At the Beacon Theatre on June 5, Julia Garner walked into a club scene in cropped platinum hair and red lipstick: Madonna circa 1985, made flesh by an Emmy-winning actress, inside a 16-cameo film that drops Benedict Cumberbatch into a bathroom dance number, casts Kate Moss and Sabrina Carpenter alongside Honey Dijon and Arca, and hands Madonna's own daughter Lourdes Leon the closing line, 'Cut, bitch.' It's been 21 years since the original Confessions on a Dance Floor in 2005, the disco-mirrorball pivot that turned a 47-year-old pop star into the biggest dance album of the decade. The woman behind that reinvention is now 67, self-directing a 13-minute visual album she screened at Tribeca on June 5 and posted to YouTube on June 8. Her chart shows you exactly how. A Leo Sun parked in the 12th house (the private chamber where mythology gets built before the world ever sees it) sits next to a Virgo Moon, Mercury, and Pluto stellium — three or more planets piled into one sign — conjunct her Virgo Ascendant (the rising sign that becomes the public face of the chart), and that combination is the engine that has run every reinvention she has ever staged.
Inside the Confessions II Premiere
The premiere was the actual film, not a teaser. Confessions II: The Film runs roughly 13 minutes, six tracks from Madonna's forthcoming studio album of the same name (Warner Records, July 3 release), directed by TORSO (David Toro and Solomon Chase), and shot over six months across London, Los Angeles, and New York. Tribeca Film Festival screened it at the Beacon Theatre on June 5; Madonna sat down with Jimmy Fallon afterward and told the room, 'I came to Earth to be a doer not a watcher.' It went up on YouTube at 11 a.m. ET on June 8. If you are a fixed-sign reader (Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, Aquarius), this is the cultural moment that maps directly onto your own chart's pressure point this summer, and the rest of this piece walks you through why.