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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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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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Babylon 's overwhelming muchness is exhausting, but much like the industry it honors, its well-acted, well-crafted glitz and glamour can often be an effective distraction.

Babylon has some entertaining moments and its ambition is impressive, but the movie's chaotic and disjointed execution makes it difficult to really enjoy.

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Movie review: 'babylon'.

Bob Mondello

Director Damien Chazelle's "Babylon" is a comically over-the-top look at scandal-ridden 1920s Hollywood. It's a celebration of an art form in turmoil as silent films give way to talkies.

DANIEL ESTRIN, HOST:

Christmas Day, a popular day to head to the movies. There's a new one out by Damien Chazelle, himself a big champion of showbiz. He's the filmmaker behind Whiplash, centered on a jazz percussionist, and "La La Land," which followed the romance between a musician and an actress. His latest is a film biz comedy called "Babylon." And as critic Bob Mondello explains, it's about scandal-ridden Hollywood in the Roaring Twenties.

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: We begin in the desert, much as Hollywood did, with a truck driver and client bit that feels like the setup for a Laurel and Hardy movie.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BABYLON")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Put down one horse and your signature right there.

DIEGO CALVA: (As Manny Torres) You said one horse?

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Yeah. It's only one, right?

CALVA: (As Manny Torres) No. It's an elephant.

MONDELLO: A misunderstanding, clearly.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) You mean a really big horse.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As Manny Torres) No. I mean an elephant.

MONDELLO: Manny's chaperoning the circus animal to a Hollywood party. And what follows will be Laurel-and-Hardy-esque slapstick in color with, shall we say, colorful language.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Holy s***. Is that a f****** elephant?

MONDELLO: Cut to Manny's car, towing the now-elephant-laden truck up a steep hill when the tow line snaps, the truck rolls backwards and - well, I'll spare you the sound of the elephant relieving itself on its trainer. But let it be said that director Damien Chazelle is being honest up front. This is not going to be Tinseltown cleaned up for public consumption. It's the roar of the Roaring 20s, amplified to full-scale bacchanal, which is, as it happens, the next scene, the Hollywood party in full swing, folks cavorting and snorting and doing things I can't talk about on the radio. Big stars are there, including a Douglas Fairbanks type named Jack Conrad, played by Brad Pitt.

BRAD PITT: (As Jack Conrad) This table only has one bottle. We're going to need eight.

MONDELLO: And also wanna-bes, including both Manny, played by Diego Calva, and a girl he helped sneak in, Nellie LaRoy, played by Margot Robbie.

MARGOT ROBBIE: (As Nellie LaRoy) I'm already a star.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) What have you been in?

ROBBIE: (As Nellie LaRoy) Nothing yet.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Who's your contract with?

ROBBIE: (As Nellie LaRoy) Don't have one.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) I think you want to become a star.

ROBBIE: (As Nellie LaRoy) Honey, you don't become a star. You either are one or you ain't. I am. Do you know where I can find some drugs?

MONDELLO: By evening's end, they'll both be promised entry to a movie set for the first time. And it's a doozy - back in the desert, maybe a dozen silent films shooting at once. Nellie gets to shine in an idiotic Western as a barroom floozy. Manny attaches himself to the director of Jack's film, a medieval battlefield epic that's shooting with real swords, lots of injuries, and a full orchestra blaring away for atmospherics, observing it all from a nearby hilltop a Hedda Hopper-style reporter played by Jean Smart

JEAN SMART: (As Elinor St. John) Soldiers swarm the fields like flecks of paint from a madman's brush as your humble servant bears witness to the latest of the moving picture's magic tricks. Oh, why do I bother? Look at these idiots. I knew Prust (ph), you know.

MONDELLO: Writer-director Chazelle is every bit as smitten as his star-struck newbies. He includes film lore for aficionados, shout-outs to Fatty Arbuckle, to the women directors who were pioneers in what later became a nearly all-male world behind the camera.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Cut. OK. Ice water for two...

MONDELLO: And with the coming of talkies, everything shifts up a notch. This was the moment when Hollywood debauchery prompted talk of a production code. And Chazelle serves up nudity, profanity, murder, rattlesnake rustling, mountains of cocaine and a probing look at the effect of film industry racism towards even black stars like the trumpeter played by Jovan Adepo.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) Next to them, Sidney looks white.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #5: (As character) Look. He's Black.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) They won't think that in the sound.

MONDELLO: "Babylon" feels over the top and enormous at three-plus hours, reportedly down from a four-hour first cut. It is a crazily overstuffed love letter to the glories of cinema, as characters keep telling us. It is too much and often, especially in call-outs to "Singin' In The Rain," a little on the nose. It is also clearly heartfelt and that counts. I'm Bob Mondello.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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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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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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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: Baby, it's way too much

Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie lead Damien Chazelle's starry, manic reimagining of the time before talkies.

Hollywood was born in sin: a spangled palm-tree Sodom where pretty young things sell their souls for a role, and vice and venality run free. Or at least that's the myth we've built since silent pictures, and one that director Damien Chazelle seems desperate to convey in Babylon , his frantic, antic, and frankly exhausting ode to the birth of the business they call show.

It's also pretty old news to anyone who's read stuff like Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon , the seminal scandal bible published nearly 60 years ago (and subsequently banned for a decade) that notoriously exposed — a lot would say exploited — many of the Golden Age stories retold here. That book, proudly operating on the far-out fringes of decency and accountability, never really pretended to be anything but what it was: a wild stew of slander and calamity as delicious as it was questionably true.

Chazelle, who became the youngest Best Director Oscar winner in history at 32 for La La Land , seems equally enamored of the industry's seamiest tales, while also coming at it like a gee-whiz kid; he needs it all to mean something. And he has at his disposal things that underground figures like Anger never did: a pile of money and movie stars, plus the high-gloss veneer of prestige filmmaking. It's still three turgid, clattering hours of nudity, depravity, and mislaid alligators, but also, you know, art.

Margot Robbie 's Nellie LaRoy enters the frontier-town Los Angeles of 1926 like a hurricane, a beautiful would-be starlet with a brassy New Jersey squawk, a gambling problem, and a tendency to turn every room she enters into a bar brawl. Brad Pitt is Jack Conrad, a much-married matinee idol sliding into middle age and ever-deeper vats of alcohol. They're both dazzling to Manuel "Manny" Torres ( Narcos: Mexico' s Diego Calva ), an aspiring producer with a Valentino face and a head full of stardust. All Manny wants is to be part of the magic of movies, whether that means wrangling an incontinent elephant for an unhinged house party or dragging strung-out talent from their beds (or whoever's bed they're in) to set by call time.

Like many of the major players here, he is Chazelle's creation: Most characters fall somewhere between composite and pure fiction, including Jean Smart 's gossip-peddling power player Elinor St. John, a ringer for real-life rival columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons ; Li Jun Li as a stand-in for Anna May Wong , the first major Chinese-American actress; and Jovan Adepo's gifted Black bandleader Sidney Palmer, whose career path echoes the early arcs of Louis Armstrong and Stepin Fetchit .

They and a cast of what easily seems like thousands spend most of the next 186 minutes in a whirl of decadence and bad decisions, careening from one hectic misadventure to the next. Cocaine piles up like table salt, and sex is universal currency; death comes casually and frequently, as a gut punch or a punchline. In one Tarantino-esque interlude, an inebriated Nelly wrestles a rattlesnake to the death in the desert; in another, she vomits shellfish at a cocktail party in an Exorcist spray. By the time Tobey Maguire arrives in the third act as a giggling, consumptive gangster, huffing a cocktail of brandy and ether, the phrase "Jazz Age Boogie Nights " feels almost too apropos.

But Boogie had a dramatic throughline, and something genuinely unsettling to say about the strange soul-bargaining of fame. Chazelle often steers his characters toward tragedy or anguish, without ever quite rooting his inscrutable thesis in anything real. (A brutal scene about blackface feels both as devastating as it's meant to be and oddly unearned.) There's also a sense that all this willful outrageousness just isn't his lane: The profanity is both relentless and numbing, and even the orgies look too clean. (Were people really waxing their personal bits circa Prohibition?)

It's all part of the film's panting need for provocation, along with its frequent, confounding anachronisms, from the hair and wardrobe down to the everyday slang. Yes, pre-Code Hollywood was a place for iconoclasts and outcasts, and in that sense could serve as a bubble of unlikely equality. But even a full-blown fantasy needs its own internal logic, a thing Babylon rarely gestures to or simply disregards completely. (What kind of unique challenges might a female director like the one Chazelle's real-life wife, Olivia Hamilton, portrays here so breezily have faced back in the day? You'll have to ask the ghost of Lois Weber . Race and class, too, don't seem to mean anything, until suddenly they do.)

The script still finds more than few bravura moments of absurd comedy, and the cast can't be faulted for committing. Pitt brings a boozy, unflappable charm and later, bewildered pathos; Robbie starts at 11 and never dials down. An acerbic Smart, vamping in a series of complicated hats, feels criminally underused, apart from one blistering speech she gives Pitt near the end. Even the cameos read like a red-carpet Rolodex on shuffle: Olivia Wilde , Eric Roberts, Katherine Waterston , Spike Jonze , Flea . Calva is naturally charismatic and lovely to look at, but the movie's supposed co-lead spends most of his time simply bearing witness — one more casualty in the frenzied, preposterous rush of Chazelle's Everything Hollywood All at Once. Grade: C –

‘Babylon’ is a lavish yet unfocused valentine to Hollywood’s heyday

Margot robbie delivers a fearless performance as a cocaine-addled ingenue, but her character is ultimately abandoned by damien chazelle’s mash-up of a story.

An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Brad Pitt's character is meant to evoke John Garfield. The character of Jack Conrad is loosely based on John Gilbert. The story has been corrected.

Say this much for Damien Chazelle: He shows his audience exactly what he’s giving them within the first few minutes of “Babylon,” his bruised, black-eyed valentine to Hollywood’s sybaritic heyday. In a whopper of an opening number, Chazelle films the delivery of an elephant to the estate of film producer Don Wallach (Jeff Garlin), a bravura scene of extravagance and excess that ends with not a few bit players covered in pachyderm waste — recalling the famous joke about the guy who cleans up after the circus every day. Asked why he doesn’t quit, he replies with incredulity: “What, and leave show business?”

That’s the animating question of “Babylon,” Chazelle’s lavish, febrile, ultimately ambiguous portrait of American cinema before the moralizing censors and Wall Street moguls got their mitts on a once-glorious tribe of outlaws, reprobates, perverts and pirates. The louche, lusty pioneers of Chazelle’s admiring imagination made movies on the fly, not to send a message but to see how far they could push a medium still in its infancy. Raffish, ungovernable and not a little unhinged, the early settlers of 1920s Hollywoodland were, by Chazelle’s reckoning, a motley crew of wackos and visionaries, prone to self-destruction but also to soaring flights of inspiration and ecstasy.

At least, I think that’s “Babylon’s” point? Quite honestly, by the time this muddled, overcrowded, tiresomely digressive trip finally crashes like so many post-binge hangovers, Chazelle’s point has gotten lost in a self-indulgent, manically erratic shuffle. Once the elephant is delivered, it becomes the centerpiece of a raging party of unfettered drinking, drugging, sex and a near-death. A fetish-y scene of an overweight man and his young date recalls the scandalous life and career of Fatty Arbuckle; the pencil-mustached Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt, in a silky, endearingly sensitive turn) is clearly meant to evoke John Gilbert; and Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), the cocaine-addled ingenue who’s plucked from obscurity to become a star, seems to be based on Mabel Normand.

Cinema nerds will find plenty of similar parlor-game diversions in “Babylon’s” characters and their real-life analogues. (Is the director Nellie works with based on Dorothy Arzner? Anita Loos? Alice Guy-Blaché? Discuss!) But for those not keeping score at home, Chazelle keeps what passes for a narrative cracking along at a breakneck but baggily unstructured speed. While Nellie pursues fame and fortune, Manny Torres, a young man she befriends at Wallach’s party, gets his own chance to leave elephant detail. Played by newcomer Diego Calva in a performance reminiscent of a youthful Javier Bardem, Manny is the ethical center of a film that whirls, gyre-like, into the outré reaches of depravity and dissolution.

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Part burlesque, part grotesque, “Babylon” takes its pacey cues and shock effects from earlier, much better films: Chazelle doesn’t tell a story so much as string together sequences that alternately quote “Goodfellas” and “Boogie Nights,” without being nearly as horrifyingly elegant or cringe-inducingly pleasurable as either. Like “Singin’ in the Rain,” which the filmmaker will quote literally in a climax that’s meant to be a moving testament to film’s endurance as an art form, “Babylon” takes place at the cusp of the sound era, when the license and licentiousness of the silents gave way to the rationalized — and fatally sanitized — production practices of the talkies. Manny’s big break comes when he rushes from a remote movie location to Los Angeles to replace a camera; he gets back just before the director is about to lose the light, thereby inadvertently discovering magic hour. In a welcome quiet moment, a Louella-or-is-it-Hedda-like reporter played by Jean Smart schools Jack in the ways of graceful aging in a touching speech about obsolescence and eternity.

