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Damien Chazelle is obsessed with the punishing pursuit of perfection. Whether it's finding an immaculate tempo, hurtling into space, or making it big in Hollywood, his films feature characters who are willing to endure physical and emotional torture to reach the finish line. If " La La Land " was his wide-eyed, sentimental look at the movie machine, "Babylon" feels like a very intentional counter to the criticisms of that film. It's a lavish 1920s-period piece about how often the silver screen images that feel like magic are really the product of incredibly hard work, broken dreams, and a lot of luck. Multiple sequences in "Babylon" detail how much work goes into two seconds of film, whether it's a field of dozens of extras sitting around while a camera is obtained or the difficult perfection needed when recording sound. Those two excellent scenes remind us that none of this is easy, even if it all looks so much fun.

Is it all worth it? That's the tough question. Chazelle gives lip service to the idea that this version of landing on the moon is worth the trip, but he drags his characters and the viewers through so much misanthropy to get there that it's hard to believe him. "Babylon" is a film of stunning parts—both individual scenes, performances, and tech elements—but it feels like the magic touch that Chazelle needed to pull them together in an honest way eludes him. There's something to be said about a film being so robustly unapologetic, but I felt as manipulated and deluded as the outsiders in this film who are eaten up by the Hollywood machine by the time it was over. One might argue that's intentional—a "feel bad" Hollywood movie is rare—but it's the difference between pulling back a curtain and simply rubbing your face in elephant shit.

And that's how "Babylon" opens, introducing us to Manny Torres ( Diego Calva ), a Mexican American in the city of angels at the end of the silent film era. He's trying to get an elephant to an insane Hollywood party, the kind of drug- and sex-fueled affair that was only whispered about in the gossip rags of the time. Chazelle uses the orgiastic bacchanal to introduce his players, including an aspiring actress perfectly named Nellie LaRoy ( Margot Robbie ), who catches Manny's eye just as her star is about to rise. We also meet the suave Jack Conrad ( Brad Pitt ), a silent film star about to leave his third wife and be struck by the fickle finger of fame as talkies come into the picture and the wheel turns to a new era of stars. There's a jazz trumpet player named Sidney ( Jovan Adepo ) and the underwritten role of a cabaret singer named Lady Fay Zhu ( Li Jun Li ). Gossip journalist Elinor St. John ( Jean Smart ) writes about it all while recognizable faces like Lukas Haas , Olivia Wilde , Spike Jonze , Jeff Garlin , and even Flea flirt on the edges of the story.

It's an undeniably ace ensemble, led by another fearless turn from Robbie and a star-making one from Calva, but Pitt is the stand-out, conveying a sense of lost glory that sometimes feels almost personal. Pitt has been a star for over 30 years—he's seen legends like Jack Conrad come and go, and he imbues his performance with a relatable melancholy that gives the entire film depth that it could have used in a few more places.

Chazelle's ambitious tapestry approach focuses on the ascending arcs of the outsiders—Manny, Sidney, and Nellie don't understand they're part of a system that values them about as much as it does the equipment it needs to shoot the films (maybe less). Even the star Jack Conrad will discover how disposable legends can be. All of them become power players in their own way—Nellie holds the screen in a way that few actresses other than Robbie could convey convincingly; Sidney's musical talent ascends as sound takes over the silents; Manny is clearly one of the smarter people on a set, and that grants him an increasing number of decisions. There's an underdeveloped love story between Manny and Nellie, but this film is more about the love of movies and Hollywood history than romance. It is also loaded with an overwhelming blend of historical detail and urban legends. Chazelle clearly did his homework.

And, once again, it feels like the filmmaker's commitment elevated his team of craftspeople. Linus Sandgren's fluid cinematography gives the film a lot of its momentum—his shots are rarely flashy but always propulsive. Justin Hurwitz's score might be the best of the year, finding recurring themes for its characters that gives the entire piece more of a sense of opera—a connection that fits this story's dark tone and tragic endings. The production design straddles that line between feeling genuine and also larger than life at the same time. The intercutting of the stories sometimes feels like it gets away from the excellent editor Tom Cross , but that's more a product of Chazelle's occasionally unfocused script than anything in the editing room.

About that script. "Babylon" is a test of whether or not a film can be the sum of its gorgeous pieces. A great score, a talented ensemble, and expert cinematography—all are undeniable here. And yet there are narrative elements of "Babylon" that feel hollow from the very beginning and only get more so as Chazelle tries to inject some manipulative lessons into the final scenes. A film like "Babylon" can be aggressively bitter and contemptuous, but I found it hypocritical when it tries to play the "isn't it all worth it" card that everyone knows is coming in the final scenes. Fans of this film seem to be adoring this finale, but it struck me as the falsest material in Chazelle's career.

There's a sense that Chazelle is suggesting that we don't get " Singin' in the Rain " if lives aren't destroyed during the transition from silent to talkies, and isn't it great that we got that movie ? That's a deeply cynical and superficial way to look at filmmaking. If he thinks he's pulling back the curtain on a broken industry, he reveals himself to be a part of that warped system in the end. It's like he doesn't want to seriously consider how his beloved art will destroy its dreamers as long as his raging party keeps going.

Available only in theaters on December 23rd.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film Credits

Babylon (2022)

Rated R for strong and crude sexual content, graphic nudity, bloody violence, drug use, and pervasive language.

189 minutes

Diego Calva as Manny Torres

Margot Robbie as Nellie LaRoy

Brad Pitt as Jack Conrad

Jovan Adepo as Sidney Palmer

Li Jun Li as Lady Fay Zhu

Jean Smart as Elinor St. John

Tobey Maguire as James McKay

J.C. Currais as Truck Driver

Jimmy Ortega as Elephant Wrangler

Marcos A. Ferraez as Police Officer

Lukas Haas as George Munn

Patrick Fugit as Officer Elwood

Eric Roberts as Robert Roy

Cici Lau as Gho Zhu

David Lau as Sam Wong Zhu

Rory Scovel as The Count

Max Minghella as Irving Thalberg

Samara Weaving as Constance Moore

Jeff Garlin as Don Wallach

Ethan Suplee as Wilson

Marc Platt as Producer

Damien Chazelle

Cinematographer

Linus Sandgren
Justin Hurwitz

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Margot Robbie dances as Nellie LaRoy, blissed out in a red dress in a huge ballroom with people partying in the balcony above are covered in streamers and golden light in the film Babylon

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Babylon is absolute fire — and everyone in it is burning

Whiplash director Damien Chazelle offers a Hollywood opus defined by passion and destruction

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The first widely available film stock in America was made with a nitrate base. Highly flammable and barely stable, this nitrate film — used from the earliest days of filmmaking until the introduction of safer acetate film stock in the 1940s and ’50s — became more dangerous with age if it wasn’t cared for properly: It released flammable gas as it decomposed into goo, then dust. In the final stages of its breakdown, it was capable of spontaneous combustion, setting history ablaze if it got hot enough on a summer day.

Countless films were lost in this way. There were fires in a Fox film vault in 1937, in MGM’s in 1965, in the National Archives in 1978 . In the silent-film era, projection-booth fires were commonplace, as the heat from projectors was often enough to ignite the nitrate film running through them.

As for the nitrate film stock from that era that survives? Much of it has fallen into decay. In Bill Morrison’s 2002 avant-garde film Decasia , scenes from silent-era films are presented in collage in their eroding state, as images that once depicted great emotion or intrigue are overtaken by the rot of time.

And yet the movie stars that once drew people to these films dreamed of immortality.

A director and crew gather behind a camera in the 1920s as the sun sets off-screen in front of them in the California desert, in a scene from the film Babylon

Immortality is what everyone wants in Babylon , the divisive new film from Damien Chazelle, acclaimed writer-director of Whiplash , La La Land , and First Man . It starts at the top: Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) is the biggest movie star in Hollywood at the peak of the silent-film era, surveying his kingdom with pride, knowing he’s fueling the dreams of the common folk and has built something that will last. Nellie LaRoy ( perennial Harley Quinn Margot Robbie ) has nothing but a self-selected name and the conviction that she deserves to be as big a star as Conrad. And Manny Torres (Diego Calva) is a waiter to the rich who dreams of making something that lasts, like a movie.

Babylon follows the fates and fortunes of these three and others around them as they diverge and intersect over the course of years. It starts with an extended party, a raucous bacchanal all three of them attend — Jack as a guest of honor, Manny as the help, and Nellie as a party-crasher. Their story is the same one Hollywood continually tells about itself and the people that sustain it: a story about big dreams and the grand life that might follow for a few people who are crazy enough to believe they might come true.

Across Babylon ’s 188-minute run time, Nellie and Manny see their stocks rise. The former becomes the star she always believed she was, and the latter becomes a studio executive, all through a lot of grit and a bit of right-place, right-time fortune. Meanwhile, change is on the horizon, as the 1927 premiere of The Jazz Singer throws showbiz off its axis, and Jack Conrad’s world begins to fall apart. Then everyone’s world follows, because fame is fickle and fleeting, and no one gets to be on top forever.

Nellie and Manny dance close enough to kiss in the opening party from the film Babylon

This is a song most movie-lovers can sing by heart, and one Chazelle has been singing in some form or another since Whiplash , his breakout film. His stories are about extraordinary people who dare to dream, who drag themselves from the wreckage — literally, in some cases — to realize that dream and be lionized for it, even if it costs them everything else in their lives. In Chazelle’s cinematic vision, art is more vital and beautiful than life itself, and the people who would set themselves ablaze for art, whether in Earth’s orbit or behind a drum kit, are the noblest of souls.

