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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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Movie Reviews

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.

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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 reveals post-oscars plans: "i am going to switch my phone off", damien chazelle weighs prospects of next project after box office flop: "'babylon' didn't work at all".

The opening half-hour here, from the sepia-toned vintage Paramount logo to the delayed appearance of the movie’s title, is such a syncopated concentration of hedonistic revelry — including a thinly veiled blow-by-blow of the Fatty Arbuckle-Virginia Rappe scandal — it could virtually have fleshed out a full-length feature. Chazelle mashes up bits of historical Tinseltown lore and real-life inspirations with the kind of lurid detail that filled the pages of Kenneth Anger’s once-banned muck-raking compendium, Hollywood Babylon , and there’s no denying the hyper-kinetic energy of the enterprise.

Propelled by Justin Hurwitz’s unrelenting wall-of-sound score, it’s often electrifying, to be sure, and certainly impressive in terms of sheer scale. How often do we get to see hundreds of non-digital extras in anything these days? But even when Chazelle takes a breather from the debauchery and gets his principals on a studio backlot or tries accessing them in more intimate moments, it all seems like one big, noisy, grotesque nostalgia cartoon. The show-offy flashiness behind one elaborately conceived and choreographed sequence after another becomes an impediment to finding a single character worth caring about.

Manny is working on the household staff of producer Don Wallach (Jeff Garlin) when he meets and is instantly intoxicated by wild child Nellie LaRoy ( Margot Robbie ) at one of the legendary parties at DW’s mansion in the hills, still surrounded by miles of undeveloped land.

While the already wired Nellie helps herself to the copious amounts of cocaine and other substances provided for guests, the two strangers bond over their dream of being on a movie set. Nelly is a New Jersey transplant with no credits and no representation, but she’s a creature of driven self-invention. “I’m already a star,” she proclaims, and when Robbie crowdsurfs the dancefloor with ecstatic moves that make her seem possessed, you don’t doubt it.

That extended opening is Chazelle at his most flamboyant. DP Linus Sandgren’s cameras weave at a breathless pace among a heaving throng of bodies either dripping in bugle beads, sequins and fancy headdresses or nude to varying degrees and indulging in more uninhibited sex and drugs than your average night at Studio 54. Just in case you miss the message, the entertainment includes a dwarf bouncing on a giant penis-shaped pogo stick that shoots confetti.

The chronicler of all things Hollywood is Photoplay columnist Elinor St. John ( Jean Smart ), based on British novelist Elinor Glynn, with a dash of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. There’s also Black jazz trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), inspired by bandleader Curtis Mosby; and Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), who makes a sultry entrance in a lesbian-chic tuxedo, singing “My Girl’s Pussy,” a pointed homage to queer icon Anna May Wong. But aside from Manny, the people of color in the cast are thinly outlined character sketches.

Chazelle maps the rise and fall of these players in the evolving Hollywood ecosystem as they are chewed up and spat out by the moral decay that eventually was rejected by the American public. That narrative already proved bloated and shrill in John Schlesinger’s 1975 film of the Nathanael West novel, The Day of the Locust . Clearly feeling the urge to cement his status as a visionary, Chazelle pumps it up into something louder, longer, gaudier and more extravagant, but seldom more interesting.

Manny and Nellie achieve their dream of getting on a movie set faster than they imagined. Jack takes a shine to Manny, commandeering him as an assistant, and he swiftly makes himself indispensable during production on a battle scene in a sword-and-sandal epic. A couple of rickety shooting setups away on the Kinoscope lot in the desert, Nellie steps in for the unfortunate starlet who overdosed while cavorting with Fatty Arbuckle — here named “Piggy” — and her exhibitionistic abandon makes her a natural.

Soon Manny is shimmying up the production chain while Nellie is catapulted to stardom before anyone figures out that her partying, gambling and generally trashy behavior might cause problems. The script takes a lazy stab at injecting some poignancy into their connection by showing that both are alone in terms of family, even if Nellie’s opportunistic father (Eric Roberts) turns up to get in on her earnings. But there’s not enough meat on the bones of either character to help them compete with the movie’s hyperactive focus.

