Vox Lux

"If the second half of Vox Lux had lived up to the first, it could have been something exceptional. Early on, the film’s narrator states Celeste was born “in America”, no state or city specified. Structured around three tragedies—a school shooting, 9/11, and a 2017 terrorist attack in Croatia—Vox Lux is an essentially American story."

"Portman's performance as a strung-out pop star is appropriately hard-bitten and manic."

"Vox Lux paints a sharp, shellacked portrait of a ghost in the celebrity machine."

"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..."

"It’s part satire, part social comment, all fragmented and downright inconclusive."

"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."

"Corbet's high-caliber melodrama combines food for thought with sense-blitzing spectacle."

"Vox Lux comes to share Celeste's vapidity rather than reflect it, but it says a lot about Corbet's possibilities that even in the film's most frustrating moments, his daring and imagination shine through."