A message like this — pursuing fame is an act of hubris, and artists are transcendent in their foolish vainglory — is highly dependent on its messenger, and Babylon dances on a razor’s edge from its first frame. Yet Chazelle, alongside his longtime editor Tom Cross and composer Justin Hurwitz, are among the most accomplished dance partners making movies right now.

There’s a musicality to Chazelle’s films as he, Hurwitz, and Cross use the visual medium of film with the improvisational vigor of jazz musicians, and Babylon is their showstopper. The cuts are syncopated to get the audience moving. The color palette is bold and brassy, blurring the line between the images on screen and the horns that fuel them. The camera lingers on performers and performances: a showstopping, manic dance from Nellie LaRoy in the film’s opening bash/orgy, a drunken climb up a hill by Jack Conrad, utterly wasted, right before he miraculously pulls himself together to deliver a perfect take. The tightening of Manny’s brow and lips as he assumes the role of an executive, and does whatever it takes to convince the movers and shakers that he belongs in the room with them.

Trumpeter Sidney Palmer plays his horn with his band, all dressed in tuxes against the golden glow and balloons of the debauched party around them in the film Babylon

Yet for all of Babylon ’s glorying in art and artists, in Hollywood and dreams, it would all be in vain without a compelling reason why . This is where the film is most volatile. Its title deliberately evokes Hollywood Babylon , Kenneth Anger’s notorious (and largely fabricated) 1959 tell-all about the golden age of Tinseltown, a book that helped cement in the public consciousness the idea that the glitz and glamour of show business came part and parcel with a seedy underbelly of sex, drugs, and violence — often at the cost of women and queer people caught under its sensational gaze, and the tabloids that preceded or followed the book’s publication.

Babylon leans into this sensationalism, first with its title, then with its opening party, an orgy that climaxes with an elephant parading through a mansion in order to distract from the body of a girl who overdosed after a sexual rendezvous. As Nellie’s and Manny’s fortunes rise, staying in the game forces them both to make compromises that chip away at their humanity. Nellie burns bright and hot, turning to drugs and gambling. Others, like the burlesque singer Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), lose their livelihoods to her wanton appetites. Manny’s naked ambition causes him to treat other marginalized people as stepping stones, going as far as to ask Black trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) to perform in blackface in order to appease markets in the South, keep a shoot on schedule, and save his bosses’ money.

The beautiful collision between Nellie and Manny at the start of Babylon signals the start of their respective rises. As the film builds toward its conclusion, it tangles them together again in freefall. Their rapid descent reaches its nadir as Manny embarks on a trip to Hollywood’s version of hell, hosted by loan shark and lurid thrillseeker James McKay (Tobey Maguire, one of Babylon ’s producers, playing wonderfully against type). In his hands, the salacious orgy of the film’s opening meets its horrific opposite.

Manny looks on nervously as James McKay (played by Toby Maguire) incredulously holds up some money in his hands while the two stand in an ominous cellar surrounded by unsavory types in the film Babylon

Babylon is long enough that it can cause viewers to wonder — multiple times! — whether sensationalism and navel-gazing are the film’s only tricks. The movie echoes the sensational shock and awe of the star machine, inviting the audience to marvel and recoil at the wonder and horror it has wrought. But Chazelle is deft enough to suggest, more than once, that he’s playing at something deeper and more challenging.

In the broadest reading, Babylon is a profane paean to film as a uniquely communal medium, gathering the collective hopes and dreams of everyone who experiences them. The film celebrates cinema as the ultimate end goal, a worthy reason for these messy, broken people to immolate themselves in the act of creation. In one of the film’s best scenes, Jack Conrad confronts entertainment journalist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart) over a negative profile she wrote. In response, Elinor tells him the truth of things: Neither of them matter. The movies do. There will be other stars and other journalists, but they are all in the service of what the beam of light projects on the silver screen.

This story, however, has been told. We’ve seen it in bona fide classics like Singin’ in the Rain , and in more recent works like the 2011 Best Picture winner The Artist . Both those films are concerned with similar ideas, and set in the exact same era. Chazelle has even already delivered a loving homage to Hollywood in La La Land , his musical about an aspiring actress who sings about the fools who dream. Babylon , in all of its sound and fury, is redundant. And then Chazelle makes one final audacious pivot: He acknowledges this in the text.

Manny stands in a trench coat under the awning of a movie palace, in front of the marquee posters of classic Hollywood in the film Babylon

In an astonishing finale, Babylon marries bombast and tragedy in one fell swoop, embracing Chazelle’s hubris as an artist by letting him insert himself into the cinematic canon, while he’s endeavoring to earn his place there at the same time. In its final moments, he isn’t content to just tell another story about the rarefied few who dreamed, and built an empire where countless others could dream along with them. Instead, he weeps over what was destroyed to keep that dream alive, and what’s been forgotten so others can hope to be remembered.

Babylon ’s most significant moments don’t come during the big events in Nellie, Jack, or Manny’s stories. They’re the quieter scenes, tracking what happens in the wake of their flaming parabolic arcs. They’re about the people who are forced out of the business or choose to walk away — the queer people forced into hiding to bolster studios’ public image, the marginalized forced to bear indignities so white actors can chase immortality.

This is the Babylon of the film’s title: The burnished image left behind after the people who built it are gone. It is easy to get caught up in the magic of movies and only see Jack Conrad, or Damien Chazelle — and if that’s all you see in Babylon , revulsion may come naturally. But Babylon is also concerned with what happens in the periphery of Hollywood’s white heroes. Chazelle shoots his stars with a lens wide enough that it’s not hard to see who lingers in the periphery, and the parts they have to play. Keep an eye on those people as they come and go, and Babylon becomes a cacophonous dirge for them, weeping for their anonymity in all the beauty that came at their expense. Their nitrate went up in flames and left us with lovely little lies of living forever.

Babylon premieres in theaters on Dec. 23.

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‘babylon’ review: margot robbie and brad pitt get blitzed by damien chazelle’s nonstop explosion of jazz-age excess.

Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Li Jun Li and Jovan Adepo also star in this feverish look at Hollywood’s transition from silents to talkies, as depravity was edged out by moralism.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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‘Babylon’ Review: Damien Chazelle’s Raucous Look at Classic Hollywood Is a Tawdry, Over-the-Top Affair

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Margot Robbie plays Nellie LaRoy in Babylon from Paramount Pictures.

With brash and bawdy “ Babylon ,” director Damien Chazelle blows something between a poisoned kiss and a big fat raspberry at the same town he so swoonily depicted in “La La Land.” Separated by nine decades and nearly an ocean of cynicism, the two Tinseltown-set films seem unlikely to have sprung from the same head; we might never suspect they had, were it not for musical collaborator Justin Hurwitz’s busy, hyper-jazzinated score. Here, Chazelle rewinds the clock to Hollywood’s raucous early days — specifically, the transition from silent filmmaking to talkies, when the industry was still fresh and figuring out what it could be.

Popular on Variety

Chazelle lets us know right out of the gate the kind of picture he has in store when a rented elephant empties its bowels on an unlucky animal wrangler (and, given where the camera is placed, on our heads as well). That outrageous spectacle is instantly topped by a kinky scene in what could be Fatty Arbuckle’s bedroom, as a corpulent silent comic giddily awaits his golden shower. Later that night, the starlet who indulged him will be dead of a drug overdose, forcing a desperate studio fixer (Flea) to tap Mexican employee Manny Torres (Calva) to get creative in disposing of the body. Characters major and minor alike are constantly dying in “Babylon” — no fewer than eight over the course of the film, plus two more name-checked in Variety obits at the end — but the tone is pitched at such a satirical extreme, not a one registers emotionally. Not even you-know-who’s.

Chazelle has essentially orchestrated a loud, vulgar live-action cartoon of a film, and while it’s exhilarating at times to witness the sheer virtuosity of his staging, the performances are all over the place. “Babylon” sorely lacks a point of view. Manny’s the closest thing the movie offers to an audience proxy, starting out as a wide-eyed outsider to the opening fete and working his way up to a studio executive position. But when asked by force-of-nature party crasher Nellie LaRoy (Robbie) why he wants to be in showbiz, the best Manny can muster is “I just want to be part of something bigger, I guess.”

Nearly all the main characters get a why-movies-matter monologue. Nearly all are shabbily written. “All the c—s in Lafayette called me the ugliest mutt in the neighborhood. Well, let them see me now!” Nellie shouts after her dancing at the party gets her discovered. The way she sashays is out of period, but that’s one of Chazelle’s incongruous rules for the movie: He spent 15 years researching the era, tapped production designer Florencia Martin and costume pro Mary Zophres to get every little detail right, then banished anything (like the Charleston) that he thought might take audiences out of the experience. Later, movie star Jack Conrad (Pitt, mugging it up as a John Gilbert-like romantic lead) will question, “The man who puts gasoline in your tank goes to your movies — why? … Because he feels less alone there.”

Witnessing it all is a gossip columnist named Elinor St. John (Jean Smart), who dictates her dispatches from the sidelines. She’s a curious character, an ahead-of-her-time Hedda Hopper, though she’s by far the most eloquent. Her “why they laughed” speech — “It’s those of us in the dark, those who just watch, who survive” — is the best scene in a movie full of far showier set pieces. Elinor will later be hired by the studio as a kind of manners coach for Nellie, which makes no sense, but then, neither does the idea that a scene-stealing bisexual woman named Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), loosely inspired by Anna May Wong, serves as a cabaret singer by night but pays her bills painting intertitles.