Such are the romantic touches that give “Babylon” moments of lyrical lift. Elsewhere, it exists in a revisionist dream space in which anarchy and art go hand in hand, even as the body count piles up and up. Robbie plays Nellie as a creature of insatiable appetites — for fame but most especially cocaine — whose jittery, tight-jawed energy fuels the entire cockeyed caravan. Lewd, lascivious, libidinous, Nellie is the heroine of a picture that begins to feel hectoring in its admiration for her most outrageous antics (the difference between madcap and mayhem lies only in a few random letters, after all). Let’s put it this way: If you must see one movie this year featuring projectile vomiting as an indictment of the upper classes, make it “ Triangle of Sadness .” Conversely, if you must see one movie this year featuring a pointless and seemingly endless snake-fight scene, “Babylon” is your best bet.

Although Jack, Nellie and Manny are the main protagonists in “Babylon,” Chazelle introduces a third: jazz musician Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), whose travails as an African American in a mostly White medium come to an offensively absurdist head when he’s asked to perform in blackface. Although he’s a welcome addition to the proceedings, Sidney’s storyline gets lost in Chazelle’s frantic intercutting, which becomes a case of diminishing returns as “Babylon” reaches its panicky denouement: a scene featuring a ghoulish Tobey Maguire, in which he seems to be channeling “ Boogie Nights ”-era Alfred Molina by way of “ Nightmare Alley .”

By this point, the pleasure seekers decadently partying their way through “Babylon” have looked to pain for their biggest turn-on. The breathless energy begins to feel exponentially more forced (and, frankly, unpleasant) the harder Chazelle works to sustain it. Robbie delivers a fearless portrayal of a woman trying to outrun the forces seeking to domesticate her, but she’s abandoned by a story that amounts to little more than a mash-up of moments that, for all their high aesthetic and production value, feel shallow and not terribly original. Even “Babylon’s” final moments — intended to be Chazelle’s crowning paean to cinema at its most expressive and transporting — can’t bring the hazy stuff-for-stuff’s-sake into focus.

Like so many recent films — “ Once Upon a Time in Hollywood ,” “ Belfast ,” “ The Fabelmans ,” “ Empire of Light ” — “Babylon” wants to pay tribute to the medium that brings us all together in the dark. But it also doesn’t miss an opportunity to alienate the audience at every turn. Which, in a backhanded way, might make it an accidentally honest portrayal of a medium that has always wanted to have its coke and snort it, too.

R. At area theaters. Contains strong and crude sexual material, graphic nudity, bloody violence, drug use and pervasive coarse language. 188 minutes.

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The Dizzying Debauchery of Babylon

Damien Chazelle’s new film is an extravaganza of caustic misery and overflowing movie magic.

A debauchery-filled party scene in 'Babylon'

For a lavish and expensive epic about 1920s Hollywood, Damien Chazelle’s new film, Babylon , introduces itself about as scatologically as possible. In its first sequence, a harried gofer named Manny Torres (played by Diego Calva) tries to transport an elephant into the Hollywood Hills for a big-shot producer’s party, a farcical task that ends with the elephant pooping on the camera lens—in a way, on the viewers themselves. We then cut to a giggling movie star getting urinated on as part of some private sexcapade while the party ensues on the floors below—a sweaty, drug-fueled orgy that Chazelle presents in a bravura unbroken take.

The scene, filled with wondrous and horrifying sights, massively overstays its welcome. And that sets the tone perfectly for Chazelle’s ensuing poison-pen letter to Hollywood’s silent era, a three-hour-plus extravaganza of debauchery, general misery, and overflowing movie magic that sets the industry aflame and invites the audience to dance around the bonfire. It’s a daring thing for a major studio to put out these days, when big budgets tend to be lavished on superheroes, and Babylon ’s caustic indulgence will likely put many theatergoers off. But Chazelle is trying to make a point with all the excess: that the joy of cinema has always gone hand in hand with exploitation, abuse, and off-screen villainy.

On its face, Babylon would seem to be the flip-side narrative to La La Land , the director’s Oscar-winning musical about filmmaking, which took a much gauzier approach. In it, people sang winsome ballads saluting “the fools who dream,” and stardom was granted to those who strived hard enough for it, though it came at the cost of love. But La La Land was a film with a bittersweet edge ; Chazelle seemed to be critiquing his own nostalgia while still letting it play out on-screen to delight viewers. In Babylon , his affection for the fame-seeking business he works in has only curdled further, but his passion for film as a medium hasn’t diminished in the slightest. The subsequent raging contrast between these two notions is fascinating to watch.

Read: La La Land ’s double-edged nostalgia

A huge ensemble piece, Babylon focuses on three main characters. There’s Manny, a Mexican American assistant who rises through the ranks of a fictional studio to become a film executive right as movies begin their transition to “talkies.” At the frenzied party in the film’s opening act, he meets two actors: Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), a newcomer looking to break into the biz, and Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), an established superstar who can’t get out of bed before downing a few cocktails. Babylon follows each person’s rise and fall as their arcs intertwine and come apart, but it also delves into other tales of an industry stumbling toward a veneer of respectability during one of its most volatile eras.

Hollywood in the 1920s was, Chazelle insistently tells us, absolutely anarchic. Bankrolled by shady figures, filmmakers were still inventing basic storytelling concepts on the fly, and codes for on-screen decency and morality were a few years off. At one point, Chazelle virtuosically shoots a series of gigantic film productions all taking place simultaneously in the same California hills, a conceit that was feasible when movies didn’t have to worry about capturing sound. While one director wrangles thousands of extras for a colossal medieval-combat scene (somewhat reminiscent of the famed 1916 epic Intolerance ), other productions play out on intimate sets that have been knocked together. Chazelle’s camera roams from location to location, drinking in the wild glory of it all.

It might be the best sequence Chazelle has ever put together, and he’s staged quite a few dazzling set pieces in his short career. He wants the viewer to consider the sheer audacity of early moviemaking, particularly delighting in the contrast between the immense battle being orchestrated for one movie and an emotional barroom scene being produced for another, in which Nellie, a last-minute replacement, proves herself the saucy new star the studio’s been looking for. By the time the sequence ended, I was ready to proclaim Babylon a masterpiece, except that the film wasn’t even halfway done.

What follows is a dizzying series of concentric spirals for the ensemble that start feeling almost nauseating. Nellie’s initial triumphant success begins to falter because of her scandalous off-screen behavior; Jack’s image begins to fade with age, alcoholism, and changing trends; Manny’s desire to rise to the top compels him to make a set of morally compromising decisions. There are other characters with narratives rooted in film history that are equally fascinating, though they sadly get shorter shrift in Chazelle’s screenplay. Li Jun Li plays Lady Fay Zhu, a cabaret singer and an actress with a gift for painting silent-film title cards, and Jovan Adepo plays a trumpeter named Sidney Palmer who briefly enjoys fame during the early years of films with sound.

Read: When Hollywood’s power players were women

Almost all of these figures have historical analogues, with many of them blending classic bits of Hollywood lore—Nellie is obviously inspired by the flapper queen Clara Bow , Jack is the tragic silent star John Gilbert , Fay Zhu is much indebted to Anna May Wong , and so on. But Chazelle turns up the volume with each portrayal, mixing fact and fiction and giving his dialogue more contemporary snap and crackle to underline the ways the industry hasn’t changed after almost 100 years. Although I was moved and agitated by the cavalcades of failure Babylon depicts, the film almost deliberately becomes a drag, wringing out every last golden drop of nostalgia until everyone, on-screen and off, is miserable and exhausted.

But before ushering ticket buyers out the door, Chazelle presents a coda that is so absurd and daring, so simultaneously cornball and avant-garde, that I wasn’t sure whether to doff my cap or throw fruit at the screen. I shan’t describe it entirely, but it includes a montage that exists to underscore Chazelle’s core message about the world he’s working in. Yes, he seems to be saying, Hollywood is a fetid pit of exploitation that has sucked many souls dry over the decades, but it is all in service of the best entertainment money can buy. I’m not sure if I agree or if I was simply beaten into submission after more than three hours, but Babylon is the kind of grandiose folly that at least gives the viewer a big old mess to chew on.

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There’s History in Damien Chazelle’s Babylon , But Where’s the Thrill?

All great directors are perverts. This is not a knock but a compliment meant to evoke the great, subterranean forces that power the medium. Film inherently taps into the rapture of looking — the voyeuristic thrill that comes with exploring worlds and peoples sometimes far from your own. It isn’t exactly escape so much as reflection, warped by the pleasure principle. In writing and directing Babylon — the three-hour-and-eight-minute tragicomedy that charts the hothouse machinations of the silent era and the fallout that happened when Hollywood moved into sound — Damien Chazelle of La La Land fame reveals himself to be anything but a pervert. He’s far too interested in the logistics of moviemaking to capture the emotional surge or exceptionable eroticism that defined not just Hollywood’s incandescent silent era but films at their most powerful.

Beginning in 1926 and ending in 1952, Babylon opens by introducing one of the narrative’s crucial leads, Manuel “Manny” Torres (Diego Calva), a sweet-hearted Mexican fixer who dreams of leaving his mark on the world through film, which he considers bigger than life itself. For now, he’s transporting an elephant to a party hosted by the mogul he works for. Chazelle quickly plunges us into a world of excess and the people who inhabit it with a hedonistic soirée. Cinematographer Linus Sandgren — who has worked with Chazelle consistently, as well as lent his skills to films like No Time to Die — lets his camera swoon, skitter, and saunter through the carefully coordinated proceedings, lingering on a Fatty Arbuckle type getting pissed on by a young dame before expanding to explore the full breadth of the occasion. (The dame later goes so hard she looks damn near dead and needs to be carried out with the elephant as a distraction.) As a Black jazz outfit, led by trumpet player Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), blares Justin Hurwitz’s bombastic score into existence, we are thrust into pure delectation.

Bodies in fine outfits, or entirely nude, sweat and gyrate within a warm amber glow. Nellie LaRoy (a vivacious Margot Robbie decked in poppy red, whose character echoes the likes of Clara Bow and Joan Crawford) crashes into a statue: “You don’t become a star. You either are one or you ain’t,” she remarks. Nellie is a star in the making, voracious in her approach to everything, who will prove to be at the right place at the right time (eventually nabbing an opportunity that was meant for the girl led out unconsciously via elephant). But Jack Conrad is a star at the peak of his fame and power, played with undeniable brio by Brad Pitt, fully leaning into his charisma and the complications he brings when he lights up a screen. Isn’t that a requirement for a matinee idol? He rolls up to the party, top down, arguing with his wife (Olivia Wilde). He’s stumbling over his words, speaking Italian as she’s pouring her heart out, angry and pleading to be seen and heard. When she announces they’re getting a divorce, Jack is barely fazed. He’ll go in and out of marriages throughout the film’s meaty run time. There’s always more women.

More women. More drugs. More alcohol. More pleasure. Desires can never be met, only endlessly fed. So, when Manny and Nellie connect, they’re not just snorting lines of cocaine but sitting in front of mounds of it. With a dancerly cadence, Jack orders not just one drink but enough to get a decent-size dinner party drunk. “We’re also going to need two Gin Rickeys, an Orange Blossom with brandy, three French 75s, and can you do a Corpse Reviver? Gin, lemon, Kina Lillet, with a dash of absinthe. Two of those,” Jack says. Pitt draws out the word “dash” and leans into the server, who moments earlier yearned to catch his eye by putting her tits in his face. There are other moments of quietude amid the feverish pace of the film. Chazelle delights in such contrasts — the chaotic and the still, the virulent and the divine. Which is part of the problem: He’s more interested in how he’s looking than what he’s looking at, more compelled by the possibilities of a camera’s gaze rather than what the camera is pointed at: people with bodies as well as lives that are far less neat in trajectory than the film suggests.

The closest Chazelle’s work comes to capturing a truly heated extravagance is when Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li) is onscreen. She exists in a liminal space in the industry — known but not wholly respected or honored for her talent. She often writes titles for the films she fails to land auditions for. She gives the money she earns to her parents. But at the party, she’s something more. She’s a star as soon as her heels click against hardwood. Her gloved hand holds a cigarette to her lips and smoke dances along the shadows of her exquisite profile. Dressed in a way that nods to the gender-bending transgressions and silken glamour of Marlene Dietrich, Lady Fay is a sight as she sings about her love for her “girlfriend’s pussy.” Li Jun Li is marvelous in the role — tricksy and yearning — but she’s underserved by Chazelle’s impulses, which tend toward broad strokes rather than delightful details that lead characters to be more than amalgamations of archetypes pulled together from considerable research into an era clearly revered. (The film suggests a relationship between Nellie and Lady Fay, but the details of how their love affair develops are never explained beyond a newspaper spread.) Babylon ’s characters are at different stages of living and dying within the shores of Hollywood, but they are all bound to and by their cravings — for stardom, for power, for control. Chazelle is most intrigued by the vice that unspools from these desires and how they fuel Hollywood’s filmmaking on the most mechanical of levels, rather than the way it charges the people that populate these films.

