Madeline’s Madeline Reviewed: From The New Yorker

By Richard Brody

“Like most other great films, Josephine Decker’s new movie, “Madeline’s Madeline,” which opens Friday, is many things at once—a passionate emotional experience, a conjoined vision of intimate and public life, a reinvention of the very elements of filmmaking. It’s also, incidentally, a decisive repudiation of one of the most enduring film-critical shibboleths: that straightforward storytelling is antithetical to directorial originality.

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The dramatic clarity and psychological acuity with which Decker (who also co-wrote the film, with Donna di Novelli) conveys the characters and their conflicts is only an infinitesimal part of this vast creation, however. Though “Madeline’s Madeline” runs barely an hour and a half, it packs an epic’s worth of expressive detail, imaginative incident, emotional variety and intensity, and aesthetic invention. The tight bond between the movie’s profusion of closely observed details, fleeting moments of intimate poignancy, grand dramatic passions, and social insight is nearly fractal in its unity, yet it also evokes a sense of spontaneity and artistic discovery at every stage of the cinematic process. That sense of discovery is equally a part of the viewing experience; Decker’s approach to every aspect of cinematic form and composition is as distinctive, as freely inventive, as is her renewal of the movie’s classical subject…”

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