The most out-there sequence is a sweaty detour into a criminal underworld so decadent it makes Babylon ’s version of Hollywood seem sanitized. This occurs when selfless Manny, having offered to cover Nellie’s gambling debts, pays a visit to James McKay, a mob boss so seedy he basically exists so that Tobey Maguire can attempt to out-weird Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet and Joaquin Phoenix in Joker combined. McKay leads Manny through an underground maze of freakdom where the gangster can hardly contain his excitement over a rat-eating muscleman. The fact that we’ve seen more imaginative variations on this theme as recently as Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley might make it easier for you to contain yours.

Despite all its meticulous craftsmanship — particularly Florencia Martin’s elaborate production design and eye-catching costumes by Mary Zophres that reference the period with distinct contemporary flourishes, a duality notable also in the women’s hairstyles — much of Babylon feels like overworked pastiche.

Chazelle’s intentions seem serious enough in attempting to shine a light on the non-white and queer people generally given minimal visibility in vintage Tinseltown narratives. But the storylines are so flimsy they seem no more real than the fanciful camp of Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood .

Aside from Nellie’s giddy spiral as the free spirit who won’t be tamed, which Robbie plays with unstinting commitment even when the frantic more-is-more of it becomes abrasive, the only story Chazelle really seems to want to tell is Jack’s.

Babylon follows his fortunes from being the highest paid star in Hollywood to getting unceremoniously dumped by Irving Thalberg (Max Minghella) after failing to make the transition to talkies and having his career decline cruelly chronicled in Photoplay . That yields the movie’s best dramatic scene, in which Jack confronts Elinor with guns blazing and the tough-as-nails columnist coolly douses his fire with some hard truths about the ephemeral nature of stardom. Only the movies endure, she tells him, which is not exactly true given that no one gave a thought to film preservation back then. But Pitt and Smart both seize on the rare breathable moment to find welcome dimension in their characters, even if the outcome that follows for Jack is drearily predictable.

A 1952 coda has Manny wandering into a movie theater to see Singin’ in the Rain and that film’s parallels to his experience in the ’30s trigger a magic-of-cinema reverie that dives back into the past and soars into the future. Some folks will eat this up, with Chazelle informing us that great art will always be bigger than the fucked-up, self-absorbed people making it. Or something like that. But it’s hard to imagine the overstuffed yet insubstantial Babylon finding its way into many screen-classic montages.

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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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Share All sharing options for: Babylon is absolute fire — and everyone in it is burning

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

By Richard Brody

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Sarah Larson

By Jessica Winter

By Jennifer Wilson

clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

‘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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Babylon Reviews

Ultimately a condemnation of the Hollywood machine that crushes everyone with equitable cruelty and an ode to the innovative artistry and ineffable magic of the movies, whose siren call continues to lure audiences & filmmakers alike towards its warm glow.

Full Review | Feb 13, 2024

Babylon isn't all bust, or even unwatchable, it is just overlong, overindulgent with nary a care...

Full Review | Jan 25, 2024

Babylon is provocative, but, at the same time, it highlights what almost serves as a thematic watermark in Chazelle's filmography: choosing success often means choosing suffering or torture. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Dec 19, 2023

Unsure if my brain will ever fully heal from what Chazelle goes-for-broke with in the extended finale, but one thing is certain: audiences may very well never see anything like it ever again. Whether that’s for better or worse is up to the viewer...

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Oct 30, 2023

Babylon is built on the idea that the primary goal of the film world is to make the viewer feel something even if it is disgust and pity.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Aug 8, 2023

All-embracing, all-consuming, and yet wholly intimate, Chazelle’s masterful epic is not only an ode to where film came from but where it will further journey to continue capturing our hearts, minds, and souls.

Full Review | Aug 6, 2023

An eyeball-searing trip into a version of writer-director Chazelle’s Hollywood.

Full Review | Jul 30, 2023

Babylon’ goes big and refuses to be ignored, even if a much better, much shorter movie exists somewhere inside the messy sprawl.

Full Review | Jul 27, 2023

Movie lovers will take to "Babylon" with a great deal of admiration, while others might struggle to notice how much it resonates within the film industry as part of historical importance.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Damien Chazelle’s Love Letter to Hollywood, Movies, Filmmaking, & its stars. A beautiful, hilarious, insane, ride through the debauchery of Hollywood & the stunning aspects of making a film. Wolf of Wall Street meets Hollywood. I LOVED it.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 25, 2023

Chazelle cracks the fantasy facade of the film by breaking down the moving images into a collection of frames and solid colors that make us question how we actually perceive the screen.