The middle hour of the film, which finds Jack and Nellie adapting to the advent of sound, owes a huge debt to “Singin’ in the Rain.” Chazelle stacks one big set piece after another — a string-of-pearls structure, with bawdy comedy more than music being the focus of each — then smash-cuts to the next scene, often to a blaring burst of jazz, or else the melancholy plunk of Hurwitz’s broken-player-piano score. You could argue that Black trumpet player Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) is also one of the film’s main characters, although he gets a far more anemic share of the plot and could have been cut out completely without much changing the film’s chemistry. Whereas all the other principals get overwritten introductions, Sidney makes his entrance onstage, playing his trumpet. Chazelle is obsessed with jazz, so maybe that solo takes the place of a monologue. Or maybe editor Tom Cross is confronted with too many threads.

There are myriad other flamboyant characters in a whirling ensemble that borrows more than is reasonable from other directors. That big opening party, for example, appears to be Chazelle’s way of one-upping “New York, New York,” though it lacks Scorsese’s instinct for privileging character over camera moves. Toward the end, an on-set drug dealer who calls himself “The Count” (Rory Scovel) gets Manny in a fix with a strung-out gangster (Tobey Maguire in a most unsettling cameo) — a rip-off of the Alfred Molina/Wonderland sequence in “Boogie Nights,” until it takes a deranged turn that suggests the “Gimp” scene from “Pulp Fiction.”

In his book “Hollywood Babylon,” Kenneth Anger spills the secrets of the Golden Age stars. “Film folk of the period are depicted as engaging in madcap, nonstop off-screen capers,” he writes. “The legend overlooks one fact — fear. That ever present thrilling-erotic fear that the bottom could drop out of their gilded dreams at any time.” Chazelle borrows both his title and that kernel of wisdom from Anger’s trashy tell-all, focusing on an alarming phenomenon from the late 1920s and early ’30s — before anyone dared to label such entertainment “art” — in which so many industry types took their own lives.

Reviewed at Samuel Goldwyn Theater, Los Angeles, Nov. 14, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 189 MIN.

Production: A Paramount Pictures release and presentation of a Marc Platt, Wild Chickens, Organism Pictures production. Producers: Marc Platt, Matthew Plouffe, Olivia Hamilton. Executive producers: Michael Beugg, Tobey Maguire, Wyck Godfrey, Helen Estabrook, Adam Siegel.
Crew: Director, writer: Damien Chazelle. Camera: Linus Sandgren. Editor: Tom Cross. Music: Justin Hurwitz.
With: Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, P.J. Byrne, Lukas Haas, Olivia Hamilton, Tobey Maguire, Max Minghella, Rory Scovel, Katherine Waterston, Flea, Jeff Garlin, Eric Roberts, Ethan Suplee, Samara Weaving, Olivia Wilde.

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“Babylon,” Reviewed: Damien Chazelle Whips Up a Golden-Hollywood Cream Puff

By Richard Brody

Margot Robbie plays Nellie LaRoy in Babylon.

I’ve long suspected that the venom inspired by Damien Chazelle ’s films is proportional to viewers’ devotion to their subjects—that his abuse of jazz in “ Whiplash ,” of acting and jazz in “ La La Land ,” and of history in “First Man” bothers most the people who care the most about those topics. His enthusiasts, meanwhile, exult in his way with myths—in his grandiose inflation of characters and their struggles into epic journeys. It’s as if, having felt the power of “Star Wars” through its incarnation of grand-scale myth, Chazelle applies its lessons to realistic quests and turns them into fantasies. He does it again in “Babylon,” which is set in Hollywood, mainly from 1926 to 1932, although it’s a little different from its predecessors. What distinguishes it from Chazelle’s other films, and what it shares with another recent film of swoony movie-love by a filmmaker of sentimental bombast—Steven Spielberg’s “ The Fabelmans ”—is the vigor of its storytelling. I think that the vigor of both films is rooted in the same source: knowledge. Just as Spielberg knows his own past, Chazelle knows Hollywood lore, and doubtless learned much more of it in the planning and the research. It’s the movie’s good anecdotes, rather than any dramatic arc, that make “Babylon” engaging, over the course of most of its three hours and nine minutes. It also takes such lore at face value, befitting the aura of legend that enhances both real-life incidents from classic Hollywood and its tall tales; these stories were born to be chazelled.

“Babylon” and “The Fabelmans,” along with Sam Mendes’s “ Empire of Light ,” make for a magic-of-the-movies trilogy that’s imbued with a halcyon retrospective glow—a nostalgic admiration for Hollywood’s past glories. Spielberg’s film is set in the fifties and early sixties, Mendes’s film in 1980-81, and both see movies of those eras as redemptive. It’s Chazelle’s film that’s, surprisingly, the most ambivalent; it’s noncommittal about Hollywood movies of the more distant era in which it’s set. Oddly enough, he appears to have little to say about them, a scant idea of what they were like and what made some of them great and others not. What the movie exalts, and what Chazelle appears to love, is the personalities—with all their flaws—who made Hollywood synonymous with its visionary boldness and blundering excesses, its blithe vulgarity and cavalier insensitivity, its vast spectrum of opportunity and ferocious maw of self-destruction.

“Babylon” is “Singin’ in the Rain” as a tragedy, albeit one that’s also filled with satirical comedy. (Its first scene sets the satirical tone, with a deluge of shit coming from the rear of an elephant being transported to a blowout Hollywood party.) Like Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s 1952 film, which is explicitly and implicitly referenced in Chazelle’s, “Babylon” tells the story of Hollywood’s transition from silent movies to talking pictures. It’s centered on three characters. The aspiring actress Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) is cognate with the earlier film’s domineering, petulant, and voice-challenged silent-film diva Lina Lamont (who, in effect, gets a backstory here). A breezy yet earnest leading man, Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), embodies the dark fate that would have awaited Gene Kelly’s Don Lockwood if he couldn’t sing and dance. The third protagonist, who is in effect the hyphen between the two, is a producer’s factotum, Manuel Torres (Diego Calva), who falls for Nellie the moment he sees her crash her car into a statue. He gets her into his boss’s wild party, where she gets noticed and cast in a small role that launches her. Manuel—or Manny, the nickname that she gives him—has been dreaming of a job on a set; at the party, Manny meets Jack, who takes a shine to him and gets him the desired in.

What’s redemptive about the movies, for Chazelle, isn’t so much the experience of viewing them but the benefits of making them. There’s no young Spielberg here, using a small camera to make Hollywood-inspired magic with whoever’s on hand; rather, there’s Manuel’s rapturous desire to be a part of something “bigger” than himself; there’s Nellie’s furious drive to escape from a hellish family life. (When a director asks Nellie, who’s playing a bit part, how she’s able to cry on cue, Nellie responds, “I just think of home.”) The brassy aspirant uninhibitedly expresses her reason for breaking into movies: “You don’t become a star, you either are one or you ain’t. I am.” As for Jack, he knows that he was a nobody before becoming a star, and he’s greatly devoted to making movies that connect deeply with “real people on the ground”; to do so, Jack wants the movies to be more innovative, audacious, and artistic. He says that he wants films to become as up to date and cutting-edge as twelve-tone music and Bauhaus architecture, “so that tomorrow’s lonely man can say, ‘Eureka, I am not alone.’ ” More plausibly, he likens the arrival of sound in movies to the discovery of perspective in painting.

Chazelle depicts the freewheeling anarchy of silent-film shoots: shouting, jousting, talking trash while the camera rolls, rowdy improvisation, last-minute derring-do. The movies made that way, he suggests, showed people as they really are, in contrast to the clinical, constrained solemnity and theatrical artifice of sound-stage work in the early days of talking pictures. The uninhibited boldness of Nellie’s earthy silent-film début and the sentimental heartiness of Jack’s silent-drama presence make a mockery of the silliness of Jack performing the song “Singin’ in the Rain” with a bouncy choral ensemble or the rigidity with which the untrained Nellie needs to hit her marks and deliver her lines in her first talking picture. (The latter scene, one of Chazelle’s many extended set pieces, borrows many of the elements from the mishaps of sound-filming depicted in “Singin’ in the Rain”—microphones in fixed positions, hidden amid décor, dictating actors’ placement and gestures and hampering their performance.)

The nasal-voiced, Joisey-accented Nellie apparently does little to develop (or even seek) the dose of theatrical skill needed to make the transition to sound; she’s too busy indulging in various forms of self-destructive frivolity. Manny rises quickly from unquestioningly intrepid assistant (breaking a strike, stealing an ambulance) to producer, but his devotion to the studio pushes him a step too far, as he betrays his principles and his friendships and comes to grief the melodramatic way, through moony swoony love. These unhinged personalities are just a few among many: the unprincipled yet discerning gossip columnist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart); the unlucky-in-love producer George Munn (Lukas Haas); the gifted, hard-edged female director Ruth Adler (Olivia Hamilton); the intertitle writer and lesbian artiste Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li); the Black jazz musician Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), whom Manny propels to stardom; the temperamental German director Otto von Strassberger (Spike Jonze); the drug dealer and aspiring actor called the Count (Rory Scovel); and the real-life “boy genius” producer Irving Thalberg himself (Max Minghella); plus a vast crew of hangers-on, acolytes, fixers, dreamers, and manipulators. They all form a wonderland, a magic kingdom that spews forth fictions that, however contrived or implausible, embody the realities of the passions, the risks, the devastations, the carnal pleasures, the obscene material splendors, and the ferocious drive to obtain them (along with at least a few drops, however diluted or adulterated, of sincere artistic ambition).