Sure, there are characters fucking in a variety of positions, sometimes wearing a fake donkey head. (Notably, we don’t see any of the main characters having sex. That’s for extras.) The party scene, which clocks in at about 20 minutes, builds to a variety of drug-fueled moments meant to titillate, including one involving a man getting a Champagne bottle shoved up his ass. His face doesn’t speak to delight so much as the rush of anxiety that comes with being lost in a party of this sort. It is anxiety that fuels the film itself. Babylon is a stunning example of how sensuality isn’t simply born from having people in various states of undress. It must have a propulsion of its own, drawn from a curiosity about the figure as much as the mind and world around it.

Consider an early sequence in Babylon involving Spike Jonze as an intense German director, Otto. He’s screaming and pushing people around over the fact that the homeless extras from Skid Row are threatening to strike if not allowed to renegotiate their pay (a problem Manny figures out on horseback with a gun). More production upheavals announce themselves during the silent’s epic shoot, as titles on the screen note the time of day. Jack manipulates Gloria Swanson into taking a lower rate while knocking back enough alcohol to pickle a man in a single sitting. Manny fights the dying of the light to get a new camera across town for the movie’s most important shot. Meanwhile, Nellie gets her debut on another set, taking the place of the woman who overdosed. Nellie proves to have a preternatural skill for understanding the camera and demonstrating what Chazelle can’t: a palpable gratification from watching or being watched. She doesn’t just cry when asked — she can hold her tears for two beats before letting them drop, or summon a single one for maximum emotional pull. But back on Otto’s set, those mistakes abound. Jack is a stumbling drunk by the time Manny secures a camera — though once Otto calls “action,” it’s as if he’s instantly sober. Cast against the rose-golden sunset, he and his leading lady kiss as smoke plumes the air and the sounds of battle are drowned out by an orchestra. As if fated, a butterfly dances in the air before delicately landing on Jack’s shoulder. “We got it,” Otto says, at almost a whisper. The set roars with satisfaction. Babylon wants to engender awe for film, while only mildly critiquing the political and social mores upon which Hollywood was built. It’s as if Chazelle wants to push against our expectations of his industry’s history but is also deeply afraid he’ll lose the ability to make a movie like this again.

Babylon can be transfixing, before a feeling that the film is too polished, too neat, takes hold. The cinematography balances warmth and cloying darkness, communicating the delights and horrors in which characters are mired. The music carries itself with hard-won panache. The actors are game. The costuming, makeup, and hair design playfully experiment with the visual traits of the eras they traipse through to mixed but eye-catching results. The editing is elegant as it weaves together a cornucopia of needs, and is often a source of the film’s greatest humorous moments, cutting against expectation to place the audience further into the barely organized chaos of this ragged industry. Where it ultimately stumbles and falls is in its characterization — those particulars of humanity that the classic films Chazelle so loves excelled at portraying.

As the film marches deeper into the sound era, the lives of its main characters take bitter turns. Manny has moved up in the industry as a sound director and is newly identifying as a Spaniard, bowing to the racial strictures of the moviemaking system he so loves. Solidarity is traded in for a perch on the ledge of power, which comes to a head when Manny asks Sidney to use cork, dressing himself in blackface to put him in better balance with the darker-skinned musicians flanking him. (It’s a surface-level exploration of the cost of being a part of Hollywood then as a Black man.) Nellie’s brassy speech, classed New Jersey accent, and wild-child nature fall out of fashion for women, and she’s forced to adapt or let go of the stardom she was just starting to relish. Take after take of Nellie’s first foray into sound are marred by minor issues born of the sensitive, cumbersome equipment now required to make movies, culminating with an assistant director (P.J. Byrne) reaching volcanic levels of expletive-laden outbursts: “If anyone stops this scene again, I will shit on you. I will shit in your mouth!” Jack, on the other hand, is fighting against the inevitable: his own irrelevance. Chazelle is able to capture the general rhythms of this era but not quite the debauchery of the specifics that made rising and falling careerists tick. What he remembers most of all is the freedom all of these artists had, something he feels is slipping into nonexistence today.

America is a country built on forgetting its own sins, and Hollywood has inherited that forgetfulness. This is never more apparent than when Hollywood is playing itself. In a scene between Jack and Elinor St. John, a gossip columnist with haughty air, Jean Smart plays an idea of a person turned into a joke — a journalist who is as performative as the actors she chooses to chide in her column. As Jack’s professional reputation continues to slide, Elinor writes a blistering column questioning if his time in the spotlight has ended. “Your time has run out. […] It’s over. It’s been over for a while,” she says to him from behind her typewriter, with a lamenting splendor that matches the tenor of the score. Smart rises before the seated Jack and launches into an arch, self-conscious monologue that mirrors issues with Chazelle’s writing elsewhere:

“I know it hurts. No one asks to be left behind. But in a hundred years when you and I are long gone, anytime someone threads a frame of yours through a sprocket, you’ll be alive again. You see what that means? A child born in 50 years will stumble across your image flickering on a screen and feel he knows you, like a friend, even though you breathed your last before he breathed his first. You’ve been given a gift. Be grateful. You’ll spend eternity with angels and ghosts.”

But this scene worked for me, tapping into a somber quality that is wistful and nostalgic. Within the folds of this scene — Smart’s melancholic approach to the monologue and Pitt’s crystalline blue eyes brimming with sorrow — is the director’s conflict. He wants to print the legend of the silent era and what was lost when Hollywood found sound, and critique its mores at the same time. He’s torn between loving film and having to defend its existence, amounting to a movie fueled not by that scintillating thrill that powers the works he’s nodding to, but a deep fear about the extinction of his own kind. Babylon is a film too busy writing an elegy for the still-breathing body of film as a medium to capture the true beauty and complications of being alive.

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Babylon Reviews Are Here, See What Critics Are Saying About Damian Chazelle’s Hollywood Epic

Audiences are in for a wild ride.

After providing audiences with Academy Award winners like Whiplash , La La Land and First Man , Damien Chazelle is back to fill our holiday season with another wild story that’s likely to be in contention for next year’s biggest awards . Babylon is a movie about movies, as audiences will follow five main characters through the era when Hollywood was transitioning from silent film to talkies. First reactions to Babylon were mixed, with people calling it everything from “a love letter to cinema” to “a flaming hot mess.” Now the reviews are here to help us decide if we’ll be taking a trip to the theater for Christmas.

Babylon ’s impressive ensemble is one reason to be excited about the movie , as it stars Margot Robbie , Brad Pitt , Diego Calva, Jovan Adepo and Li Jun Li, whose characters jump through time, experiencing the highest highs and lowest lows of their careers. Let’s see what the critics are saying, starting with CinemaBlend’s review of Babylon . Eric Eisenberg rates the film 3 stars out of 5, saying that while the first half is one of the best movies of the year, it’s destined to be divisive, yet still worth the watch. His take:

At its best, Babylon is exciting, hilarious, and a blast… but those adjectives are mostly reserved for describing approximately the first 90 minutes. The back half of the film, while it does have its highlights, demonstrates an inability for the movie to fully carry its own weight, and the multi-faceted narrative descends into tropes and some groan-worthy material before the end credits start to roll.

Leah Greenblatt of EW grades the film a C-, saying Damien Chazelle seems desperate to convey the depravity of Hollywood, for “three turgid, clattering hours,” and the result is frankly exhausting. She says in the review:

They and a cast of what easily seems like thousands spend most of the next 186 minutes in a whirl of decadence and bad decisions, careening from one hectic misadventure to the next. Cocaine piles up like table salt; sex is universal currency, and death comes casually and frequently, as a gut punch or a punchline.

Tomris Laffly of AV Club , however, calls Babylon “masterful,” grading the “deliciously decadent” movie an A and saying it’s not a minute too long. The critic says despite what’s going on on-screen, this is the writer/director’s most clear-headed film:

With an electric score by Justin Hurwitz (that occasionally resembles the chords in Chazelle’s La La Land too audibly), it’s all pure, eye-gouging debauchery for 30 or so minutes. Before the suggestive title Babylon appears, there will be plenty of orgies, mountains of drugs, sexual fetishes, naughty performance bits, projectile vomiting, and more sweaty bare bodies than one can count.

Babylon shows yet again that Damien Chazelle isn’t afraid to swing for the fences or go too far, according to Travis Hopson of Punch Drunk Critics , making him a filmmaker always worth checking out. However, only the lead trio get the proper amount of attention, and themes of race and homophobia would likely have been better off omitted since they’re not properly explored, the critic argues, rating the film 3 out of 5 stars:

Like the blitzed-out-of-its-mind lovechild of Boogie Nights and The Wolf of Wall Street, Damien Chazelle’s exciting, exhausting, and sloppy ode to jazz age Hollywood, Babylon, features elephant shit and golden showers in the first ten minutes. It also features a Los Angeles as you’ve rarely seen it…tranquil. For a moment, anyway. The city is in the midst of an epic transition, not just from silent movies into ‘talkies’, but the city as a whole from quiet desert to sprawling show business epicenter. They say that Hollywood will chew people up and spit them out, but this has always been true. Never moreso than the tragic, hopeful, and thrilling era that Chazelle lovingly, maddeningly depicts.

Nick Schager of The Daily Beast calls Babylon “an orgy of every worst idea in Hollywood” and a story about the roaring ‘20s in which no one looks, acts, or talks like they’re from that decade. The critic says the movie steals from every great director before collapsing in on itself. More from Schager:

Chockablock with profanity, nudity, and all manner of demented degradation, Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to First Man is a three-hour work of grand and grotesque excess that strives to celebrate the wondrous power of the movies. All it does, however, is crassly steal the magic of its superior ancestors, right up to a finale that parasitically pinches yesteryear’s classics for the pathos it can’t conjure on its own.

Love it or hate it, people are definitely going to be talking about Damien Chazelle’s latest offering, especially in regards to awards. If you want to be in the conversation, you’ll be able to see this one for yourself in theaters starting Friday, December 23. Be sure to also check out what’s headed to the big screen in the new year with our 2023 Movie Release Schedule .

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DVD & Streaming
Comedy , Drama

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In Theaters

December 23, 2022
Diego Calva as Manny Torres; Margot Robbie as Nellie LaRoy; Brad Pitt as Jack Conrad; Jean Smart as Elinor St. John; Jovan Adepo as Sidney Palmer; Li Jun Li as Lady Fay Zhu; Tobey Maguire as James McKay; Lukas Haas as George Munn; Max Minghella as Irving Thalberg; Samara Weaving as Colleen Moore

Home Release Date

January 31, 2023
Damien Chazelle

Distributor

Paramount Pictures

Movie Review

They called them the Roaring Twenties, and few places roared louder than Hollywood.

This scrub-littered corner of California was home to big dreams and bigger appetites, a place where the Wild West lived on and grew wilder. Snow wasn’t in the sun-drenched hills, but on coffee tables. Sex lived not behind the bedroom door, but the ballroom floor. A sweeter, innocent time? Don’t make me laugh.

Perhaps one could expect little more from an industry still so young, so new. Dreams were stamped on celluloid here, and the people that made them were blessed with a kind of immortality. They were stars , these first denizens of the silent screen—untouchable and glorious. By the 1920s, the film industry itself was in its adolescence—unfettered by any guardian, with the house to itself.

Perhaps it’s fitting that this particular story begins at a party, high in the hills.

Manny Torres arrives with an elephant literally in tow. The livestock truck (with probably less horsepower than today’s Honda Accord) nearly slid down the hill before it finally crawled up. Manny smelled of sweat and feces and elephant, but he was quickly drafted into backroom duty anyway—donning a tux to make sure that the party went smoothly and its loaded attendees stayed happy and drunk.

Nellie LaRoy arrives in a stolen car, driving smack into a statue that she insists hopped out of nowhere. She’s not on the guest list, but that’s not going to stop her. She’ll find her way in. Fate demands it. She’s not in Hollywood to try to be a star, Nellie tells Manny. “You either are one or you’re not. I am.”

Jack Conrad arrives on a wave of attention as always, adulation lapping ‘round his ankles like the tide. His wife leaves the party before even entering it—divorce soon to crash in her wake. But no matter. Tonight, Jack is It —life of the party, stealer of scenes. At a party with a literal elephant, he’s still the biggest star.

But change is coming to this glittering galaxy, an earthquake just down the road from the San Andreas. It’s called sound . And when the industry feels it rumble outward, not everyone will be left standing. It comes with a roar all its own.

Positive Elements

Of all the characters we meet in Babylon , Manny might be the most decent, the most down to earth. The son of Mexican immigrants, Hollywood attracts him because he wants to be a part of “something that lasts, something that means something.”

His work ultimately does mean something. He gives a talented Black jazz player a chance to wow audiences on screen, not just behind the cameras, for instance. And he seems to have an understanding of the medium’s power and potential. When he’s forced to make cruel decisions, he clearly feels bad about it.