Babylon is pure excess, to its own detriment. Chazelle became so lost in frolicking in the playground of the 1920s Hollywood he’s created that he forgot to tie it all together into something meaningful.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

Babylon is a visual feast full of committed performances, charting years of the start of Hollywood’s Golden Age with all involved clearly having a riot.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 19, 2023

Chazelle frames it as a tragicomic exercise that underscores power dynamics and the filmmaking process in a golden age of Hollywood cloaked in frenzy, elegance and fading stars on the brink of the abyss. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jul 4, 2023

Repulsive, wretched excess...

Full Review | May 30, 2023

Chazelle seems to have abandoned the moving humanism that animated his early films, opting instead to wallow in grotesquerie, absurdity, and debauchery

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Apr 4, 2023

A fascinating mess.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 26, 2023

Babylon is ambitious, and costly—and almost a complete shambles. It is badly constructed and unconvincingly done, providing little or no insight into the film industry, culture in general or American society.

Full Review | Mar 24, 2023

For all that is great and grand in its use of history, the film is long and you can feel it, a problem when making an epic.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 20, 2023

As it stands, after two movies that started the “White People Freaking Out About Jazz” genre, I don’t have a lot of faith in Chazelle telling these stories and Babylon has shown me that my fears were founded.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Mar 17, 2023

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

Margot Robbie plays an ingénue, Brad Pitt a silent film star and Diego Calva a dreamer in this exuberantly messy look at La La Land's early days — an acid spin on 'Singin' in the Rain.'

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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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.

From the Saturnalian showbiz house party that kicks things off — an impressively staged, thoroughly debauched bacchanalia that owes as much to “Caligula” as it does to Scorsese — to the disarmingly schmaltzy montage with which this whirling three-hour folly climaxes, Chazelle demands that we see The Movies differently. Fine. Hollywood was hardly the innocent, asexual industry that a classic like “Singin’ in the Rain” (or later, “The Artist”) so lovingly depicted. But those movies deliver so much more pleasure per frame than this one does, which wears out its welcome in scene after exhausting scene, while purporting to set the record straight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Babylon review: Baby, it's way too much

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

Leah Greenblatt is the critic at large at Entertainment Weekly , covering movies, music, books, and theater. She is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and has been writing for EW since 2004.

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 –

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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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• Cast & crew
• User reviews

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. 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. 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.

• Damien Chazelle
• Margot Robbie
• 940 User reviews
• 309 Critic reviews
• 61 Metascore
• 46 wins & 161 nominations total

• Jack Conrad

• Nellie LaRoy

• Elinor St. John

• Truck Driver
• (as JC Currais)

• Manny Torres

• Elephant Wrangler

• Police Officer
• (as Marcos Ferraez)

• Jane Thornton

• Orville Pickwick

• Sidney Palmer

• Joe Holiday

• Guest (Chicken Line)

• Female Guest (Nathalie)
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia The character of Lady Fay Zhu is loosely based on Anna May Wong (1905-1961) the first Chinese-American actress in Hollywood whose career spanned both silent and sound films.
• Goofs A "Jackass Forever" billboard appears in the 1952 epilogue.

[Jack finds George crying with his head in the toilet]

Jack Conrad : Aw, Georgie. Who was it this time?

George Munn : [panting] Claire.

Jack Conrad : Claire. Well, Claire's a lesbian. That's an uphill battle for anyone.

• Crazy credits The Paramount logo is the 1920s version, fitting the era the film is set in.
• Alternate versions In Singapore, before the film could passed with an R21 classification for theatrical release, the distributor required to remove a scene depicting a deviant sexual act in which the authority felt it has exceeded the classification guidelines which states that "any material that is about or promotes deviant sexual behavior" would be refused classification.
• Connections Featured in WatchMojo: Top 10 Best Movies of 2022 (2022)
• Soundtracks My Girl's Pussy Lyrics by Harry Roy Music and additional lyrics by Justin Hurwitz Performed by Li Jun Li

User reviews 940

• drownsoda90
• Dec 23, 2022
• How long is Babylon? Powered by Alexa
• December 23, 2022 (United States)
• United States
• Official Facebook
• Official Instagram
• Santa Clarita, California, USA
• Paramount Pictures
• C2 Motion Picture Group
• Marc Platt Productions
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $110,000,000 (estimated)
• $15,351,455
• Dec 25, 2022
• $63,562,440

Technical specs

• Runtime 3 hours 9 minutes
• Dolby Digital
• Dolby Atmos

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• DVD & Streaming
• Comedy , Drama

Content Caution

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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Review: ‘Babylon’ douses you with sex, drugs, vomit and elephant diarrhea. You … might like it?

