Synopsis
In 1999, teenage sisters Celeste and Eleanor survive a seismic, violent tragedy. The sisters compose and perform a song about their experience, making something lovely and cathartic out of a catastrophe - while also catapulting Celeste to stardom. By 2017, Celeste is a mother to a teenage daughter of her own and is struggling to navigate a career fraught with scandals when another act of terrifying violence demands her attention.
Your Movie Library
Cast
- Natalie PortmanCeleste Montgomery
- Jude LawManager
- Raffey CassidyYoung Celeste / Albertine
- Stacy MartinEleanor "Ellie" Montgomery
- Jennifer EhleJosie
- Willem DafoeNarrator (voice)
- Maria DizziaMs. Dwyer
- Christopher AbbottJournalist
- Logan Riley BrunerCullen Active
- Meg GibsonMrs. Montgomery
Recommendations
- 100
CineVue
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. - 100
The Telegraph
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. - 91
The Film Stage
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. - 90
The Hollywood Reporter
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. - 90
Screen Daily
Vox Lux is intellectually charged spectacle, with one foot in the Euro-art tradition and the other ankle-deep in the pop zeitgeist. - 90
Variety
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. - 83
IndieWire
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. - 83
The Playlist
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.