But he’s at his most caring when it comes to Nellie. He’s perpetually protective of her and (without giving too much away) saves her from one scrape after another—sometimes at huge risk to himself.

We can offer a bit of a golf clap to Jack Cramer for giving Manny his start in the business (though you get the vibe that he’s about as conscious of that kindness as a motorboat towing a water skier).

An exotic performer named Lady Fay Zhu fearlessly saves someone from a rattlesnake and helps her family’s business when she can.

And perhaps we can offer a bit of praise to some protestors and the moviegoing public, oddly enough. “There’s a new sensibility now,” Manny tells someone as Babylon moves into the mid-1930s. “People care about morals.” And while he says that like it’s a bad thing, we know differently.

Spiritual Elements

We should start with the movie’s title here. The name Babylon is intentionally aiming at a biblical vibe: It’s a place of unbridled hedonism and sin that, perhaps, can’t see the writing on the wall. Perhaps it’s telling that in the first party we see, a reveler wearing an oversized devil’s head is conspicuous.

And that’s not the only biblical allusion we’re treated to. As Hollywood transitions into sound, we see a scene featuring the song “Singing in the Rain” (a popular song in 1929 and into the 1930s, long before the Hollywood musical). The singers, dressed in raincoats, stand in front of a huge painting of Noah’s ark—likely a bit of visual foreshadowing that Silent-Era Hollywood (and all its vices) is about to be swept away.

A director offers a lament to God during a filming delay: “You gave us such beautiful light and we f—ing squandered it,” he says. We hear some references to Hollywood being “magical.” There’s a reference to someone being Jewish.

Sexual Content

The party mentioned in the introduction is filled with countless people in various stages of undress. We see several—perhaps dozens—of topless women. Some wear no clothes at all, and people in various corners (which we mainly see in a flashback) look as if they’re engaged in various sexual acts. (While brief, the scenes feel pornographically explicit.) Both same-sex and opposite-sex couples are pretty free to show their (ahem) affections for each other. In an upstairs bedroom, another explicit sexual tryst involves someone urinating on another person.

The party’s audience quiets down long enough to hear a breathless, titillating song from Lady Fay Zhu, a bisexual/lesbian entertainer who whisper-sings a song that centers on a bit of female anatomy. She strides through the party, as if selecting someone to seduce, and she ultimately shares a passionate kiss with a woman. It’s part of the act, and their “relationship” goes no farther.

Zhu does eventually embark on a fairly steady relationship with another actress—one that begins with a passionate kiss in the desert. We later see newspaper photos of the two women holding hands in a field, images that ultimately spell the end of Zhu’s employment with a studio. (The studio fires her due to moviegoers’ changing moral attitudes and the scandal that might hurt one of the studio’s biggest stars.).

Nellie’s growing stardom is predicated on her sexuality. She introduces herself at the same party by wearing a next-to-nothing outfit (the “neckline” of which sinks down to her waist) and her ridiculously sultry, seductive dancing. She’s given a part as a sexual bauble in a Western, where she’s asked to dance on the bar. She uses her sexuality (and acting chops) to turn the movie—where she calls herself a “wild child” and tells the cowboys she was voted the “least-dressed woman” at one point—into a star vehicle for her.

Subsequent roles play up her tawdry sexuality, and her personal appearances feature her wearing a variety of barely-concealing outfits—presaging the Kardashians by nearly a century. Her frustrated overshadowed co-star accuses her of “icing her nipples” so they’ll be more visible to the camera—something that Nellie denies but secretly does. She attends a party wearing just a pair of overalls (sans shirt) with the entire football team from the University of Southern California in tow (most of whom are dressed only in their underwear and with lewd pictures and messages scrawled across their chests).

In a scene depicting, both literally and metaphorically, a Hollywood underworld, various people are engaged in all manner of degrading activities for the people watching; the rooms go by at a pretty big clip, but we can tell that onlookers are being titillated by scantily-clad fighting females and a place featuring mostly undressed dwarfs and farm animals.

We see characters kiss, both on and off screen. Jack takes a tumble into a pool in his underwear. (When he gets out, the material clings a bit to his rear.) Publicity shots and movie posters depict women in some very revealing garments. We see sexual toys.

Violent Content

That underworld lair mentioned in the section above is filled with literal violent “acts.” The women fighting in a cage seem covered in mud or blood (or possibly both). An alligator guards an entrance to the most taboo room—where a man will eat anything for cash. (The man plucks a live rat out of a box and gobbles it up.) A man is killed in that underground space—skewered in the neck with a spike-covered mace. (The place is filled with seemingly Medieval torture weapons and vaguely sado-masochistic decorations.) We see the blood pour out of the wound as the man slumps to the ground.

A woman “fights” a rattlesnake in the desert. The rattlesnake technically wins, biting the woman’s neck and rendering her unconscious. But it’s a Pyrrhic victory: Someone slices the snake’s body off, rips the still-attached head from the woman’s neck, eyes the pink blood-and-venom mixture oozing from the women’s neck and begins to suck it and spit it out.

A man commits suicide with a gun. While the shooting takes place off-camera, we see the blood hit the bathroom wall. (Another man kills himself off-camera, too.) A hitman guns down two men, splashing a kitchen’s walls with blood. (Other characters are threatened.) Guns are fired elsewhere. Someone dies from heat.

A massive medieval movie scene ends with several very real injuries and at least one death. (An extra lies on the movie set, impaled by a flag-adorned pole.) Guns are fired. Automobiles crash into things. An elephant sends people running. We hear of an actress who dies at a heartbreakingly young age. Someone falls off a roof and into a pool.

Crude or Profane Language

We hear roughly 165 uses of the f-word and another 30 or so of the s-word. Oh, and there’s at least one c-word in the mix, too. No surprise Babylon has plenty of other, lesser profanities in the mix—nearly all of them, actually—including “a–,” “b–ch,” “b–tard,” “h—,” “p-ssy,” “pr–k” and probably a few I didn’t have time to write down. God’s name is misused at least seven times (five of them with “d–n”), and Jesus’ name is abused four times.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Hollywood’s silent-era hedonism was powered by two things, it would seem from Babylon : hubris and illegal substances.

Technically, alcohol was an illegal substance at the time, too, with Prohibition in place since 1920. But that didn’t matter, it seems, to anyone in the film industry. Countless people drink a variety of substances, and some get raging drunk to the point of unconsciousness. In one scene, Jack—who’s been drinking constantly on set during a delay in filming—needs help to stagger up a hill to where a scene’s to be shot. He can barely stand and nearly tosses his cookies before the camera starts rolling. And then, when the scene begins, he performs perfectly.

And that’s far from the only substance being passed around. Nellie and Manny bond while snorting cocaine in a back room. Nellie is constantly getting illicit substances from an on-set drug dealer, sometimes popping pills to help calm her nerves. (He presumably has another job on set, as well, but it seems most everyone knows why he’s really in demand.) A man, whom the movie suggests almost subsists on chemicals, puts makeup on his face to hide just how gray and pasty it actually is.

The opening party is full of banned substances, and one person apparently dies from it. (We see the mostly naked body with gunk crusted around her mouth. The main concern seems to be how to dispose of the body without anyone—including partygoers and police—being alerted to what’s happened.)

Characters smoke cigarettes and cigars.

Other Negative Elements

And on and on it goes.

As the elephant is being taking to the party (mentioned in the introduction), she suffers a very serious stomach emergency. Her handler gets sprayed with vats of diarrhea (and we’re subjected to a very anatomical shot of the elephant’s backside, too).

A talented Black jazz performer successfully breaks color barriers, moving from behind the camera to in front of it as he entertains audiences with his skill. But in one movie, the color of his skin is lighter than many of his jazz-playing cohorts, and he’s forced to wear shoe polish on his face so that audiences—not able to detect the difference in hue—won’t be shocked at the appearance of an interracial band.

Someone goes to a posh party and, in an aggressive act, crams as much food into her mouth as messily as she can. Before she leaves, she winds up projectile-vomiting all over the host and his carpet.

Nellie has a gambling problem, and she falls under the sway of a very dangerous criminal and his gang—putting herself and others in peril.

A couple of people try to pay off a debt using fake movie money. Moviemakers use asbestos as snow.

In the book of Revelation, we meet a woman called Babylon, sitting on a seven-headed beast and holding a “golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her sexual immorality.” I’m sure many a Bible reader has stumbled across the description and thought to him/herself, “What’s that all about?”

Some might have a similar, confused reaction to this dizzying, often slightly insane, movie.

First, let’s give some credit where it’s due. Babylon has its attractions. Taking place in the frenetic, chaotic, anything-goes environment of a powerful fledgling industry, Babylon gives us a sense of the era’s charms as well as its decadence. Jack often trumpets this new “art” (though it was hardly that at the time) as a powerful force for good, and Hollywood’s advertised as the greatest place on Earth. You can see what Jack sees beneath its many (many) vices: the beauty and wonder and satisfaction that comes from weaving dreams with borrowed cameras and paper sets. The possibilities that burble underneath the surface.

We should also acknowledge that, for all of Jack’s optimistic ruminations, Babylon isn’t meant to trumpet Hollywood’s past beauties as much as it is to castigate it for its excesses. This is, indeed, a place of depravity—so full of titillation that a prostitute holding a golden cup and riding a horrific beast would blend right in.

But naturally, therein lies the problem. Or, rather, problems .

Babylon is as crass and raw and titillating and intentionally disgusting movie as I’ve seen this year. It joins many a film seeking to point to a given culture’s excesses and spends hours (in this movie’s case, more than three hours) showing you just how bad it can be. “Wow, isn’t that horrible?” it says. “Now, come this way and take a look at this !”

In the opening scenes, a police officer tells Manny and his crew that you can’t “drive an elephant without a permit.” This movie has some elephantine-sized issues. And discerning viewers might want to drive the other way.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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Babylon review – Damien Chazelle’s messy, exhausting tale of early Hollywood

Despite star wattage from Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt, the La La Land director’s overcooked portrait of a nascent Tinseltown is more hysterical than historical

I n the opening act of Damien Chazelle ’s hyperventilating, splashboard portrait of early Hollywood, an elephant shits explosively straight on to the screen, covering us in a veritable sewage farm of sloppy excreta. Over the next three hours (believe me, it feels longer) we’ll be treated to a man chomping down on live rats in the bowels of hell, a giant alligator snapping at the heels of subterranean revellers to the monkey/chimp refrain of Aba Daba Honeymoon , and a rattlesnake sinking its fangs into Margot Robbie’s neck before having its head cut off with a knife. We’ll also get to watch an actor pee on a Fatty Arbuckle-style partygoer (“Playtime with potty time!”) and see Robbie projectile-vomiting all over someone’s nice suit, extravagantly despoiling a Klikó rug in the process. All this is delivered in shrieking, hyperactive tones that make Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! look like one of the slower works of Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr . Subtle it is not. Nor is it good.

The story (if that word can be used to describe a succession of over-choreographed set pieces strung together by interstitial date markers and bouts of screaming) follows silver-screen dreamers Manuel “Manny” Torres ( Diego Calva ) and Nellie LaRoy (Robbie) as they ascend the greasy pole to stardom in the foundational days of motion pictures. Nellie wants to become a star (“You don’t become a star, honey. You either are one or you aren’t”), while Manny longs to be in the movie-making business in any capacity, from shovelling shit at glitzy parties, to becoming a fixer for matinee idol Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) and assuming uncertain positions at a studio (when asked if he’s “a producer”, he replies that he is an “ executive ”).

As the pair’s fortunes change, so does the world to which they have sold their souls, with movies shifting from silents to sound as the wild west lawlessness of the unregulated emergent industry (immortalised in Kenneth Anger’s apocryphal tome Hollywood Babylon , to which Chazelle’s title alludes) gives way to something altogether more corporate. With almost breathtaking audacity, Chazelle imagines Babylon to be a kind of origins story for Singin’ in the Rain , clumsily nodding towards the 1952 classic before simply lifting clips from it that remind us how much better Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly were at doing this self-referential Hollywood shtick.

For all its nudge-wink movie-history nods and self-conscious carnivals of bodily fluids and glamorous excess, Babylon is exhaustingly unexciting fare – hysterical rather than historical, derivative rather than inventive. One sequence in which Manny visits a giggling gangster (a Joker-faced Tobey Maguire) is pretty much lifted from the Alfred Molina scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s superior 1997 tale of movie madness Boogie Nights , right down to the lurking sidekick who keeps making random explosive noises (swapping cherry bombs for coughs). Then there’s the inevitable jazz subplots that serve as a continuing apologia for the whitewashing criticisms levelled against Chazelle’s La La Land while also suggesting that the miniseries format of his 2020 Netflix outing The Eddy might have better suited this sprawling mess of a movie.

From Jean Smart’s gossip columnist Elinor St John to Spike Jonze’s German director Otto von Strassberger, the performances veer between pastiche and pantomime, although bored viewers can while away the hours playing spot the celebrity cipher. Max Minghella may be specifically named as “boy wonder” producer Irving Thalberg, but is Pitt meant to be silent-movie star John Gilbert? How much Clara Bow is there in Nellie LaRoy? Surely Li Jun Li’s vampy Lady Fay Zhu is just a thinly disguised Anna May Wong , the groundbreaking Chinese American star.