Chazelle’s vision of the myth-mad vitality and built-in tragedy of classic-era Hollywood comes at the price of its substance. The movie offers no politics, no history—1929 comes and goes with no stock-market crash (which in real life hit Hollywood and its players hard), no Depression, no electoral campaigns. There’s little sense of the corporate side of Hollywood, the hard-nosed boardroom management, the studios’ industrial organization (which is already on display in King Vidor’s inside-Hollywood comedy “ Show People ,” from 1928). These absences are more than merely factual; they set a tone for the movie that turns the tragedy superficial and the comedy decorative. Supernumeraries get killed and stories get silenced (except when they don’t), but there’s neither a sense of the mutual back-scratching or the power behind the suppression of news, no sense of the law at the studio gates, whether in threatened prosecutions or looming censorship—no Hays Code. Chazelle whips the story into cream-puff whorls of myths upon myths. He delivers a movie that’s neither unified nor disparate but homogenized, its elements of reality and hyperbole alike assimilated to the same creamy glow of rueful wonder. (The Coen brothers’ “ Hail, Caesar! ” has twice as much substance and vastly more humor—and compassion—at just over half the duration.)

Chazelle also puts forth a view of the magic of the movies in a phrase that strikes me as appallingly oblivious and unthinking, when Jack, facing newly hostile audiences, asks Elinor why he’s losing his appeal and she answers, “There is no why.” It’s approximately the line that Primo Levi relates regarding his internment in Auschwitz: he responded to a guard’s cruelty by asking why, and the guard responded, “Here there is no why.” I almost fell out of my seat.

“Singin’ in the Rain” offered a triumphalist point of view, asserting that the styles of the new, postwar Hollywood were indeed advances on the artifice and extreme stylization of silent movies and the primitive techniques of earlier talking pictures. It came amid a time of actual rapid artistic and cultural change in Hollywood: “Singin’ ” premièred just eleven years after “Citizen Kane,” four years after the court decision that helped to break up studio dominance and opened the door to independent producers, and during the rise of television, which thrust Hollywood into economic crisis. The self-satisfaction of “Singin’ in the Rain” had some aesthetic justification, but it also had a major thread of Hollywood self-advertising. “Babylon” is something of a work of salesmanship, too, offering a pitch for freestanding movies seen on the big screen at yet another moment when movie studios and theatres are facing economic disaster. Like “Singin’ in the Rain,” “Babylon” reaches from the past into the cinematic present, with another fact-based fantasy—a wild montage of subliminally brief clips that build the arc of movie history from Muybridge and the Lumière brothers to nineteen-sixties modernists and onward to recent cinematic times; it bends inevitably toward Chazelle. Artistically, what “Babylon” adds to the classic Hollywood that it celebrates is sex and nudity, drugs and violence, a more diverse cast, and a batch of kitchen-sink chaos that replaces the whys and wherefores of coherent thought with the exhortation to buy a ticket, cast one’s eyes up to the screen, and worship in the dark. ♦

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The Real History Behind <em>Babylon</em>’s Outrageous Hollywood Tale

The Real History Behind Babylon ’s Outrageous Hollywood Tale

W hat do public orgies, mountains of cocaine, and a party-crashing elephant have in common? They all make an appearance in the first 20 minutes of Damien Chazelle’s new movie Babylon .

In the three-hour-plus Hollywood epic, out Dec. 23, writer-director Chazelle ( La La Land , Whiplash ) paints a depraved picture of late 1920s Tinseltown—and he wastes no time setting the scene for what’s to come. Before the title card ever appears on screen, a lengthy opening sequence depicting a drug- and sex-fueled rager at a desert mansion introduces the movie’s main players: wide-eyed industry hopeful Manny Torres (Diego Calva), brazen wannabe starlet Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), and seasoned silent-film superstar Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt).

From there, Babylon takes viewers on a rip-roaring ride through the last days of the silent film era. Beginning in 1926 and ending in the early 1930s (with an epilogue set some years later), the movie centers on the industry’s tumultuous transition to talking pictures. But was the Los Angeles of that time period really as uninhibited and debaucherous as Babylon makes it seem?

“I wanted to look under the microscope at the early days of an art form and an industry, when both were still finding their footing,” Chazelle said in commentary included in the film’s production notes. “And, on a deeper level, I liked the idea of looking at a society in change. Hollywood underwent a series of rapid and at times seemingly-cataclysmic changes in the 20’s, and some people survived, but many didn’t. In today’s terms, we’d call it disruption. You look at what these people went through, and it gives you a sense of the human cost that accompanied the kind of ambition that attracted so many people to Los Angeles at that time. There’s a darker side to the story of that transition than I’d seen before.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Babylon has been met with polarizing reviews from critics. While some have praised Chazelle for his ambition , others have rebuked the film as over-the-top and tasteless.

“Chazelle thinks he’s created a vision of 1920s Hollywood, but no matter how much research he may have done, he hasn’t listened at all to what these faces, these stories, have told him,” wrote TIME film critic Stephanie Zacharek. “He treats people of this lost era like primitive creatures who just didn’t know any better. He’s not capturing the past; he’s only condescending to it.”

Whatever your take on Babylon , here’s what we know about the complicated history behind the Old Hollywood odyssey.

Read more: Babylon Doesn’t Capture the Magic of Early Hollywood—It Butchers It

The real-life inspirations behind Babylon ‘s stars

While the only real person portrayed in Babylon is MGM production head Irving Thalberg (Max Minghella), a number of the movie’s main players do have real-life inspirations.

Robbie’s LaRoy is based on a combination of silent film stars, with the character’s struggles with addiction, difficulty making the transition to “talkies,” and eventual fall from grace hinting at names like Jeanne Eagels, Joan Crawford, and Alma Rubens. But Robbie has said it was the traumatic upbringing of onetime “It Girl” Clara Bow that really helped her understand Nellie.

“Clara Bow had probably the worst childhood of anyone I’ve ever heard of,” Robbie said. “Clara’s parents never got a birth certificate for her because they had already lost two children, and they felt certain she would never make it past her childhood. When I read that, the character of Nellie really started to make sense to me. I could imagine she always felt that every day she was on the planet she was on borrowed time, so she was going for broke every single day.”

On the opposite end of the Old Hollywood fame spectrum is Pitt’s Conrad, an established A-lister who calls to mind big-name stars of the time like John Gilbert, Douglas Fairbanks, and Rudolph Valentino.

“Jack is sort of the uber movie star,” Chazelle said. “He’s the highest grossing leading man in the world when we meet him. He’s one of those guys who has reached the apogee of stardom right at that moment, and the kind of hysterical love and admiration that he inspires, at a moment in time when the whole concept of movie stardom was still relatively new, is really hard for us today to fathom.”

Calva’s Torres, a Mexican immigrant with dreams of making his way up the Hollywood ladder, was also inspired by several real-life figures, according to Chazelle. These included Rene Cardona, who came to Hollywood from Cuba and climbed the studio executive ladder, later playing a role in the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema.

As for some of Babylon ‘s more memorable side characters, Chazelle has cited writer Elinor Glyn, reporter Adela Rogers St. Johns, and renowned gossip columnist Louella Parsons as influences for Jean Smart’s Elinor St. John; early female directors like Lois Weber, Dorothy Davenport, and Dorothy Arzner for filmmaker Ruth Adler (played by producer and Chazelle’s wife Olivia Hamilton); and Anna May Wong , the first Asian American film star in Hollywood, as jack-of-all-trades chanteuse Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li).

Finally, charismatic trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) is intended to be an amalgam of a myriad of Black stars of the era: talented actors and musicians who had to contend with immense racism in the industry.

“There was a short window of opportunity for Black performers when sound arrived,” Chazelle said, citing musical films of the late ’20s and early ’30s starring Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, and Bessie Smith as actors who also played music onscreen. Chazelle also lists Curtis Mosby, Les Hite, and Sonny Clay as sources of inspiration for Adepo’s character.

Was early Hollywood really that wild?

Playing off 1952 musical blockbuster Singin’ in the Rain’s lighthearted depiction of late 1920s Hollywood, Babylon clearly seeks to dispel some of the more conservative notions of the silent film era by showcasing a boisterous and thriving party culture, rampant drug abuse, and the often inhumane churn of the movie machine.

“The more I researched those early days of Hollywood, the more I became aware of just how insane that time period was,” Chazelle said. “It was this sort of larger-than-life assemblage of misfits who came together and built a city and a new industry from nothing. I didn’t feel like that kind of crazed behavior had been accurately captured on film before, and I wanted to present their lives and lifestyles in an unvarnished and totally unsanitized way.”

Babylon ‘s party scenes are meant to be next-level in order to emphasize the wantoness of the time. The exterior shots of Babylon ‘s raucous opening party were filmed at Shea’s Castle, a remote mansion about 60 miles outside of Los Angeles that was built in the 1920s for soirees of that nature. “Socialites used to fly out here and stay for the weekend and do whatever they felt like doing when nobody was watching,” said supervising location manager Chris Baugh.

