Metacritic reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thrillingly confounding.

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.

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.

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.

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.