Justin Hurwitz’s overworked score (the recipient of several awards), Florencia Martin’s lavish production design and Linus Sandgren’s endlessly swirling cinematography all add to the overcooked tenor. Finally we arrive at a climactic car-crash cross between Cinema Paradiso and the Stargate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey – a ludicrous showreel that’s meant to be a time-jumping tumble through decades of movie magic but actually resembles those toe-curling multiplex adverts they play before the main feature, trying to persuade customers not to watch films on the small screen. On this evidence I’d happily stay at home.

Period and historical films
Mark Kermode's film of the week
Drama films
Margot Robbie
Damien Chazelle

Babylon Review

20 Jan 2023

You will seldom find a film as simultaneously romantic and repulsive as Babylon . Damien Chazelle ’s palpably impassioned, occasionally overwhelming ode to the epic moviemaking magic of the pioneering studio era features at least four bodily fluids (three of which splash vibrantly across the screen during the film’s ambitious opening 45 minutes), and chucks out grotesquely framed sex acts like candy. For every shot of a single tear rolling down Margot Robbie ’s stoic face, there’s one of an elephant’s exploding rectum. It’s a visceral, mesmerising balancing act that doesn’t stop tipping throughout the film’s packed-to-the-rafters three-plus-hour runtime.

Chazelle wastes no time in setting his tempo, as he plunges into a 35-minute tour of a buzzy Hollywood party, rife with undulating dancers, live jazz and an Aladdin’s cave of hard drugs. Aspiring star Nellie (Robbie) has been snuck in by the puppy-eyed industry rookie Manny (Diego Calva). A freshly single A-list actor Jack ( Brad Pitt ) is the man of the hour. It’s a triumph of a set-piece; a relentlessly kinetic jamboree with Robbie at the epicentre, like a red spinning top with long, erratic limbs. It will leave you reeling. Only no sooner has the dust settled, it’s kicked it back up again, as the next day the three head to a huge, violent and tumultuous film set in the desert; Nellie making her debut in a dance scene, Jack roping Manny in to help on a grand battlefield-set romance. Here the film is at its most enjoyable, as Chazelle gleefully explores every corner of production, from the throbbing, sweaty temples of the directors working across different shoots to the vast sandy vistas peppered with exhausted extras.

Has Chazelle made a remarkable movie? He’s certainly made an unforgettable one.

As Nellie, Robbie is impressively athletic, whether she’s wrestling a rattlesnake or making a stomach-churning exit at an upper-crust party. Yet her range is set firmly to Harley Quinn in ’20s Hollywood — maniacal and exuberant — which leaves Nellie’s more emotionally demanding moments somewhat lacking. Clumsy dialogue contributes to this problem elsewhere: a two-hander between the brilliant Jean Smart as a seasoned gossip journalist and a post-heyday Jack descends into saccharine talk of ghosts and angels and the enduring power of celluloid.

Chazelle assumes his audience shares his obsession with what cinema means, but it’s never made entirely clear what that is. When Manny falls down a depraved rabbit hole with shady crime boss James ( Tobey Maguire , on creepy, excellent form), the film veers off track, painting marginalised performers as feared freaks without the celebratory or comedic subtext. And storylines involving Li-Jun Li’s queer performer and Jovan Adepo’s session musician-turned-on-screen star get overshadowed by the film’s insistent messaging on the power of film.

Has Chazelle made a remarkable movie? He’s certainly made an unforgettable one. The set-pieces are masterful, the comedy caustic and bold, the ensemble cast commanding even in the face of chaos. Its ambition is undeniable. Yet even with all its flair, what it’s trying to say about cinema gets lost in the noise.

Movies | 08 02 2023

Movies | 22 12 2022

Movies | 28 11 2022

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Common sense media reviewers.

Uneven historical Hollywood epic has sex, drugs, and blood.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

The movie is a tribute to the idea that movies (an

Lots of morally ambiguous characters. Manny has a

Among principal cast, two are men of color: Manny

Several characters die by suicide, violence, overd

Several scenes of people engaging in graphic simul

Extremely strong, constant language includes count

The studio names are real, as are several landmark

Frequent use/overuse of alcohol and drugs, as well

Positive Messages

The movie is a tribute to the idea that movies (and art) last forever, even if everyone involved in them dies. Manny describes the magic of movie making as doing something that lasts and means something. The story also elevates popular culture as important.

Positive Role Models

Lots of morally ambiguous characters. Manny has a kind heart and helps several people, including Nellie and Sidney, get ahead and succeed at their jobs. Jack may drink too much and not be a faithful husband, but he's a good actor and friend. Nellie, despite her many issues, is ambitious and cares about her father and Manny.

Diverse Representations

Among principal cast, two are men of color: Manny (Diego Calva) is Mexican and Sidney (Jovan Adepo) is Black; other lead characters are White. Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), a supporting character, is Chinese American. Movie explores how all three are exploited and discriminated against in the entertainment industry. Also shows how women were mistreated in the old studio system.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Several characters die by suicide, violence, overdose. One character shoots himself; actual act isn't visible, but blood is shown hitting a bathroom wall. Another character attempts suicide several times (occasionally in a way that's depicted as humorous, like getting his head stuck in a toilet) before succeeding (off camera). A character "fights" with a rattlesnake and is bitten in the neck. She survives, but blood, pus, and venom are shown coming out of the wound. An assassin kills multiple people in cold blood. Two characters are shown a multilevel BDSM-looking underground club with several creepy and violent acts, including a masked person eating an animal, and women fighting in a cage. Person killed by being struck in the neck by spiked weapon. People die on movie sets: an extra who's impaled on a medieval movie set (others are injured), a crew member who dies of heat exhaustion from being locked in a box.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Several scenes of people engaging in graphic simulated sexual acts in semi-public (including during an orgy at a party). Some full-frontal nudity, as well as topless women performing. Nonsexual nudity, too, but most does involve sex -- e.g., an actress keeps pulling on her dress to show her breasts and also ices her nipples so they'll constantly show through in scenes.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Extremely strong, constant language includes countless uses of "f--k," plus "s--t," "goddamn," "ass," "a--hole," "p---y," "hell," "pr--k," "c--k," "c--ksucker," "t-ts," and more. At least one use of the "N" word. Spanish-language curses like "cabrón," "puta," etc. Bathroom humor includes an elephant that defecates a lot directly on two assistants.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

The studio names are real, as are several landmarks (restaurant and hotels) and old American cars.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Frequent use/overuse of alcohol and drugs, as well as cigarette smoking. Several people get so drunk/high that they black out or need help functioning. People snort cocaine from what looks like a mound of the drug. Characters also take pills, use ether, and drink absinthe, wine, cocktails, and more. One crew member moonlights as a drug dealer. A character dies of an overdose.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Babylon is a sprawling, mature drama about the importance of art -- in this case, the early days of cinema. Expect much stronger, more frequent language than in writer-director Damien Chazelle 's first three movies, with countless uses of "f--k," plus "s--t," "bitch," and more. There's also a lot of nudity, graphic simulated sex (including an early orgy sequence), drinking, and drug use (cocaine, ether, pills, etc.), as well as bloody violence (people die from gunshots, suicide, movie set accidents, overdoses, and more). On the plus side, the cast is more diverse than in Chazelle's previous movies, with the three most prominent characters being a Mexican man (Diego Calva), a White woman ( Margot Robbie ), and a Black man ( Jovan Adepo ) -- all of whom face discrimination. Brad Pitt also appears as a silent film star who doesn't adapt to talkies as well as everyone assumed he would. This is a story of the excesses of early Hollywood and the people involved in it (hence the city of the title), but it's also about the magic of the movies, regardless of the sacrifices, corruption, and debauchery that surround the industry. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

Parents say (17)
Kids say (18)

Based on 17 parent reviews

Awful “torture sex scene” descent into hell not needed. Felt depressed after seeing this movie. Wish I could erase it from my brain,

Don't waste your money or 3 hours of your life, what's the story.

Writer-director Damien Chazelle' s BABYLON is a sprawling chronicle of the early days of Hollywood, pulling back the curtain to show the wild, unrestrained sex, drugs, and violence of the industry during its transition from silent films into the talking era. There are two main stories in play, starting in 1926. One is about how three young hopefuls -- Manny (Diego Calva), an earnest Mexican American production assistant; Nellie ( Margot Robbie ), an edgy Jersey girl ready for her close-up; and talented Black jazz musician Sidney ( Jovan Adepo ) -- all end up trying to make it at roughly the same time in motion pictures. Meanwhile, handsome, hard-drinking Jack Conrad ( Brad Pitt ), a silent film star, realizes that talkies could spell the end of his relevance if he doesn't adapt with them. On the fringes are a large cast of other industry workers, including a woman director, crew members, a sultry Chinese American singer (Li Jun Lee) who'd happily take any role, and the producers, agents, gossip columnists, and reviewers who make show business run.

Is It Any Good?

It's overlong, gratuitous, and self-indulgent, but this epic about Hollywood's origins has enough standout performances and cameos to make it worth watching. Chazelle isn't subtle in portraying early Hollywood as an industry and city of debauchery and excess, showing how "anything goes" in show business. Jack, an international silent film star, can do no wrong on screen, and he's (mostly) a genuinely good guy, even if he's a terrible husband and overly fond of drinking. Only Pitt, or possibly his close pal George Clooney, could have played this role in such a humanizing way. It's an overt reference to Gene Kelly's legendary character Don Lockwood from Singin' in the Rain -- which perhaps makes Nellie an example of all the Lina Lamonts, beautiful and riveting in the silent era but unable to transition into talkies because of a lack of elocution. Then there's Calva, who's fabulous as Manny -- with his big, expressive eyes that convey wonder at everything around him, until even he's beaten down by the compromises and corruption of the industry.

If there's anything that Chazelle seems to love as much as the move industry, it's jazz, and music plays a central role in his story. Adepo is terrific as the young bandleader who knows he's ready to be more than just background music. But if modern Hollywood is still struggling with racism, how much more prevalent was it in its inception? Everyone struggles with their place in the system, and it's only when writer Elinor St. John ( Jean Smart , pitch-perfect as usual) spells it out for Jack that he understands. The people in front of or behind the camera don't matter nearly as much as the work itself -- or at least what it represents to the audience. Despite all of the notable performances and the technical mastery of everyone from composer Justin Hurwitz to cinematographer Linus Sandgren, the movie has some fairly big flaws. The bloated run time becomes self-indulgent after a while, and the uneven storytelling and pacing make Babylon feel like movies by the Coen Brothers, David O. Russell, and Quentin Tarantino all rolled into one. Ultimately, it's like Chazelle has simultaneously too much and not enough to say, so he's just doing everything all at once -- and, in this case, it can have less impact than he intended. Still, for those interested, watching Babylon on the big screen is a must. You may end up appreciating it more than you enjoy it, but it's proof that the auteur theory is alive and kicking with Damien Chazelle.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the amount of nudity and substance use portrayed in Babylon . Is it necessary to the story, or does it seem gratuitous?

How does this movie fit in with director Damien Chazelle's previous films ( La La Land , etc.)? What do you think he's trying to say about the nature of art? Does the "magic" outweigh the negative, corrupt, even evil aspects?

Talk about the violence in the movie. Does realistic violence, especially death by suicide, impact viewers differently than stylized violence?

Which of the flawed characters would you still consider a role model, if any? What character strengths do they display?

For those who've seen Singin' in the Rain , what do you think of this movie's relevance to that? What about the references to all of those other big movies?

Movie Details

In theaters : December 23, 2022
On DVD or streaming : January 31, 2023
Cast : Brad Pitt , Margot Robbie , Diego Calva
Director : Damien Chazelle
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studio : Paramount Pictures
Genre : Drama
Topics : Friendship , History , Music and Sing-Along
Run time : 189 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : strong and crude sexual content, graphic nudity, bloody violence, drug use, and pervasive language
Award : Golden Globe
Last updated : March 20, 2024

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Screen Rant

10 good brad pitt movies with really divided rotten tomatoes scores.

Brad Pitt has a lot of universally loved movies under his belt, but some of his best movies left critics and audiences on Rotten Tomatoes divided.

Brad Pitt has several universally loved movies in his filmography, but some have left reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes divided.
Movies like Bullet Train and Troy were preferred by audiences, while critics had harsher criticisms.
Ad Astra and Killing Them Softly received high critic scores on Rotten Tomatoes, but audiences' scores were significantly lower.

Brad Pitt has played in a lot of great movies over the years, some of which left critics and audiences divided on Rotten Tomatoes . In most cases, the scores from both groups are relatively close to one another, with both the professionals and average-joe viewers citing similar issues or praises for a film. However, there are times when critics rave about a movie while general audiences are left feeling so-so or vice versa. In these cases, defining a movie's critical success is a little more complicated, and Pitt is among the actors who frequently leave people divided .

