Starring Natalie Portman and Jude Law, VOX LUX (2018, streaming on Netflix) is about a young woman who becomes a pop star after a severe personal tragedy only to face her many regrets years later. The film is spiced with intelligent dialogue and titillating insights into the music business along with great artistic direction and performances, but otherwise it’s, well, a hot mess.

The film opens with 14-year-old Celeste surviving a school shooting and performing a song she wrote at the memorial service, which becomes a hit and opens doors for her to record an album and eventually become a pop singer. The film then fast forwards to her as an aging star increasingly unhinged by stress, regret, and substance abuse.

I’m not sure how to review this one. There’s a lot that’s likeable in the first half. The school shooting is genuinely horrifying, the memorial service touching, the orchestrations and discussions about the music industry spicy and authentic. The artistic direction is actually very good. The actors give solid performances, though the young Celeste’s Staten Island accent comes and goes, and she’s never really convincing as a charismatic singer, performer, and emerging savvy businesswoman modeled after Lady Gaga.

The rest of the film is Celeste as an aging pop star on the edge or past the edge of freaking out (with scenes playing out similarly though at a lower volume than HER SMELL, which came out the same year) plus a long stage performance that may be intended to be evocative of Hazel O’Connors’s iconic separation from her humanity at the end of BREAKING GLASS. While Portman delivers and again there are titillating insights about the music business, I was never clear on what the film was trying to say despite its Shakespearean tone, and as much as I love Portman, I didn’t believe her as a pop star in this any more than I did the actress playing her younger self. Add to that another mass shooting that again serves as a plot device and makes all the violence feel ugly for its inclusion and exploitative for shock value rather than informing a theme. The overall result reaches for poignancy but ultimately never really says anything.

Watching VOX LUX, I sometimes glimpsed the beautiful, Shakespearean, poignant whole I believe the writer/director was going for, but while many of the parts in the film are extremely well done and compelling, in my opinion their sum just didn’t add up to the whole of its lofty ambition, and when it comes to “fame leads to exhaustion and abuse,” we’ve seen the basic story told many times before. A tighter focus, perhaps sticking with the young singer (and picking one with a golden voice, as despite all of Lady Gaga’s marketing savvy and understanding of pop music, she is a stellar singer with natural charisma), might have made a huge difference here, but instead the film reached too far and grasped far less.

COHERENCE (2013, streaming on Amazon Prime) is a science-fiction film that goes far beyond its limitations with interesting ideas and a close look at how facing the unknown can punish the human psyche.

The film opens with people arriving at a dinner party, where we get to know their stories, including fertile ground for potential interpersonal conflicts. The group talks about a comet due to pass overhead that night. When cell phones die and the power goes out across the neighborhood, they treat it as just an entertaining twist for the party. But then they notice there’s a house down the street that’s lit up. The house looks like theirs. And there are people inside who look just like them.

Shot over five days on a shoestring and largely improvised by the cast, the film achieves an impressive sum for its parts. It starts off rough, with everybody talking at once during the party, which feels improvised. Once the central conflict reveals itself, however, things get real interesting and the actors fall into a more natural rhythm. The result is sort of a sci-fi BLAIR WITCH PROJECT as they find themselves in an escalating quantum event.

By the end, the characters question who everybody is and even where they are, start to break down facing the unknown, and one of them decides on a dangerous solution.

Overall, COHERENCE doesn’t make any of my sci-fi top lists, but it’s impressive for what it achieves for its limitations, and I found the premise intriguing, with an entertaining result.