Another striking sequence late in the movie sends Manny down into the depths of a stomach-churning underground sin den to settle a debt Nellie has racked up with criminal kingpin James McKay (Tobey Maguire). “Welcome to the asshole of Los Angeles,” McKay proclaims as they arrive on the scene.

Babylon ‘s production notes explain that the episode was inspired by an incident in Clara Bow’s life as well as the depraved world of Cal-Neva, “an area between the border of California and Nevada that became a hub of gambling in the early 30s as soon as Los Angeles outlawed the practice.”

Babylon doesn’t tell a true story, but instead leans hard into exposing the exploitative history of cinema and how that impacted the society that came up around the industry. However, some of the criticism surrounding the film has centered on Chazelle’s interpretation of this outrageous excess.

“Hollywood was hardly the innocent, asexual industry that a classic like Singin’ in the Rain (or later, The Artist ) so lovingly depicted,” wrote Variety ‘s Peter Debruge . “But those movies deliver so much more pleasure per frame than this one does, which wears out its welcome in scene after exhausting scene, while purporting to set the record straight.”

Still, others appreciated Chazelle’s commitment to extravagance. “This extensive intro—one of the year’s most impressive feats of filmmaking—feels as exhausting as Chazelle clearly intended it to be,” wrote A.V. Club’s Tomris Laffly of the opening party melee, “serving as a denunciation of a town overflowing with unnamed skeletons concealed by the shadow of those who managed to claim the spotlight.”

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Babylon Reviews

[A] creditable slice-of-life drama...

Full Review | Oct 15, 2020

Franco Rosso's film Babylon is a hidden gem when it comes to authentic explorations of institutional racism and the immigrant experience.

Full Review | Jul 29, 2020

The central M.C. is played by Brinsley Forde, leader of the British reggae band, Aswad; his musical presence is just one element of authenticity in a movie that never strikes a false note.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 22, 2020

With its vivid cinematography, incredible soundtrack, and powerful message... It has become an icon of its time and a cinematic classic, influencing generations of artists.

Full Review | Feb 24, 2020

The film is also visually rich. Every minute is filled with the details of a period and milieu that's rarely so crisp on film.

Full Review | Jan 2, 2020

It's a really vivid life at a certain part of life.

Full Review | Sep 24, 2019

Rosso's rough-and-tumble portrait of immigrant life in the slums of Thatcher's England arrives in American theaters 39 years late and depressingly right on time.

Full Review | May 20, 2019

This 2019 release feels uncomfortably apt.

Full Review | Apr 23, 2019

A new restoration of this 1980 British cult classic makes plain that its themes of disaffection and racial discord in south London are still relevant nearly four decades later.

Full Review | Apr 18, 2019

Powerful and shocking, 'Babylon' is possibly one of the most important films you'll see this year.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 5, 2019

Babylon's cultural specificity is what gives it power, putting it as much in a tradition of British alienated youth movies.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 4, 2019

in many ways clumsy and ham-fisted [yet] there's something to the movie that cannot be so easily dismissed.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Apr 1, 2019

"Babylon" burns with an energy and candid intensity rarely seen in mainstream movies.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 21, 2019

An entertaining and culturally significant film that exposes much more than the world of reggae dancehall. It's a fitting companion piece to Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 19, 2019

A cinematic shot of energy that combines a proto-stoner comedy, a gritty musical and a nihilistic call-to-arms into an excoriation of Thatcher-era racism and poverty.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 17, 2019

Assertive and ebullient, "Babylon" is as alive as a movie can be to the everyday mesh of liberating art, humorous camaraderie and hazardous political reality.

Full Review | Mar 14, 2019

Babylon is a hidden gem worth seeking out if it comes to your city.

Full Review | Mar 12, 2019

...revealing and raw in its political and sociological spectrum. Unapologetically radical, intrusive and emotionally gripping...a blistering commentary...

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 10, 2019

Babylon is a pulsating document of a time and place as well as a piece of connective tissue from the past to the present.

Full Review | Mar 8, 2019

The movie is more interested in what feels real than what seems right.

Full Review | Mar 7, 2019

Entertainment

‘Babylon’ review: Damien Chazelle’s latest takes excess to a new level

Movie review.

Damien Chazelle’s sprawling “Babylon” is the flip side to his 2016 hit “ La La Land .” Both are movies about movies, set primarily in Los Angeles and focus on characters who dream. But where “La La Land” was all lightness, a gentle valentine to love and hope and the larger-than-life way that movies capture our hearts, “Babylon” is darkness. Set mostly in the years between 1926 and 1932, when the movie business transitioned from silent films to talkies, it’s a tale of ambition and excess that’s often sordid and ugly, literally starting off with a shower of elephant feces.

And yet, this story of a hedonistic lost Hollywood has the same thing at its core as “La La Land”: a passionate love for the art of moviemaking, expressed both by the characters and by Chazelle himself through them. Depicting a time of excess, it’s a movie full of excesses: its overlong running time (over three hours), its wildly elaborate party scenes in which masses of people seem to meld into one grotesque moving thing, its over-the-top closing montage in which colors seem to run like blood, its galloping pace. “Babylon” is a movie with a fever, and that fever is film.

A number of characters travel the sometimes arduous journey that is “Babylon” with us, many inspired by real-life figures from movie history. Three of them are central. Diego Calva is Manny Torres, a Mexican immigrant and behind-the-scenes underling eager to become part of something bigger, and ready to do whatever he needs to do to become a producer. Brad Pitt is Jack Conrad, a stratospheric star of silent film finding his way in a new world. And Margot Robbie is Nellie LaRoy, a starlet in the making: canny enough to wangle her way into a Hollywood producer’s party in a barely-there dress, naive enough to dance in glee under the starlight when she gets a movie offer. “Ain’t life grand?” she says, in words echoed later in the film under rather different circumstances. All three give lovely performances, still points in this film’s mad whirl. There’s a moment near the end where Pitt exits a room, swaying and humming just the tiniest bit, dancing to music only he hears; a few minutes later, Robbie’s character does the same thing elsewhere. They’re both living in a movie, whether anyone’s watching or not.

If all of these characters sound like predictable types to you, that’s the point: Hollywood deals in types, and “Babylon” is full of scenes you’ve seen before: the earthy ingénue trying to act refined at a posh gathering; the chaos of an Old Hollywood set, where multiple takes keep getting ruined by something going wrong; the movie star whose marriage is not-so-secretly imploding. (There are also a few scenes you’ve never seen before, particularly one involving a snake that I’d rather not contemplate further.) But Chazelle drenches these moments in style, in music, in beautiful actors shrieking at the camera, in bigness; you watch not just for the story but for the immersion he creates.

I can’t say I truly enjoyed watching “Babylon,” or that I’d ever want to see it again, but I definitely haven’t stopped thinking about it since screening it earlier this month, and there was a passage near the end that moved me immensely — by showing me something I’ve seen before, many times, made all the sweeter by the frenetic trashiness around it. I won’t spoil it. Elinor St. John, a gossip columnist played with feline languor by Jean Smart (who deserved far more screen time), at one point employs the phrase “a maelstrom of bad taste and sheer magic.” It’s an appropriate description for “Babylon” as well.

With Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li. Written and directed by Damien Chazelle. 188 minutes. Rated R for strong and crude sexual content, graphic nudity, bloody violence, drug use, and pervasive language. Opens Dec. 23 at multiple theaters.

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To Love and Hate in L.A.: ‘Babylon’ Must Be Seen to Be Believed

Damien Chazelle’s rambunctious new feature is either a celebration of Old Hollywood or an ode to the death of the entire industry—but above all else, it seems deliberately designed to kill his own career

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Damien Chazelle’s Babylon is not a movie that lacks moments of potential self-critique, from the fire hose–like spray of pachyderm shit that douses the characters in its first scene—a nod as much to the elephant-sized proportions of this $80 million period piece as to its scatological attitude—to a gut-churning atrocity-exhibition climax located, per one character’s unforgettable description, in “the asshole of Los Angeles.” You don’t write a line like that in a movie that imagines silent-era Hollywood as the ninth circle of hell if you don’t want critics to single it out as your rhetorical equivalent of “Rosebud.”

There is, however, a quieter exchange midway through Babylon that gets closer to the gooey, arrhythmic heart of Chazelle’s project. Sharing a cab on a rainy day in New York, newly minted starlet Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) and studio gofer Manny Torres (Diego Calva) have a gentle, mutually affectionate heart-to-heart. She’s in town to duck the paparazzi who’ve made her into America’s new it girl, a “wild child” known for her lascivious performing style. He’s there to scope out the preview of The Jazz Singer , a new “talking” picture that threatens to completely rewrite the industry rule book. What these two foundlings turned insiders end up talking about, though, is ice cream, and what they like to put on it. Nellie’s favorite topping is all of them—as good a metaphor as any for a nauseous, high-calorie sugar rush of a movie that not only wants to have its cake and eat it too, but also to puke it up, smear it around, and cram it in the viewer’s face.