Pitt has been a household name since his breakout role in the 1991 movie Thelma & Louise , a project with a critic score of 86% and an audience score of 82% on Rotten Tomatoes . Since then, the actor has taken part in a variety of movies, many of which, like his highest-rated 2013 movie, 12 Years a Slave (critic: 95% and audience: 90%), left viewers on the same page regarding approval. Of course, Pitt has had a few duds over the years, such as the 1992 movie Cool World , which only managed a 4% critic score. Still, some of Pitt's best films were slightly more divisive.

10 Movies That Defined Brad Pitt's Career

10 babylon (2022), critic score: 57% - audience score: 52%.

The 2022 movie Babylon is a touch meta in that it is about the birth of modern Hollywood after the industry transitioned from silent films in the 1920s. Pitt played real-world figure Jack Conrad and has been praised for an excellent performance, along with costars like Margot Robbie. However, Babylon as a whole left reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes divided. This time, critics and general audiences were on the same page but were split amongst themselves regarding whether Babylon checked all the necessary boxes.

With the critic and audience scores for Babylon falling around 50%, the reviews from each group flip-flopped between approval and criticism. While half of both found the provocative movie engaging and impactful, the other half noted that Babylon was too long, which made its themes of excess and disgusting ambition exhausting rather than interesting.

*Availability in US

Not available

Babylon is a film by director Damien Chazelle (La La Land) that focuses on characters during the great Hollywood boom - when silent films moved to talking pictures, and the medium was reinvented. During this era of decadence and glamorous lifestyles in pure excess, Babylon explores the rise and fall of fictional Hollywood greats that mirror nonfictional actors and actresses throughout American history.

9 Bullet Train (2022)

Critic score: 54% - audience score: 76%.

2022's Bullet Train features Pitt as Ladybug, an assassin determined to make his current job go as smoothly as possible. Of course, it doesn't quite work out that way, and along with costars Joey King, David Leitch, Bad Bunny, Logan Lerman, and more, things quickly begin to go off the rails. Considering the chaotic nature of Bullet Train , it's no surprise that it left reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes divided. This time around, critics were only moderately impressed, while general audiences had considerably more praise to give .

Critics' 54% Rotten Tomatoes score was largely due to the long runtime and monotonous concept, which many felt grew old by the film's halfway point. Others called Pitt's film " cartoonish " and silly. These same criticisms are also present in audience reviews, but the over-the-top concept went over far better for those just looking for a good time.

Bullet Train

Packing a stellar cast with the likes of Brad Pitt, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Brian Tyree Henry, and Zazie Beetz, David Leitch's Bullet Train tells the story of an assassin for hire who bumps into multiple dangerous criminals aboard a high-speed Shinkansen trip from Tokyo to Kyoto. The 2022 action comedy is an adaptation of Kōtarō Isaka's novel "Maria Beetle".

8 Ad Astra (2019)

Critic score: 83% - audience score: 40%.

Pit's 2019 sci-fi movie , Ad Astra , saw the actor get a short haircut and step into an astronaut's suit, and critics were entirely on board. The film sees a man named Roy McBride head to Neptune to discover what happened to his astronaut father, with the goal of also saving the world. Pitt starred alongside Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, Kimmy Shields, and Natasha Lyonne in a film that was a little outside his wheelhouse.

Ultimately, critics seemed awed by the special effects, while audiences had hoped for a stronger plotline.

This worked well for critics, who gave Ad Astra an 83% " Certified Fresh " score on Rotten Tomatoes . Words like " stunning " and " powerful " were used, with a lot of praise aimed specifically at Pitt's performance. Audiences seemed to agree on this front, but their surprisingly low 40% score came down to a lack of an interesting story and a disappointing payoff . Ultimately, critics seemed awed by the special effects, while audiences had hoped for a stronger plotline.

Brad Pitt stars in Ad Astra as astronaut Roy McBride, who embarks on a mission to Neptune to find his missing father (Tommy Lee Jones) in the outer reaches of space. Liv Tyler and Donald Sutherland appear in this 2019 sci-fi movie directed by James Gray.

7 Killing Them Softly (2012)

Critic score: 74% - audience score: 44%.

2012's Killing Them Softly is an action movie through and through, with plenty of mobster violence and gunfights to get the blood pumping. Pitt played mob enforcer Jackie Cogan, tasked with taking care of a couple of low-ranked thugs who somehow managed to get hold of his boss' money. Killing Them Softly also starred James Gandolfini, Ray Liotta, Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn , and many more, and is another film that pleased critics far more than it did general audiences.

Killing Them Softly also managed a " Certified Fresh " score from critics (74%), who praised the film's fast pace and poetic balance between action, violence, comedy, and impactful discourse. On the other hand, audiences gave Killing Them Softly a collective 44%, calling the story paper thin, weird, and even dull . One reviewer noted that the writer " thought they were witty or something ," but it seems only critics got the joke.

Killing Them Softly

Brad Pit stars as Jackie Cogan in Killing Them Softly, a crime drama film based on the novel Cogan's Trade, released in 1974. Cogan is a hitman who is sent to hunt down those responsible for a poker game where mafia members were robbed. However, Cogan will have to dig deeper than two amateur robbers to get to the bottom of this off-kilter crime.

6 Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005)

Critic score: 60% - audience score: 58%.

2005's Mr. & Mrs. Smith is among Pitt's most memorable films and has developed a minor cult classic status over the years (inspiring the Prime Video 2024 Mr. & Mrs. Smith series starring Donald Glover and Maya Erskine). Despite this, the movie has fairly mediocre scores across the board on Rotten Tomatoes , with both critics and audiences giving the action romance movie a collective score of just around 60%.

Once again, the critical response to Mr. & Mrs. Smith was divided, this time with both critics and audiences split on whether the movie is any good. In both categories, reviewers criticized Pitt and Angelina Jolie's 2005 movie for its lack of originality , noting that the film offered nothing new regarding action sequences, technology, or weaponry. Others, however, praised Mr. & Mrs. Smith 's comedy, saying that the premise was original enough to make up for the cliche action.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith

5 ocean's twelve (2004), critic score: 55% - audience score: 60%.

Though the 2001 movie Ocean's Eleven has critics and audiences predominantly on the same page (earning an 83% critics score and an 80% from audiences), the 2004 sequel Ocean's Twelve left viewers far more divided. The film sees Danny Ocean's (George Clooney) crew come back together to pull off another massive heist, this time to pay off the debt they accrued following the previous one. It was a fun return to an enjoyable story, but reviewers couldn't agree much further than this.

Half of Ocean's Twelve 's critics praised the charismatic cast, while the other half accused the sequel of milking the first film of all its fun. Audiences were similarly split, with some claiming that the movie managed to outdo Ocean's Eleven , while others chastised Ocean's Twelve for bringing in far too many characters to the point that the plot got lost.

Ocean's Twelve

4 troy (2004), critic score: 53% - audience score: 73%.

2004's Troy came at a time when such stories were all the rage, so it's no surprise that it was a success with general audiences. The film is based on the legends within Homer's Iliad and features Pitt alongside notable stars like Eric Bana, Diane Kruger, Orlando Bloom, Sean Bean, and much, much more. It brings legendary characters like Achilles (Pitt), Odysseus, and Hector to life. Twenty years later, it's still a classic, but critics weren't as fond of Troy .

"Gets The Most Homeric": Brad Pitt's Historical Epic Gets High Score From Battle Expert

While audiences gave Troy a collective 73% on Rotten Tomatoes , critics were split down the middle, only managing to give the film a very medium 53% score. Some praised Troy for its balance between romance, drama, and action, while others couldn't get past the historical inaccuracies or the over-the-top and sometimes cheap-looking costumes.

Troy is available to stream on Apple TV.

3 Snatch (2001)

Critic score: 74% - audience score: 93%.

In all, critics and audiences on Rotten Tomatoes agreed that 2001's Snatch was a good movie. Pitt starred alongside Jason Statham and Alan Ford, who played a boxing promoter and dangerous gangster, respectively. Snatch is full of action and violence and an intriguing hunt for a stolen diamond. It's one of Guy Ritchie's first films, and reviewers generally agreed that it is an early sign of the director's eventual genius.

Still, critics and audiences aren't entirely on the same page regarding just how good Snatch is. The professionals gave the movie a 74% score, with plenty of praise for the script and direction but some criticisms regarding Snatch's pandering to "lad culture." Audiences, on the other hand, had overwhelming praise for the 2001 movie, giving it a whopping 94% score with very few criticisms.

Snatch is a comedic crime film by director Guy Ritchie that centers on several different groups of characters' paths that begin to cross after a missing diamond becomes central to their stories. From a fight promoter trying to make pay his bookie to a group of inept bank robbers that fumble a bookkeeping heist, a stolen diamond ends up in the stomach of a dog, setting off a hectic chain of violent but darkly comedic events.

2 Meet Joe Black (1998)

Critic score: 45% - audience score: 81%.

Meet Joe Black certainly gets points for its unique premise and remains one of Pitt's more iconic roles. The actor stars alongside legend Anthony Hopkins and Claire Forlani in the 1998 film, which sees Death (Pitt) take the form of a man named Joe Black to experience what it is to be human. It's romance paired with a uniquely creepy theme, and while it thrilled audiences, critics weren't too impressed.

One reviewer from the Wall Street Journal even called it "dramatic flatulence."

Meet Joe Black has an impressive 81% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes , owing to its intriguing story, spectacular acting, and captivating musical score. However, critics, who came up with a collective 45% score, criticized Meet Joe Black for its gimmicky premise, lousy dialogue, and " painfully " slow pace , with one reviewer from the Wall Street Journal even calling it " dramatic flatulence ."

1 Legends Of The Fall (1994)

Critic score: 59% - audience score: 87%.

The 1994 movie Legends of The Fall is one of Pitt's earlier successes and is again regarded as a classic today. Pitt gave a gripping performance alongside costars Anthony Hopkins, Aidan Quinn, Henry Thomas, and Julia Ormond in a story about a family torn to pieces after a death in World War I led to a complicated love triangle.

Once again, Legends of Fall is a movie that touched the hearts of general audiences but left critics a little more on the fence. Though 60% approved of the film, the remaining critics called its premise silly and melodramatic . This contrasts significantly with audiences' assessment of this Brad Pitt movie, where it was called " one of the most iconic movies ever made ."

‘Babylon’ Review: Damien Chazelle’s Latest Is an Orgy of Excess — and That’s Why It Rocks

Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, and Diego Calva star in this truly absurd and engrossing story of early Hollywood.

Damien Chazelle always likes to start his movies with a bang, whether through an intense drum solo in Whiplash , a Jacques Demy -inspired dance number in La La Land , or a harrowing plane crash piloted by Neil Armstrong in his last film, First Man . But his newest film, Babylon , puts all these explosive openings to shame. Within the opening of Babylon , there are rooms entirely dedicated to the storage of any type of drugs imaginable, naked bodies writhing around a raucous party, a man getting absolutely covered in elephant shit coming straight from the source, and a sexual encounter that includes a pile of cocaine and piss. And that's just the first five minutes.

With Babylon , an over-the-top story of old Hollywood and the shift from silent films to talkies, Chazelle has created an orgy—both literal and metaphorical—of madness that can't help but remind of the wild adventures of The Wolf of Wall Street and Boogie Nights . Chazelle’s three-hours-and-change epic is frequently ridiculous, manic, and constantly heightened in a way that certainly isn't period accurate. Yet Chazelle’s absurdist take on this integral period in film history is less about the details and more about going along for this ride, excess to the extreme that leads to one of the best and most singular experiences in film all year.

But inside this party atmosphere is primarily the story of three players and their love of film. Nellie LaRoy ( Margot Robbie ) is an aspiring actress who just happens to be at the right place (this insane party) at the right time and gets cast in a movie. At the party, she meets Manny Torres ( Diego Calva ), a Mexican-American who also longs to be in the movies, and after showing some initiative at the party becomes the assistant to Jack Conrad ( Brad Pitt ), a silent film star. Among the insanity is also the entertainment journalist Elinor St. John ( Jean Smart ), the jazz trumpeter Sidney Palmer ( Jovan Adepo ), and Lady Fay Zhu ( Li Jun Li ), who writes the words on the cue cards and tends to have more sense than anyone else in Hollywood.

RELATED: First 'Babylon' Reactions Call It a Cocaine-Cooked Mess With Manic Visuals and Dazzling Debauchery

While there’s certainly some historical basis around Babylon , as the transition to sound pictures did shake up film in a major way, and we do meet characters that existed in Hollywood at the time—such as Max Minghella as Irving Thalberg or Samara Weaving as Colleen Moore , hilarious cast as a rival to Robbie’s Nellie—this is all just a way for Chazelle to have fun in this playground. For example, Chazelle shows Nellie and Manny’s first day on set as a frenzy of activity, drugs, sex, and death, where multiple films shoot mere feet from each other and everyone is racing to finish their projects before the sun sets. It’s truly the Wild West, an untamed land ready for expansion. But again, within the lunacy and barely controlled chaos, Chazelle—who also wrote the script—shows just how exciting this time must’ve been, and how beautiful and improvisation the experience of this type of filmmaking could be. When the sun sets at just the right time, or an unexpected moment of beauty that couldn’t be planned occurs, or a performance that comes along and knocks you off your feet, it’s easy to see the magic inherent in early filmmaking.

