VOX LUX

Commencing with a teenager, massacring his contemporaries, resulting in the burgeoning career of a surviving victim, “Vox Lux” mimics real and fictional lives of those whose meteoric rise to lionization is fueled by drugs, alcohol and their own manufactured megalomania; this is a tiresome topic that has engulfed filmgoers, especially in 2018.

“A Star is Born”, in its fourth avatar, still worthy of revisiting; “Bohemian Rhapsody”, justifiably, Rami Malek’s depiction of “Queen” was overwhelmingly remarkable; Natalie Portman, as “Celeste”, a survivor of her school’s annihilation, becomes a rock star at the age of fourteen; Raffey Cassidy is substantive in a dual role as the teenage “Celeste” and “Albertine”, Celeste’s daughter; Portman’s supreme effort cannot salvage a meaningless, meandering plot; Celeste’s monstrous, self-centered paranoia, cruelty, insidious treatment of her sister, “Eleanor” (Stacy Martin); her altruistic ingestion of drugs and alcohol transcend her counterfeit, fifteen minute concluding song and dance spectacle.

Writer/director Brady Corbet’s political agenda is redundant; living in a culture where “murdering the myriad” has become sport; “Vox Lux” is a placid stab at a reality we’ve become accustomed to.

ONE & 1/2 STARS!

Peneflix