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Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” begins in a dusty stretch of Southern California desert in the 1920s, with the delivery of an elephant that will serve as one of the more quixotic performers at an exclusive Hollywood house party. While being carted uphill to the venue where various movers and shakers will soon descend — and where great quantities of cocaine will be inhaled amid an orgiastic swirl of dancing, rutting, mostly naked bodies — the poor pachyderm, either sensing disaster or experiencing some early stage fright, violently evacuates its bowels in the direction of the camera.

The movie concludes, some three hours and roughly three decades later, with something no less messily eruptive. Let’s be tactful and call it an explosion of cinema, a simultaneously dazzling and depressing survey of a motion-picture medium whose formative years we have just, in some measure, witnessed. These two sequences might sound at first like incongruous bookends. But after enduring — and I must say, enjoying much of — this wild and pungent cinematic bacchanal, I’m of the mind that they actually form a logical progression.

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The point seems to be that Hollywood, dreamily identified here as “the most magical place in the world,” has in fact always been a seething cauldron of iniquity, vulgarity and vice. The vast, underdeveloped sprawl of Los Angeles, seen here in its pre-metropolitan infancy, is both a literal Wild West and a freewheeling filmmaking bazaar, populated by gangsters, con artists, imbeciles and madmen, and as yet ungoverned by any semblance of a Production Code. Movie stars — like the ones played here by a crisply tuxedoed Brad Pitt and a wildly vampy Margot Robbie — are indulged but also manipulated, exploited and treated like high-priced chattel. Bit players, musicians, sound guys and various other expendables have it significantly worse.

What this ragtag empire produces, against considerable odds, is entertainment: emotion, wonderment and, on occasion, art, to be lapped up by an eager and easily enchanted moviegoing public. But if we were to glimpse what actually transpired in the belly of the beast, to see everything the system chewed up and spat out — well, that elephant’s fecal shower might start to feel pleasant by comparison.

These are hardly new ideas, as the movie’s title — with its glancing nod to Kenneth Anger’s scandal-choked “Hollywood Babylon” books — duly acknowledges. But there is some novelty in its sourness, coming as it does from the writer-director of the enchantingly sweet and sunny “La La Land.” (Several collaborators on that picture are reunited on this one, including cinematographer Linus Sandgren, editor Tom Cross and, most recognizably, composer Justin Hurwitz.) Then again, the soul-crushing struggles and dashed dreams of working artists have long been grist for Chazelle’s creative mill, and in some ways the corrosive showbiz cynicism of “Babylon” feels less like a reversal than a strategic reframing.

You could think of this movie as “La La Land’s” manic, mean-spirited cousin, spinning like a tornado through the Hollywood hothouse of the 1920s and ’30s, and spraying booze, excrement, vomit, gunfire and blood in all directions. At some point — maybe when Robbie tussles with a rattlesnake, or when someone ingests a live rat — you may well wonder: Is this movie a bloated, ghastly wreck, or merely a credible depiction of a bloated, ghastly wreck? That may be a distinction without a difference. In any event, I’ll admit that I found much of “Babylon” mesmerizing, even when (maybe especially when) I also found it naive, bludgeoning and obtuse. Chazelle’s demolition of the Dream Factory may be rather too taken with its own naughtiness, but coming from a filmmaker who until now has been precociously well-behaved, it can be a welcome blast of impudence and sometimes just a blast.

Its most attention-grabbing headliner is Nellie LaRoy (Robbie), a temptress in red who’s a star already in the making and unmaking. Recently arrived in L.A. from New Jersey, she’s first seen gate-crashing that epic party and tearing it up like a demon on the dance floor, high on cocaine and her own confidence. But Nellie’s is just one of a few loosely intertwined stories this movie has to tell. The camera, sweeping gracefully through the party crowd (as though borne aloft by the few sober revelers in attendance), briefly zeroes in on Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), a gifted trumpet player in the band, and Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), a singer who’s basically Anna May Wong by way of Marlene Dietrich. Taking the stage in a tuxedo and top hat, she naughtily teases the crowd with a double-entendre overload of a song — a performance calculated to remind or reveal to you that silent-era Hollywood wasn’t as straight, white or male as you thought.