“Make ’em laugh,” Donald O’Connor urged in Singin’ in the Rain , a movie that serves as Babylon ’s conceptual and spiritual template, and it’s the essentially enigmatic, deeply subjective question of comedy—of whether or not something is funny, and why—that hangs over the proceedings like an old-timey anvil. There are scenes of raging, quasi-surrealist degradation here that Adam McKay would kill to direct, and bits so dour and pretentious and sentimental that they may even justify Oscar nominations. This wildly erratic, at times shockingly unpleasant concoction arrives just under the wire as the most surprising and potentially polarizing American movie of the year—a parable of artistic license and ends-justify-the-means ambition that’s as ethically inscrutable as Tár and as awash in alienation effects as Blonde , with an even deeper love-letter-to-the-movies subtext than Empire of Light or The Fabelmans . It even somehow boasts a direct connection to Avatar that, like a half dozen other tricks it has crammed up its sleeves, has to be seen to be believed.

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Make no mistake: All of this discombobulation is very much on purpose, as if Chazelle—whose biggest hits, Whiplash and La La Land , were, in their way, crowd pleasers—were trying to recast himself as a black sheep in an industry that’s already embraced him as a precocious prodigy. A case can be made that Chazelle’s first movie, the charming, black-and-white hipster romance Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (2009), is still his best; certainly, it’s the one in which his love of musicals and preoccupation with the balancing act between creativity and personal stability rings truest, with the best ratio of invention to self-indulgence. The bigger his movies got, though, the more they felt imbued with show-offy style and a bizarre masochism about art. Whiplash was basically Full Metal Jacket for jazz majors, minus Kubrick’s satirical (and political) subtext, while First Man sacrificed the exhilaration and uplift of other astronaut biopics for a sweaty, white-knuckled anxiety that stalled at the box office.

Well-made, conspicuously expensive, and emotionally remote, First Man was the sort of movie you make when you have an Oscar in your back pocket and you’re cashing in your chips. Babylon is something else entirely—like a guy who’s already all in tossing his watch, car keys, and wedding ring into the pot. Hollywood history is littered with titles whose directors had reason to fear that they might never work in this town again, but Babylon is on the short list of movies that seem almost deliberately designed as career killers. It is, on some level, an affront to its subject matter and its audience, yet the mix of exuberance, insolence, and white-hot melancholic guilt at its core makes it just as hard to hate as to love. Gold-plated, fur-lined, and spattered with precious bodily fluids of every kind, Chazelle’s film somehow aims high while also going low. It’s a hymn to its own filthy ambivalence.

The use of the Mexican-born Manny—a cipher with no obvious historical corollary in a narrative where fictional and real-life celebrities rub shoulders (and body parts)—is fascinating and telling. One of the principal criticisms of La La Land was of its weirdly deracinated view of Los Angeles, the way that the multicultural chorus singing and dancing their way through the traffic-jam-set opener “Another Day of Sun” more or less fell away in order to keep the focus on Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone’s lily-white strivers. The only major character of color was John Legend’s gregarious Top 40–oriented sellout; otherwise, Black people existed in the movie to implicitly authenticate Gosling’s love of jazz, whether by serving as backing musicians or smiling politely while he twirled them around at the end of a pier. Relitigating the racial politics of a six-year-old movie is nobody’s idea of a good time, but Chazelle seems determined to evoke the problematic aspects of his Oscar-winning triumph, whether as penance, confessional, or rationalization. Manny’s steady rise from below-the-line factotum and assistant to Brad Pitt’s vainglorious matinee idol, Jack Conrad, to hard-boiled studio executive provides the film with its strongest through line, and he’s just one of several characters meant to embody (and challenge) the erasure of nonwhite figures in romanticized accounts of Hollywood’s history. Others include Jovan Adepo ’s ace Black trumpet player, Sidney Palmer, and Li Jun Li ’s lesbian cabaret-singer-slash-intertitle-writer, Lady Fay Zhu, both of whom get plot arcs that testify to their artistic and cultural innovations—and unrealized star potential—while gesturing toward the larger factors in their marginalization.

The politically correct thrust of these subplots is theoretically meant to balance out—or at least provide ballast to—the bacchanalian madness of Babylon as a whole, which kicks off with a 30-minute pre-credit prologue set at an isolated, free-for-all orgy in the upper reaches of the Hollywood Hills. If Singin’ in the Rain is Babylon ’s spirit guide, then Boogie Nights —and the big-dick aesthetic of Paul Thomas Anderson in general—is its how-to manual. The movie isn’t five minutes old before a scantily clad party guest ODs in a back room after urinating on a corpulent man’s face, her convulsions registered in glancing fashion in the midst of an endlessly whirling, look-ma-no-hands tracking shot. In fact, the swift, relentless virtuosity of the filmmaking is probably the only thing standing between Babylon and an NC-17 rating, since the nudity and debauchery get abstracted into one gigantic, writhing, fleshy blur. (If you played the opening sequence at half speed you’d have Eyes Wide Shut .)

It’s into this unhinged milieu that Robbie makes her entrance, cheerfully smashing her car into one of the mansion’s statues. Nellie is an uninvited but ultimately very welcome guest who’s barely made it past the front door before she’s knee-deep in cocaine, a substance that has the same basic effect on her as spinach did on Popeye. In synthesizing the look and attributes of various pre-code stars, including the notoriously hard-living Clara Bow, Robbie has the showiest role in Babylon and makes the most of it, oscillating between feral, strung-out exhibitionism, crackerjack physical comedy, and endearing rag-doll fragility without breaking a sweat. Her triumph comes not so much in spite of her character’s archetypal dimensions as through them; when she reveals that her ability to cry on command—a priceless asset in the silent era, with its vocabulary of rapturous, wordless close-ups—is as simple as thinking about her miserable backwater home, it’s a laughably simplistic bit of character psychology given bravura shading. Like Emma Stone in La La Land , Robbie is basically playing ambition personified, except that she’s obliged to go to darker and more daring places along the way. By the time a wasted, half-naked Nellie is taunting a roomful of alpha-male admirers to fight a cobra on her behalf—and resolving that she’s going to have to do it herself—the only reasonable response to the performance is a kind of stunned admiration.

Nellie’s indomitable spirit and tarnished-angel innocence are irresistible to Manny, who’s otherwise pragmatic about an industry whose many illusions fail to fool him. For instance, he’s sympathetic to Pitt’s fading superstar but he also sees right through him. (Pitt’s acting here verges on laziness; Jack’s rumpled, deflated handsomeness is just right, but he lacks the self-deprecating specificity of Cliff Booth in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood .) It’s Manny who recognizes the paradigm-shifting potential of The Jazz Singer , and who labors to keep his own studio on the cutting edge, a process that’s depicted in line with Chazelle’s usual themes of art as a form of self-annihilation. Except that this time out, instead of psychological torture à la Whiplash , we actually get filmmaking as a matter of life and death—over and over again. In one bravura set piece synced to a ticking-clock conceit, Jack’s crew (which includes a Germanic director played in a perfect cameo by [ redacted ]) needs to get a shot before the end of Magic Hour; over the course of one afternoon, the production of a biblical epic devolves into clumsy, life-threatening slapstick, with underpaid extras corralled at the barrel of a gun and one unfortunate day player impaled by a spear. Cut to a few years later and the production of an innocuous talkie comedy set on a college campus results in another on-set casualty—the morbid, inevitable punch line to a breathlessly acted and edited set piece that takes the behind-the-scenes confusion of Lina Lamont’s squawky dialogue recording in Singin’ in the Rain and weaponizes it.

To say that the historical veracity of these scenes—and their suggestion of Old Hollywood as a sort of haphazard abattoir populated by lunatics—is up for debate is an understatement. There’s evidence here of deep research, but also of a filmmaker who isn’t all that interested in how early production actually worked—not when it’s more effective to cultivate total chaos. But even if one accepts the manic stylization of the filmmaking scenes in Babylon , it’s genuinely hard to tell how the movie feels about the period—whether the overarching attitude is one of nostalgia or horror. This ambivalence is, in and of itself, a point of interest, since most movies made at Babylon ’s budget level are afraid to put any onus of interpretation on the audience. But it’s also risky. Viewers in search of tonal or ideological coherence—or who know anything about the period being depicted—are likely to be frustrated, or even outraged. In Time, Stephanie Zacharek, who has often written passionately and perceptively about the cinema of the early 20th century, unloaded on Chazelle for his callow, opportunistic treatment of the past, writing that “he treats people of this lost era like primitive creatures who just didn’t know any better. He’s not capturing the past; he’s only condescending to it.”

I actually found Babylon less condescending than La La Land , which, to borrow a withering phrase from Film Comment’ s Michael Koresky , seemed to be trying to Make Movies Great Again—to escape into an idealized past without actually turning back the clock. Babylon ’s return to the primal scene is about something more unsettling and complicated: the idea that mass entertainment depends on smoothing out—and often denying—the contradictions that go into its creation. On the one hand, Chazelle’s array of characters and their various frustrations verges on caricature: the hard-working immigrant bedazzled (and derailed) by a hapless blond; the ingenue hypnotized by her own charisma; the old hand staring down his own personal and professional obsolescence. At the same time, Babylon is clear-eyed about the blurry relationship between supply and demand that has always been at the center of the movie business: that the utopian fantasies on the screen exist in an impossible space between the flawed and all too human constituencies that both build and receive them.

