblegum, Corbet’s fusion of A Star Is Born melodramatics with art-house stylings is cold, raw, dark filmmaking. And Portman, like her quiff, is an acquired taste but immense. Read full review
80
The GuardianDamon WiseSep 5, 2018
It’s part satire, part social comment, all fragmented and downright inconclusive. Read full review
75
Philadelphia Daily NewsDan DeLucaDec 20, 2018
It’s not an easy watch: It might be the darkest pop music movie ever made. But it largely succeeds at its main goal, which it not to entertain, but make you think. Read full review
75
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsDec 12, 2018
Vox Lux is the sardonic yang to the sincere, heart-yanking yin of this season’s big awards fave, “A Star is Born.” Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliDec 7, 2018
One possible misstep along the way is Willem Dafoe’s narration – it’s too wordy for the material and doesn’t quite work. Still, that’s a minor quibble about an otherwise dead-on portrait of a lost soul who may never quite find herself but who makes an uneasy peace with what the world has made of her. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzSep 8, 2018
Corbet’s work is a big, sloppy wet kiss to all manner of rise-and-fall clichés. Yet it mostly works, with Corbet as eager to display his influences...as he is to prove he can handle his own gonzo-spectacle set-pieces. Read full review
67
Original-CinKim HughesDec 18, 2018
In the end, all the sorrow and horror and anger and angst just seem pointless despite Corbet’s stated intention to juxtapose the meaningless against the tragic. Read full review
63
New York PostSara StewartDec 7, 2018
Natalie Portman is captivating as a damaged electro-pop star known as Celeste in Vox Lux, a flawed, flashy drama from actor/director Brady Corbet (“The Childhood of a Leader”). Read full review
63
Movie NationRoger MooreDec 4, 2018
Vox Lux is “A Star is Born” for the bubblegum babies of pop. Read full review
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