Mostly, though, the camera gravitates toward a droll A-lister named Jack Conrad (Pitt), first seen surveying the festivities from a balcony; several hours later, he’ll take a drunken tumble from his own. Is the sight of him floating face down in his own swimming pool meant to evoke Jay Gatsby or Joe Gillis ? At any rate, he survives with his ego, his dreams of screen immortality and his sky-high ambitions for the medium intact: “We got to innovate. We got to inspire. What happens on that screen means something,” he tells Manny Torres (a fine Diego Calva), the elephant transporter and eager jack-of-all-trades whose wide-eyed gaze ties most of these stories together.

The naive outsider who becomes the consummate insider is a convention of numerous movies, though “Babylon’s” wannabe-epic sprawl and coke-fueled energy bring Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” and “The Wolf of Wall Street” especially to mind. One sequence in particular strongly evokes — did I say evokes? I meant it blatantly, gleefully rips off Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights,” an allusion that’s nothing if not instructive. Hollywood moviemaking and San Fernando Valley smut peddling may have their differences — here, an actor’s visibly tented crotch counts as a blooper rather than a highlight — but they are united by the same antic, anything-goes energy and improvisational spirit.

The most electrifying sequences in “Babylon” fully embrace that spirit. The first-act highlight surveys a typically frenzied day in the life of a Hollywood shoot, during which everything must go unthinkably wrong before it can go improbably right. It’s here that Manny, scrambling to find a replacement camera on a lavish medieval epic, makes his initial mark behind the scenes, while Nellie, starring in a tawdry barroom melodrama, shows off her acting chops, especially when it comes to turning on the waterworks. (Having a smart director, played by a terrific Olivia Hamilton, surely helps.)

This is the glory of moviemaking in the silent era: big, gestural performances, lavish outdoor shoots and a nonstop background cacophony that the cameras will never register. The talkie revolution, by contrast, will demand silence on the set — an irony not lost on Chazelle, who proceeds to orchestrate a riotous comedy of errors, cycling through take after aborted take on an unbearably hot soundstage. The demand for new heights of actorly precision takes its toll on Nellie, the unlucky Lina Lamont in this cruel mash note to “Singin’ in the Rain.” It also will weigh heavily on Jack, whose career end is soon prophesied by the Hollywood gossip columnist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart, sharply channeling Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper).

Pitt, who often does his best work by deflecting his own A-lister aura, is believable enough as an actor who’s beginning to doubt his own stardom, and who suspects that he may have been a second-rate talent all along. Robbie, finding notes of emotional nuance in between blasts of pure Hollywood-diva id, wrings a few entertaining variations on past roles: Again she gets a kick out of watching herself in a movie, as she did in “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” and again she is dismissed as too unrefined for a mercilessly fickle industry, as she was in “I, Tonya.” Pitt and Robbie are both well cast in roles that don’t ultimately deserve them, that never take on an indelible, specific life of their own. They’re not playing characters so much as ideas of characters; they’re walking, talking demonstrations of just how ephemeral and exploitative Hollywood stardom can be.

Jack and Nellie are at least afforded significant screen time, as is Manny, who falls hopelessly in love with the movies and Nellie at the same time and is doomed to be let down by both. But speaking of letdowns: Sidney and Lady Fay, perhaps the two most interesting (and talented) artists onscreen, are given woefully short shrift. That’s a shame, considering they’re meant to represent the hardworking entertainers who hustled and hauled ass in the margins and achieved the prominence they deserved in a profoundly racist industry. (And a profoundly homophobic one, as we see once Lady Fay and Nellie start to generate potentially career-destroying headlines.) But Chazelle’s writing of these characters feels much too hesitant and insubstantial, and he gives Adepo and Li far too little to chew on. In his eagerness to honor undersung performers, he winds up marginalizing them all over again.

There’s something instructive in that failure, and it speaks to the raging confusion, verging on incoherence, at the heart of “Babylon” — namely, its insistence on being both a poison-pen letter and a valentine, a decadent celebration and a politically conscious corrective. It’s not that a movie about the evils of blackface couldn’t also be a movie about, say, the evils of Tobey Maguire doing his scariest Alfred Molina impression. It’s that Chazelle, a director of impressive chops and a writer of often hasty, ill-formed ideas, isn’t strong enough to make those movies breathe as one. He would have to be either much more in control or much less in control of his instincts to do so.