Late in the film, in yet another moment that feels engineered to give critics something to chew over, a Hollywood gossip columnist played by Jean Smart delivers a monologue to Pitt’s character about the strange immortality conferred by motion pictures. She tells him that long after he’s dead, his image will serve to comfort, inspire, and entertain. Posterity is obviously important to Chazelle, and it may be that he’s made Babylon in kamikaze mode because he suspects it’s one way to keep it from being forgotten in the long run—that the same manic, unsettling intensity that will likely make it a flop in real time could help to sustain it as a cult item. But there’s also a deeper anxiety in play here. In a moment when the earth dies streaming and everything from Marvel to micro-budget indies is distributed and received as content, what Chazelle may be sweating is the death of cinema itself—a perspective that recontextualizes the film’s bonkers closing montage of the medium’s greatest hits not as a celebration, but a long goodbye. If that’s the case, then one way to look at Babylon is as a wake—loud and cathartic, raucous and bleary-eyed, embarrassing and heartfelt. But another would be as the cinematic equivalent of Tim Robinson wearing that hot dog suit in I Think You Should Leave , finding culprits for an art form’s untimely demise by looking everywhere except in the mirror.

Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.

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Babylon: It’s got Margot Robbie, it’s got Brad Pitt, and it’s intriguing, infuriating, entertaining and preposterous

Damien chazelle’s evocation of pre-talkie hollywood features some of his very best work but also some of his clumsiest follies.

Babylon features some of Chazelle’s very best work. It features some of his clumsiest follies, writes Donald Clarke

One consequence of films arriving here weeks after their US debut is that American critics have already exhausted every cliche. Like The Fabelmans and Empire of Light, Damien Chazelle’s effluvial journey through the early days of Hollywood is, apparently, a “love letter to cinema”. Too many reviewers have also enjoyed telling us that the director of La La Land and Whiplash is “swinging for the fences”.

Maybe. That baseball metaphor suggests that no possibility exists between unqualified success and total humiliation. You either score a home run or get caught in the outfield. What we actually get is an intriguing, infuriating, sometimes entertaining, sometimes preposterous oscillation between those two extremes. It features some of Chazelle’s very best work. It features some of his clumsiest follies.

We begin with a statement of intent in the most malodorous terms. Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a Mexican immigrant to southern California, is helping transport an elephant to a prototypical “wild party” in 1920s Hollywood when the beast empties its bowels on both his head and ours. (Strawy nuggets adhere to the lens.) At the booze-fuelled, coke-enhanced event he meets up with a rising star named Nellie La Roy ( Margot Robbie , obviously) – a loose variation on Clara Bow – and is drawn into a scandal not unlike the one that finished “Fatty” Arbuckle’s career. Manny and Nellie brush beside the career of suave star Jack Conrad ( Brad Pitt , equally obviously) as the arrival of sound threatens to upend the festivities.

After 15 minutes of loosely choreographed debauchery, even the most devout Chazelle enthusiasts will find themselves wondering if they can endure all three hours to come. The director and his team are making no great attempt at verisimilitude. Contemporaneous film professionals swore like longshoreman, but not quite in the hip portmanteau fashion we encounter here. This is the silent era filtered through late Federico Fellini and seasoned with the uninhibited swagger of postclassical Hollywood. It just about functions. Then it creaks. Then it wearies.

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Just when you are set on giving up, however, Chazelle swings us into a day in the life of a Hollywood studio. The extended episode is a jarring, clattering masterpiece of creative chaos. A western over here. A melodrama over there. A small army is kitted out with swords and ordered into battle for a martial epic. We get confirmation that, at this stage of the industry, before consortiums took over, women were still healthily represented in all areas of production.

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That glorious set piece is beautifully complemented by a later, infuriatingly amusing sequence – in this case, accurately reflecting the history – where Nellie, now star of an early sound comedy, is driven crazy by the tyrannical demands of the audio technicians. Even a creaking surgical pin can trigger a retake.

The message is clear(ish). A rogue, guerrilla art form, established when Bel Air was still desert, is giving in to mechanical discipline and bourgeois sensibilities. Yet something else is going on in Chazelle’s brain. Penultimate descent into an off-the-leash closing phantasmagoria, involving demonic meetings in alligator-infested sewers, looks to be making more unhinged accusations about the rearrangements to come. Where did that come from?

That predilection to disorder is repeated in a screenplay that never satisfactorily solidifies relationships between the three principals. Robbie and Pitt know how to inhabit those archetypes. Calva is charming as the eyes of the audience. But all three struggle to be more than shiny spheres in a clinking, blinking pinball machine.

It ends with a bizarre exercise in self-congratulation – one you might love on Thursday and then dismiss as utter pap on Friday – that appears to undermine everything argued up to this point. Yet, for all its confusion, Babylon really does function as celebration of an increasingly threatened medium. Scored heroically by Justin Hurwitz, and designed to within an inch of its life by Florencia Martin, Chazelle’s film commemorates the era’s hubris as he indulges in a bit of its own.

This is how a world ends. Not with a whimper but a great deal of banging, baby. And vomiting. And snorting.

Babylon is released on Friday, January 20th

Donald Clarke

Donald Clarke, a contributor to The Irish Times, is Chief Film Correspondent and a regular columnist

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‘The Beach Boys’ Review: How to Make Good Vibrations

This Disney documentary looks at the family ties and sweet harmonies that turned a California band into a popular treasure.

On a stage, five men wearing matching striped shirts and white pants perform.

By Nicolas Rapold

The wholesome ocean-breeze look of the Beach Boys could make the group a punchline if it weren’t for their sweet sunshine sound. The origins of their intricate harmonies undergird “The Beach Boys,” a Disney documentary directed by Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny that notes obstacles in the band’s career but mostly tries to keep the good vibrations going.

Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson grew up in a musical household in Hawthorne, Calif., and eventually pooled their ample talents with a cousin, Mike Love, and a friend, Al Jardine. As told through a patchwork of polite interviews and mostly mundane clips from performances, the rise of their music was fueled by four-part harmonies, surf culture and entrancing orchestration not unlike Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound .

Brian, who hated touring, was the band’s homebody musical mastermind, and he could imbue their pop with an outsider’s moods, while the Wilsons’ father, Murry, put on the pressure as their manager. Snippets from “Pet Sounds,” their landmark 1966 album, never fail to rejuvenate the movie. But after a while, you get the sense of a band that stopped growing, though the movie traces a fruitful competitive streak with the Beatles.

Any deviations from the film’s obligatory timeline tour are very welcome, like a mortifying studio recording of Murry holding forth, and it’s a treat to hear the esteem for Brian among the Wrecking Crew , the storied group of session musicians. And for the pop romantics among us, the Beach Boys can still cast a spell with those four little words: Wouldn’t it be nice?

The Beach Boys Rated PG-13 for drug material and brief lapses into unsunny language. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. Watch on Disney+ .

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In ‘Eric,’ Benedict Cumberbatch is a dad angry at everyone as he searches for his missing son

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“Eric,” a limited series premiering Thursday on Netflix, stars Benedict Cumberbatch, wearing an American accent, as Vincent Anderson, a Jim Henson-brand puppeteer, if Henson had had severe mental health issues, a drinking and drugs problem and, on top of that, was just kind of an angry, egotistical jerk. Henson is mentioned in passing, so we are not supposed to confuse the two, Vincent’s beard notwithstanding. (Coincidentally, Disney+ is premiering Ron Howard’s documentary “Jim Henson: Idea Man” on Friday, which will make that distance clear.)

The setting is 1980s New York City, in its graffiti ’n’ garbage prime, and to be fair, Vincent is only one jerk among many. There are crooked politicians, crooked cops, crooked garbagemen, dodgy street people, human traffickers and drug dealers. Vincent’s parents, who are rich, are also jerks. The Big Apple, baby! (For balance, there’s a good parent, a good cop and a good street person.)

The engine of the plot, written by Abi Morgan (who created the fine British media drama “The Hour” ), is the disappearance of Vincent’s son, 9-year-old Edgar (Ivan Morris Howe), which sets Vincent, his wife, Cassie (Gaby Hoffmann), and missing-persons detective Michael Ledroit (McKinley Belcher III) — Black, gay and closeted in a homophobic environment — on toward their intertwined individual destinies. It’s not a spoiler to mention that Edgar is on a trajectory of his own.

A woman and a man sit side by side at a table lined with microphones

Vincent is the brains behind “Good Day Sunshine,” a decade-old puppet-populated TV show, set in a park in an idealized inverse of the city. (It is not funky like “Sesame Street.”) Ratings are slipping and the fate of the show, which exhorts children to “be good, be kind, be brave, be different,” seems to depend entirely on Vincent coming up with a new puppet that, says producer Lennie (Dan Fogler), will somehow “bridge the gap between the preschoolers and the elementary kids,” because “that’s where the cool kids are.” (Kindergarten, apparently.)

Vincent doesn’t like this idea, or any idea not his own, one bit, and cannot help making his displeasure known, in barely veiled or extremely open terms. (He is especially disturbed by the thought that any of his characters might beatbox, which is a poor reading of the times.)

But this is not a story about children’s television, though the details of the production and the puppetry are convincing enough. It’s a mystery wrapped in a family drama wrapped ina police procedural, tricked out with fantasy element and social issues. These include the AIDS epidemic, the unequal treatment by police and media of Black victims of crime, gentrification at the expense of the poor, homelessness and the sexual exploitation of minors, with a dramatically gratuitous, if historically accurate, nod to “the free Black Americans and the immigrant Irish and German populations” who were moved from their homes to build Central Park thrown in at nearly the last moment. All that and a full platter of red herrings.