Chazelle has just as much fun showing the rigidity of filming with sound and the restrictions of the early days as everyone attempted to figure out this new technology. By showing the filming of just one scene, Chazelle makes it clear how one major advance in the form could upend lives, ruin careers, and completely alter what people wanted from a film. Chazelle is teaching us the broad strokes of film history, yet in a way that is outrageous and always entertaining.

This mayhem is enough to make Babylon work, but Chazelle has filled this story with characters that show the fragility of life in the spotlight, and how easily it is for people to move forward and leave certain stars behind. Robbie is excellent as Nellie LaRoy, whose star shines bright and fast, but then struggles with the public image of it all. When Robbie is on the screen, it's impossible to take your eyes off her, even when she’s dancing in a packed mansion. But it's that innate star power that makes this role so perfect for her. We especially see how great Robbie is when she’s on the set, giving us slight variations of the same scene, yet her ability to make each take different simply by her mannerisms and her choices in the scene. From the moment we see Nellie act, we know she's a star, and we once again get another great role where Robbie can show how tremendous she can be.

Pitt is also wonderful in an understated role, as the star who is shaken by the shift to sound, worries about the next generation that's coming up from behind, and the industry that might be leaving him in the dust. Even with the frequent substance abuse and tossing off of new wives, this is a quiet performance for Pitt, and it works best when he’s left to reckon with his legacy. In one scene late in the film, Jack Conrad and Elinor St. John discuss the status of his career, and a quiet “thank you” stated by Jack is utterly heartbreaking in the context of the scene.

Yet the true standout here is Calva, as we watch him rise in the ranks of Hollywood, and see just how this era was a land of opportunity for those ambitious enough. Calva is the glue that ties this whole story together, and his evolution throughout Babylon is fascinating, whether when he’s torn over his love for Nellie, or his realization of what the movie industry has cost him throughout the film. It’s a star-making role for Calva, and the best performance in a film packed with big names.

However, it’s Jovan Adepo and Li Jun Li who get discarded far too easily in this madcap story, as they get moments to show their greatness in their industry, yet the story itself spends far too little time on them. Maybe this is Chazelle’s commentary on how poorly non-white performers were treated in this era, or maybe it's just that Chazelle's interests lay more with his key three stars, but it’s a shame they don't get more screen time. But Babylon is packed to the gills with incredible cameos as well, with Spike Jonze as an unhinged silent director, and Tobey Maguire ’s psychotic appearance that might be the film’s most bonkers addition.

Like all of Chazelle’s films, Babylon is gorgeously presented, with stunning cinematography from his frequent collaborator Linus Sandgren . Even though Babylon shows just how uncaring Hollywood at this time can be, it’s the soft moments of beauty scattered throughout that show why these people stayed put and didn’t give up their dreams. After the party that begins the film, Nellie and Manny leave as the sun rises, and the purple hue of the sky brings comfort that was lacking indoors. And when the magic hour hits, it’s almost as if a hush falls over the cast and crew, even when they're not recording for sound. In Babylon , Hollywood can be a dark, callous place, but the beauty that punctuates the coldness almost makes it all worthwhile. Throw in Justin Hurtwitz ’s stupendous and thumping score and it’s hard to not get lost in the magic of the movies too.

As with so many other films this year, Babylon is a celebration of the magic of film, yet it’s also a criticism of the industry itself and the disposability of those in front of and behind the camera. No one gets out of the spotlight unscathed. But even though the people who made these images might fade away, their memories will last forever on celluloid. That’s the give and take of the movies: the movies will take all they can, yet the legacy is unceasing. But Chazelle isn't content with just focusing on the beauty of movies from this time, he also in one outstanding montage near the end, presents the entirety of cinema history, the shifts in its eras, and the power of the moving image over the course of a little over a century. Again, Chazelle shows us just ow powerful these films are, and while the creators of these films are little more than ghosts, the images they left behind are eternal.

Babylon is certainly self-indulgent and excessive, almost as if Chazelle is trying to show after some fairly restrained work that he can let loose and go nuts, but that indulgence into the hysteria works beautifully as Chazelle explores the history of film, the loneliness of stardom, and how the movies can make us feel less alone. For a film that is largely about the craziness of the movie industry, Babylon has a very real emotional core at the center of his film that delves into the humanity, loves and pains beneath us all. Babylon is often pure mayhem, but it’s the beauty of life and film itself underneath that makes this one of the best movies about movies this year, and one of the best films of 2022.

Babylon comes to theaters on December 23.

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Challengers

Tashi, a former tennis prodigy turned coach is married to a champion on a losing streak. Her strategy for her husband's redemption takes a surprising turn when he must face off against his f... Read all Tashi, a former tennis prodigy turned coach is married to a champion on a losing streak. Her strategy for her husband's redemption takes a surprising turn when he must face off against his former best friend and Tashi's former boyfriend. Tashi, a former tennis prodigy turned coach is married to a champion on a losing streak. Her strategy for her husband's redemption takes a surprising turn when he must face off against his former best friend and Tashi's former boyfriend.

Luca Guadagnino
Justin Kuritzkes
Josh O'Connor
8 User reviews
54 Critic reviews
88 Metascore
1 nomination

Tashi Donaldson

Art Donaldson

Patrick Zweig
Umpire (New Rochelle Final)

Art's Physiotherapist

Art's Security Guard
(as a different name)
Tashi's Mother
Line Judge (New Rochelle Final)
TV Sports Commentator (Atlanta 2019)

Leo Du Marier

Woman With Headset (Atlanta 2019)

Motel Front Desk Clerk
Motel Husband

New Rochelle Parking Lot Guard
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Trivia To prepare for her role, Zendaya spent three months with pro tennis player-turned-coach, Brad Gilbert .
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steveinadelaide
Apr 21, 2024
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April 26, 2024 (United States)
United States
Những Kẻ Thách Đấu
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
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‘Civil War’: What you need to know about A24’s dystopian action movie

Kirsten Dunst holds a camera in her lowered hand while another hangs off her backpack in "Civil War."

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A24’s “Civil War,” the latest film from “Ex Machina” and “Men” director Alex Garland , imagines a third-term president ruling over a divided America and follows the journalists driving through the war-torn countryside on a mission to land his final interview. The movie is pulse-pounding and contemplative, as the characters tumble from one tense encounter to the next and ruminate on the nature of journalism and wartime photography.

In his review of the film, The Times’ Joshua Rothkopf wrote, “‘Civil War’ will remind you of the great combat films , the nauseating artillery ping of ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ the surreal up-is-down journey of ‘Apocalypse Now.’ It also bears a pronounced connection to the 2002 zombie road movie scripted by its writer-director Alex Garland, ‘28 Days Later.’”

Starring Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeny as photojournalists, alongside Wagner Moura and Stephen McKinley Henderson (and a scene-stealing, nerve-racking Jesse Plemons ), the film carries a reported production budget of $50 million and has already started to recoup the costs at the box office, earning $25.7 million in ticket sales in its first weekend in North America.

“Civil War” has also been a discourse juggernaut. Conversation on social media has focused on the lack of context given for the conflict at the heart of the film. In a recent column, The Times’ Mary McNamara wrote that “forcing the very real political divisions that plague this nation into vague subtext doesn’t even serve the purported pro-journalism nature of ‘Civil War.’”

Catch up on our coverage of the film below.

Review: ‘Civil War’ shows an America long past unraveling, which makes it necessary

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Los Angeles, CA - April 02: Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeny pose for a portrait as they promote their new film, "Civil War," at Four Seasons Beverly Hills on Tuesday, April 2, 2024 in Los Angeles, CA. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

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Kirsten Dunst, left, and Cailee Spaeny in 'Civil War'

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In trying to hedge its politics, ‘Civil War’ betrays its characters — and the audience

Alex Garland’s powerful war drama is ostensibly a tribute to the fourth estate. But the film is absent the examination of causes and consequences central to great journalism.

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This image released by A24 shows Kirsten Dunst in a scene from "Civil War." (Murray Close/A24 via AP)

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‘Civil War’ Review: We Have Met the Enemy and It Is Us. Again.

In Alex Garland’s tough new movie, a group of journalists led by Kirsten Dunst, as a photographer, travels a United States at war with itself.

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‘Civil War’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The writer and director alex garland narrates a sequence from his film..

“My name is Alex Garland and I’m the writer director of ‘Civil War’. So this particular clip is roughly around the halfway point of the movie and it’s these four journalists and they’re trying to get, in a very circuitous route, from New York to DC, and encountering various obstacles on the way. And this is one of those obstacles. What they find themselves stuck in is a battle between two snipers. And they are close to one of the snipers and the other sniper is somewhere unseen, but presumably in a large house that sits over a field and a hill. It’s a surrealist exchange and it’s surrounded by some very surrealist imagery, which is they’re, in broad daylight in broad sunshine, there’s no indication that we’re anywhere near winter in the filming. In fact, you can kind of tell it’s summer. But they’re surrounded by Christmas decorations. And in some ways, the Christmas decorations speak of a country, which is in disrepair, however silly it sounds. If you haven’t put away your Christmas decorations, clearly something isn’t going right.” “What’s going on?” “Someone in that house, they’re stuck. We’re stuck.” “And there’s a bit of imagery. It felt like it hit the right note. But the interesting thing about that imagery was that it was not production designed. We didn’t create it. We actually literally found it. We were driving along and we saw all of these Christmas decorations, basically exactly as they are in the film. They were about 100 yards away, just piled up by the side of the road. And it turned out, it was a guy who’d put on a winter wonderland festival. People had not dug his winter wonderland festival, and he’d gone bankrupt. And he had decided just to leave everything just strewn around on a farmer’s field, who was then absolutely furious. So in a way, there’s a loose parallel, which is the same implication that exists within the film exists within real life.” “You don’t understand a word I say. Yo. What’s over there in that house?” “Someone shooting.” “It’s to do with the fact that when things get extreme, the reasons why things got extreme no longer become relevant and the knife edge of the problem is all that really remains relevant. So it doesn’t actually matter, as it were, in this context, what side they’re fighting for or what the other person’s fighting for. It’s just reduced to a survival.”

By Manohla Dargis

A blunt, gut-twisting work of speculative fiction, “Civil War” opens with the United States at war with itself — literally, not just rhetorically. In Washington, D.C., the president is holed up in the White House; in a spookily depopulated New York, desperate people wait for water rations. It’s the near-future, and rooftop snipers, suicide bombers and wild-eyed randos are in the fight while an opposition faction with a two-star flag called the Western Forces, comprising Texas and California — as I said, this is speculative fiction — is leading the charge against what remains of the federal government. If you’re feeling triggered, you aren’t alone.

It’s mourning again in America, and it’s mesmerizingly, horribly gripping. Filled with bullets, consuming fires and terrific actors like Kirsten Dunst running for cover, the movie is a what-if nightmare stoked by memories of Jan. 6. As in what if the visions of some rioters had been realized, what if the nation was again broken by Civil War, what if the democratic experiment called America had come undone? If that sounds harrowing, you’re right. It’s one thing when a movie taps into childish fears with monsters under the bed; you’re eager to see what happens because you know how it will end (until the sequel). Adult fears are another matter.

In “Civil War,” the British filmmaker Alex Garland explores the unbearable if not the unthinkable, something he likes to do. A pop cultural savant, he made a splashy zeitgeist-ready debut with his 1996 best seller “The Beach,” a novel about a paradise that proves deadly, an evergreen metaphor for life and the basis for a silly film . That things in the world are not what they seem, and are often far worse, is a theme that Garland has continued pursuing in other dark fantasies, first as a screenwriter (“ 28 Days Later ”), and then as a writer-director (“ Ex Machina ”). His résumé is populated with zombies, clones and aliens, though reliably it is his outwardly ordinary characters you need to keep a closer watch on.

By the time “Civil War” opens, the fight has been raging for an undisclosed period yet long enough to have hollowed out cities and people’s faces alike. It’s unclear as to why the war started or who fired the first shot. Garland does scatter some hints; in one ugly scene, a militia type played by a jolting, scarily effective Jesse Plemons asks captives “what kind of American” they are. Yet whatever divisions preceded the conflict are left to your imagination, at least partly because Garland assumes you’ve been paying attention to recent events. Instead, he presents an outwardly and largely post-ideological landscape in which debates over policies, politics and American exceptionalism have been rendered moot by war.

‘Civil War’ Is Designed to Disturb You

A woman with a bulletproof vest that says “Press” stands in a smoky city street.

One thing that remains familiar amid these ruins is the movie’s old-fashioned faith in journalism. Dunst, who’s sensational, plays Lee, a war photographer who works for Reuters alongside her friend, a reporter, Joel (the charismatic Wagner Moura). They’re in New York when you meet them, milling through a crowd anxiously waiting for water rations next to a protected tanker. It’s a fraught scene; the restless crowd is edging into mob panic, and Lee, camera in hand, is on high alert. As Garland’s own camera and Joel skitter about, Lee carves a path through the chaos, as if she knows exactly where she needs to be — and then a bomb goes off. By the time it does, an aspiring photojournalist, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), is also in the mix.