Los Angeles, CA - May 14: From right - Gaby Hoffman, Benedict Cumberbatch, and McKinley Belcher III stars of Netflix's "Eric," poses for a portrait on Tuesday, May 14, 2024 in Los Angeles, CA. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

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Before his disappearance, Edgar, who is known around the studio and has precocious art skills, drew up plans for a new “walk-around” puppet, a furry blue monster he calls Eric — a blend of a Maurice Sendak Wild Thing , Sulley from “Monsters, Inc.” and the Muppets’ Sweetums — in hopes it will help save “Good Day Sunshine.” Later, discovering Edgar’s drawings, which he had frightened his son out of showing him, Vincent begins both to build the puppet in hopes that putting Eric on television will bring Edgar back, and to hallucinate its presence as a hectoring, critical constant companion.

I say “hallucinate” — and there are passing references to some kind of breakdown in Vincent’s past — but imaginary companions are always functionally real on the screen. Eric is invisible to the world, though never to us; Vincent gets some looks when he speaks to him, usually in irritation, but no one suggests that what he really ought to see is a doctor.

Viewing a man in pain, we are surely meant to feel for Vincent at least a little, but he’s so consistently annoying across so many hours, so rude not only to the suits in power but to the people on his team, that you may have trouble empathizing. (That is not how Henson did it.) “How do you have everything that you have going on in your life and you still make people struggle to have basic sympathy for you?” asks Lennie, speaking for at least one viewer. The sorry state of his marriage is obviously mostly his fault — and incidentally responsible for Edgar’s disappearance, when he sets off alone, unsupervised, as his parents bicker.

A man and a woman in shabby dress stand near an encampment.

Serving as a temperamental counterweight to Vincent is Det. Ledroit, a straight-up good guy who, when not working overtime to find Edgar, is taking care of his partner as he dies from AIDS-related illness. And he’s determined to investigate a possible connection with the earlier disappearance, from the same neighborhood, of an older Black child, whose mother (Adepero Oduye, in one of the subtlest of the series’ many fine performances) haunts police headquarters, looking for help and expecting none. (Oddly, no one suggests a ransom request might be forthcoming, though Vincent is famous and his father is a wealthy developer.)

Cumberbatch has Vincent turned up to high most of the time, but he’s surrounded by quieter performances from a first-rate cast. I especially liked Bamar Kane as Yuusuf, who lives in the subway tunnels underground, and is perhaps Morgan’s least predictable character; Erika Soto as Tina, a sympathetic New York Police Department secretary; the always magnificent Clarke Peters as George, the super of Vincent’s building; and Wade Allain-Marcus as Gator, who runs a club called Lux, suspiciously located between Edgar’s home and his school, that stands generically for the excesses of 1980s Manhattan nightlife and where many characters will encounter significant plot points.

For a series with puppets, a missing child and a father in need of redemption, there are only a couple of possible endings, however twisted the route, that won’t have you cursing the six hours you spent getting there — as sentimental and simplistic as that finish may be. And “Eric” goes there, boldly.

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West Hollywood, CA - May 23: Reality TV's "Vanderpump Rules" stars Ariana Madix, left, and Katie Maloney, are photographed in what will soon be their open restaurant, "Something About Her," in West Hollywood, CA, Tuesday, May 23, 2023. The two reality stars have been embroiled in a cheating scandal with castmate Tom Sandoval, with fans dubbing the chaos, "Scandoval." (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

Column: The very L.A. lessons at the heart of reality TV smash ‘Vanderpump Rules’

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‘Babylon’ review: Margot Robbie starrer gets thumbs down
To Love and Hate in L.A.: ‘Babylon’ Must Be Seen to Be Believed
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BABYLON: Several ambitious Dreamers rise and fall as a result of debauchery, immorality, and extreme
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'Babylon' review: Sex, drugs and elephant diarrhea
By Justin Chang Film Critic. Dec. 20, 2022 11:24 AM PT. Damien Chazelle's "Babylon" begins in a dusty stretch of Southern California desert in the 1920s, with the delivery of an elephant ...
Babylon movie review & film summary (2022)
If "La La Land" was his wide-eyed, sentimental look at the movie machine, "Babylon" feels like a very intentional counter to the criticisms of that film. It's a lavish 1920s-period piece about how often the silver screen images that feel like magic are really the product of incredibly hard work, broken dreams, and a lot of luck.
'Babylon' Review: Boozing. Snorting. That's Entertainment!?
Margot Robbie, center, in Damien Chazelle's "Babylon," which for all its scenes of wild thrashing is paradoxically puritanical. Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures. By Manohla Dargis. Dec. 22 ...
Babylon review: a fiery, passionate love letter to early Hollywood
Babylon premieres in theaters on Dec. 23. Damien Chazelle, the director of Whiplash and La La Land, returns with Babylon, an audacious, debauched ode to Hollywood's golden age that is so over ...
Babylon (2022)
The movie was just too good Rated 5/5 Stars • Rated 5 out of 5 stars 02/08/23 Full Review Michael Inside Babylon exists a wonderful and illuminating story about the dawn of modern filmmaking and ...
'Babylon' Review: Margot Robbie & Brad Pitt in Damien Chazelle Film
Release date: Friday, Dec. 23. Cast: Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, P.J. Byrne, Lukas Haas, Olivia Hamilton, Tobey Maguire, Max Minghella. Director ...
'Babylon' Review: Damien Chazelle's Raucous Look at ...
'Babylon' Review: Damien Chazelle's Raucous Look at Classic Hollywood Is a Tawdry, Over-the-Top Affair Reviewed at Samuel Goldwyn Theater, Los Angeles, Nov. 14, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running ...
Babylon Mangles the Spirit of Early Hollywood
It opens in 1926, as silent films and their stars were still going strong, and ends in the early 1930s, when many of the old players found themselves left behind by the talkies, a span of roughly ...
"Babylon," Reviewed: Damien Chazelle Whips Up a Golden-Hollywood Cream
The aspiring actress Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) is cognate with the earlier film's domineering, petulant, and voice-challenged silent-film diva Lina Lamont (who, in effect, gets a backstory ...
How 'Babylon' Roars Through the 1920s
It follows multiple characters through a period in the 1920s when Hollywood, high on the success of silent films, began experiencing growing pains and significant collateral damage from the ...
Babylon film review
It is 1926. At the end of the road is a movie business party, a crazed bacchanal where the crowd includes a kingly matinee idol, played by Brad Pitt, and Margot Robbie's free-spirited starlet ...
The True Story Behind Babylon
The exterior shots of Babylon's raucous opening party were filmed at Shea's Castle, a remote mansion about 60 miles outside of Los Angeles that was built in the 1920s for soirees of that ...
Babylon
Robert Abele Los Angeles Times Assertive and ebullient, "Babylon" is as alive as a movie can be to the everyday mesh of liberating art, humorous camaraderie and hazardous political reality. Full ...
'Babylon' review: Damien Chazelle's latest ...
Movie review. Damien Chazelle's sprawling "Babylon" is the flip side to his 2016 hit " La La Land .". Both are movies about movies, set primarily in Los Angeles and focus on characters ...
Babylon (2022 film)
Babylon is a 2022 American epic historical black comedy drama film written and directed by Damien Chazelle.It features an ensemble cast that includes Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, P. J. Byrne, Lukas Haas, Olivia Hamilton, Max Minghella, Rory Scovel, Katherine Waterston, and Tobey Maguire.It chronicles the rise and fall of multiple characters during ...
To Love and Hate in L.A.: 'Babylon' Must Be Seen to Be Believed
Damien Chazelle's Babylon is not a movie that lacks moments of potential self-critique, from the fire hose-like spray of pachyderm shit that douses the characters in its first scene—a nod as ...
'Babylon' trailer: Robbie, Pitt revel in old Hollywood
July 6, 2022. The uncensored, NSFW trailer takes off with madcap humor and lots of drugs, violence and nudity. It features Pitt and Robbie partaking in circus-style parties, punctuated with flying ...
Babylon: It's got Margot Robbie, it's got Brad ...
Starring: Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, PJ Byrne, Lukas Haas, Olivia Hamilton, Tobey Maguire, Max Minghella
'Babylon' Review: A Clear View of Black ...
Video by Babylon, the Movie. The thinking might have been that censors would have been saving young impressionable audiences from themselves. That kind of paternalism is, in some way, the force ...
The Beast film review
Here in 2024, everyone in movies is gripped by melancholy dread about the future. The Beast has its own take on that. Change, it suggests, is mostly an illusion.
Review: Witty, fast-paced 'Babylon,' set in ...
With the Thursday premiere of Danny Boyle's astringent though essentially true-hearted police satire "Babylon," SundanceTV expands its original-series repertoire into comedy.
The Best Films of 2024, So Far
The story: Picking up generations after the last trilogy ended, Wes Ball's action-adventure follows Noa (Owen Teague) after his clan has been attacked. On his own now, he meets up with Raka, a ...
'The Beach Boys' Review: How to Make Good Vibrations
The wholesome ocean-breeze look of the Beach Boys could make the group a punchline if it weren't for their sweet sunshine sound. The origins of their intricate harmonies undergird "The Beach ...
'Eric' review: Benedict Cumberbatch is angry and ...
"Eric," a limited series premiering Thursday on Netflix, stars Benedict Cumberbatch, wearing an American accent, as Vincent Anderson, a Jim Henson-brand puppeteer, if Henson had had severe ...

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‘Babylon’ Review: Damien Chazelle’s Raucous Look at Classic Hollywood Is a Tawdry, Over-the-Top Affair

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Reviewed at Samuel Goldwyn Theater, Los Angeles, Nov. 14, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 189 MIN.

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