The streamlined, insistently intimate story takes shape once Lee, Joel, Jessie and a veteran reporter, Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), pile into a van and head to Washington. Joel and Lee are hoping to interview the president (Nick Offerman), and Sammy and Jessie are riding along largely so that Garland can make the trip more interesting. Sammy serves as a stabilizing force (Henderson fills the van with humanizing warmth), while Jessie plays the eager upstart Lee takes under her resentful wing. It’s a tidily balanced sampling that the actors, with Garland’s banter and via some cozy downtime, turn into flesh-and-blood personalities, people whose vulnerability feeds the escalating tension with each mile.

As the miles and hours pass, Garland adds diversions and hurdles, including a pair of playful colleagues, Tony and Bohai (Nelson Lee and Evan Lai), and some spooky dudes guarding a gas station. Garland shrewdly exploits the tense emptiness of the land, turning strangers into potential threats and pretty country roads into ominously ambiguous byways. Smartly, he also recurrently focuses on Lee’s face, a heartbreakingly hard mask that Dunst lets slip brilliantly. As the journey continues, Garland further sketches in the bigger picture — the dollar is near-worthless, the F.B.I. is gone — but for the most part, he focuses on his travelers and the engulfing violence, the smoke and the tracer fire that they often don’t notice until they do.

Despite some much-needed lulls (for you, for the narrative rhythm), “Civil War” is unremittingly brutal or at least it feels that way. Many contemporary thrillers are far more overtly gruesome than this one, partly because violence is one way unimaginative directors can put a distinctive spin on otherwise interchangeable material: Cue the artful fountains of arterial spray. Part of what makes the carnage here feel incessant and palpably realistic is that Garland, whose visual approach is generally unfussy, doesn’t embellish the violence, turning it into an ornament of his virtuosity. Instead, the violence is direct, at times shockingly casual and unsettling, so much so that its unpleasantness almost comes as a surprise.

If the violence feels more intense than in a typical genre shoot ’em up, it’s also because, I think, with “Civil War,” Garland has made the movie that’s long been workshopped in American political discourse and in mass culture, and which entered wider circulation on Jan. 6. The raw power of Garland’s vision unquestionably owes much to the vivid scenes that beamed across the world that day when rioters, some wearing T-shirts emblazoned with “ MAGA civil war ,” swarmed the Capitol. Even so, watching this movie, I also flashed on other times in which Americans have relitigated the Civil War directly and not, on the screen and in the streets.

Movies have played a role in that relitigation for more than a century, at times grotesquely. Two of the most famous films in history — D.W. Griffith’s 1915 racist epic “The Birth of a Nation” (which became a Ku Klux Klan recruitment tool) and the romantic 1939 melodrama “Gone With the Wind” — are monuments to white supremacy and the myth of the Southern Lost Cause. Both were critical and popular hits. In the decades since, filmmakers have returned to the Civil War era to tell other stories in films like “Glory,” “Lincoln” and “Django Unchained” that in addressing the American past inevitably engage with its present.

There are no lofty or reassuring speeches in “Civil War,” and the movie doesn’t speak to the better angels of our nature the way so many films try to. Hollywood’s longstanding, deeply American imperative for happy endings maintains an iron grip on movies, even in ostensibly independent productions. There’s no such possibility for that in “Civil War.” The very premise of Garland’s movie means that — no matter what happens when or if Lee and the rest reach Washington — a happy ending is impossible, which makes this very tough going. Rarely have I seen a movie that made me so acutely uncomfortable or watched an actor’s face that, like Dunst’s, expressed a nation’s soul-sickness so vividly that it felt like an X-ray.

Civil War Rated R for war violence and mass death. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In theaters.

An earlier version of this review misidentified an organization in the Civil War in the movie. It is the Western Forces, not the Western Front.

How we handle corrections

Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times. More about Manohla Dargis

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Movie Review: ‘Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’ amps up a true-tale WWII heist

This image released by Lionsgate shows Alex Pettyfer, Alan Ritchson, Henry Cavill, Hero Fiennes Tiffin, and Henry Golding in a scene from the film “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” (Daniel Smith/Lionsgate via AP)

This image released by Lionsgate shows Henry Cavill in a scene from the film “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” (Daniel Smith/Lionsgate via AP)

This image released by Lionsgate shows Alan Ritchson in a scene from the film “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” (Daniel Smith/Lionsgate via AP)

This image released by Lionsgate shows Eiza Gonzalez in a scene from the film “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” (Daniel Smith/Lionsgate via AP)

This image released by Lionsgate shows Alex Pettyfer in a scene from the film “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” (Daniel Smith/Lionsgate via AP)

This image released by Lionsgate shows Babs Olusanmokun in a scene from the film “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” (Daniel Smith/Lionsgate via AP)

This image released by Lionsgate shows Danny Sapani in a scene from the film “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” (Daniel Smith/Lionsgate via AP)

This image released by Lionsgate shows Cary Elwes in a scene from the film “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” (Daniel Smith/Lionsgate via AP)

This image released by Lionsgate shows Henry Golding in a scene from the film “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” (Daniel Smith/Lionsgate via AP)

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The latest Guy Ritchie flick “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” has a spine of true story to it, even if it does all it can to amplify a long-declassified World War II tale with enough dead Nazis to make “Inglourious Basterds” blush.

The result is a jauntily entertaining film but also an awkward fusion. Ritchie’s film, which opens in theaters Friday, takes the increasingly prolific director’s fondness for swaggering, exploitation-style ultraviolence and applies it to a real-life stealth mission that would have been thrilling enough if it had been told with a little historical accuracy.

In 2016, documents were declassified that detailed Operation Postmaster, during which a small group of British special operatives sailed to the West African island of Fernando Po, then a Spanish colony, in the Gulf of Guinea. Spain was then neutral in the war, which made the Churchill-approved gambit audacious. In January 1942, they snuck into the port and sailed off with several ships — including the Italian merchant vessel Duchessa d’Aosta — that were potentially being used in Atlantic warfare.

Sounds like a pretty good movie, right? The story even features James Bond author Ian Fleming, giving it more than enough grist for a WWII whopper. “Operation Postmaster” makes for a better title, too, than the ungainly “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” Ritchie, however, already has an operation — last year’s “Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre” — in his filmography.

This image released by A24 shows Kirsten Dunst in a scene from "Civil War." (A24 via AP)

Ritchie, who turned Sherlock Holmes into a bulked-up action star, has always preferred to beef up his movies. It’s a less-noted side effect of the superhero era that regular ol’ heroes have been supersized, too, as if human-sized endeavors aren’t quite enough anymore. And “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare,” in which a handful of operatives kill approximately a thousand Nazis, has a fine, brawny duo in Henry Cavill and Alan Ritchson.

In the movie’s opening scene, they’re relaxing on a small ship in the Atlantic when Germans rush aboard. After a few laughs and a Nazi monologue that plays like a poor man’s version of Christoph Waltz’s masterful oration in “Inglourious Basterds,” the duo makes quick mincemeat of them, leaving blood splattered across the henley shirt of Anders Lassen (Ritchson, a charming standout).

Not much has changed in Ritchie-land, though he’s swapped tweed for skintight tees and cable-knit sweaters in a rollicking high-seas adventure. As in the director’s previous movies, everyone — and, as before, nearly all male — seems to be having a good time. Likewise, Ritchie revels in his characters’ debonair nonchalance while meting out all manner of savagery.

This image released by Lionsgate shows Eiza Gonzalez in a scene from the film "The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare." (Daniel Smith/Lionsgate via AP)

This image released by Lionsgate shows Eiza Gonzalez in “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” (Daniel Smith/Lionsgate via AP)

The assembled group of operatives are said to be delinquents and misfits, though they steadfastly adhere to the polite manners of past Ritchie protagonists. They may kill with bloodthirsty impunity but what really matters is upholding an old-school sense of style. When the undercover agents Marjorie Stewart (Eiza González, who silkily cuts like a knife through the film) and Mr. Heron (Babs Olusanmokun, excellent) ride a Nazi-controlled train on their way to Fernando Po, they look in disgust at the German sausages they’re served. Later, someone will say, “I hate Nazis not because they’re Nazis but because they’re so gauche.”

And in proficiently staged set pieces, Ritchie makes his own case for a bit of class. As a journeyman filmmaker now pumping out a movie a year, he’s in many ways grown to be a more complete director. He’s adept at giving the many members of his large ensemble moments to shine — including Henry Golding, Alex Pettyfer, Cary Elwes, Freddie Fox as Fleming, Til Schweiger as a barbaric Nazi and Rory Kinnear as Churchill.

And once the film — based on the nonfiction book by Damien Lewis — settles into a seedy, sunny West African setting and the nighttime heist finale, “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” proves a spirited, if grossly exaggerated diversion.

“The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare,” a Lionsgate release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for strong violence throughout and some language. Running time: 92 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.

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Babylon movie review & film summary (2022)
Babylon. 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 ...
Babylon
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: 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
W ith this turbo-charged and heavy handed epic, Damien Chazelle returns to that tinsel town movie world where he made his breakthrough with 2016's Oscar-winning La La Land. This one is all about ...
Movie review: 'Babylon' : NPR
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Babylon. The Bottom Line Altogether too much. 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 ...
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'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 ...
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Babylon. review: Baby, it's way too much. Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie lead Damien Chazelle's starry, manic reimagining of the time before talkies. Hollywood was born in sin: a spangled palm-tree ...
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Margot Robbie delivers a fearless performance as a cocaine-addled ingenue, but her character is ultimately abandoned by Damien Chazelle's mash-up of a story. Review by Ann Hornaday. December 20 ...
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Perhaps foremost, "Babylon" feels like a case of providing a talented filmmaker unfettered license to make the movie he wanted to make, when a few judicious notes - whether that involved ...
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From Damien Chazelle, Babylon is an original epic set in 1920s Los Angeles led by Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Diego Calva, with an ensemble cast including Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li and Jean Smart. A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, it traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood.
Babylon (2022)
Babylon: Directed by Damien Chazelle. With J.C. Currais, Diego Calva, Jimmy Ortega, Marcos A. Ferraez. A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, it traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood.
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Babylon film review — Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie star in ambitious ode to Hollywood. ... It is 1926. At the end of the road is a movie business party, a crazed bacchanal where the crowd ...
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By David Sims. Scott Garfield / Paramount. December 23, 2022. For a lavish and expensive epic about 1920s Hollywood, Damien Chazelle's new film, Babylon, introduces itself about as ...
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Babylon is a film too busy writing an elegy for the still-breathing body of film as a medium to capture the true beauty and complications of being alive. More Movie Reviews Dune: Part Two Is ...
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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 Reviews Are Here, See What Critics Are Saying About Damian
Let's see what the critics are saying, starting with CinemaBlend's review of Babylon. Eric Eisenberg rates the film 3 stars out of 5, saying that while the first half is one of the best movies ...
Review: 'Babylon' is Damien Chazelle's brilliant fever dream ...
Don't mistake his movie's lack of sentimentality for callousness. "Babylon" is coarse, hard and wild, but its emotion is undeniable. "Babylon" is what movie love really looks like. N"Babylon": Drama. Starring Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Diego Calva. Directed by Damien Chazelle. (R. 188 minutes.)
Babylon
An exotic performer named Lady Fay Zhu fearlessly saves someone from a rattlesnake and helps her family's business when she can. And perhaps we can offer a bit of praise to some protestors and the moviegoing public, oddly enough. "There's a new sensibility now," Manny tells someone as Babylon moves into the mid-1930s.
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For all its nudge-wink movie-history nods and self-conscious carnivals of bodily fluids and glamorous excess, Babylon is exhaustingly unexciting fare - hysterical rather than historical ...
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Babylon Review. Under the wing of fading movie star Jack Conrad (Pitt), film assistant Manny Torres (Calva) becomes swept up in Hollywood's transition from silent to sound movies during the ...
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 ...
Babylon Movie Review
Several characters die by suicide, violence, overd. Sex, Romance & Nudity. Several scenes of people engaging in graphic simul. Language. Extremely strong, constant language includes count. Products & Purchases. The studio names are real, as are several landmark. Drinking, Drugs & Smoking.
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The 2022 movie Babylon is a touch meta in that it is about the birth of modern Hollywood after the industry transitioned from silent films in the 1920s. Pitt played real-world figure Jack Conrad and has been praised for an excellent performance, along with costars like Margot Robbie. However, Babylon as a whole left reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes divided.
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In the movie's opening scene, they're relaxing on a small ship in the Atlantic when Germans rush aboard. After a few laughs and a Nazi monologue that plays like a poor man's version of Christoph Waltz's masterful oration in "Inglourious Basterds," the duo makes quick mincemeat of them, leaving blood splattered across the henley shirt of Anders Lassen (Ritchson, a charming standout).

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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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