Maybe that’s why “Babylon” ends, either spectacularly or with spectacular foolishness, with what feels like an aesthetic breakdown. As we watch by the light of the projector beam, the Dream Factory careens into nightmare territory, and the forces of nostalgia and nihilism duke it out to a draw. Is Chazelle composing a letter of good riddance to the criminally toxic industry of yesteryear, or directing an Old Hollywood version of a “movies, now more than ever” PSA? Maybe he’s doing both, in an attempt to acknowledge the complicated legacy and the lasting, contradictory power of the movies. And why not? Somehow, elephant dung feels good in a place like this .

Rated: R, for strong and crude sexual content, graphic nudity, bloody violence, drug use and pervasive language Running time: 3 hours, 9 minutes Playing: Starts Dec. 23 in general release

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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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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Heidi Venable is a Content Producer for CinemaBlend, a mom of two and a hard-core '90s kid. She started freelancing for CinemaBlend in 2020 and officially came on board in 2021. Her job entails writing news stories and TV reactions from some of her favorite prime-time shows like Grey's Anatomy and The Bachelor. She graduated from Louisiana Tech University with a degree in Journalism and worked in the newspaper industry for almost two decades in multiple roles including Sports Editor, Page Designer and Online Editor. Unprovoked, will quote Friends in any situation. Thrives on New Orleans Saints football, The West Wing and taco trucks.

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‘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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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

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…

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 .

Where to Watch

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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 : August 12, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Our editors recommend.

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Screen Rant

Damien chazelle’s next movie update is disappointing (despite his infamous $110 million box office bomb).

While 2022's Babylon proved a flop upon release, the effect this may have on Damien Chazelle's career could be unfair given his artistic pedigree.

• Chazelle fears future film budgets post-Babylon flop.
• Babylon's ambitious storytelling divides critics, risks trust in director.
• Chazelle should stick to smaller projects while proving box office potential.

Director Damien Chazelle revealed his 2022 flop Babylon has now given him fear regarding the budgets his future films might get, but it would still be a major shame if studios didn’t trust him with bigger projects . Damien Chazelle’s career has been defined by narratives of control. Both his 2009 debut Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench and 2016’s La La Land were bittersweet musicals about couples whose inability to control their careers cost them dearly. Meanwhile, 2013’s suspense thriller Grand Piano (which Chazelle wrote) and the following year’s Whiplash were both intense stories of musicians risking everything, including their lives, to master their art and play perfectly.

As such, it was ironic and almost inevitable that the ending of 2022’s Babylon was arguably the most unrestrained filmmaking in Chazelle’s career. A sprawling, endlessly ambitious, and critically divisive flop, Babylon tells the sprawling story of various Hollywood denizens grappling with the transition from the silent era to sound. Despite boasting stars like Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, and Tobey Maguire among its massive cast, Babylon was written off as an overlong folly by many reviewers. Its runtime didn’t help matters, clocking in at a whopping 189 minutes, and Babylon ’s unfocused storytelling proved an acquired taste upon release.

Damien Chazelle Doesn’t Believe He Will Get A Big Budget After Babylon

La la land’s director said the flop could hurt his future prospects.

Like many ambitious directors before him, Chazelle proved himself on smaller projects before he was trusted with a huge budget and creative control. As a result, the director admitted in a recent interview with TCM ’s Talking Pictures podcast that he was aware Babylon ’s mammoth budget wouldn’t be available to him in any upcoming projects thanks to the movie's financial failure. Per Chazelle, “ I won’t get a budget of Babylon size any time soon, or at least not on this next one .” Although Chazelle is right to be realistic, it would be a major shame if Babylo n’s failure hampered his future projects.

Babylon ’s visual excess is as stunning and captivating as the director’s classic musical inspirations.

Despite its reputation, Babylon was far from a disaster. It doesn’t rank highly among Damian Chazelle’s movies , but this is more of a testament to his typically high standard than evidence of Babylon ’s failure. Both Robbie and Pitt are typically excellent in their roles, while Babylon ’s visual excess is as stunning and captivating as the director’s classic musical inspirations. Babylon undeniably outstays its welcome, but it is the sort of ambitious, offbeat project that often never gets realized due to its limited commercial potential. Like Southland Tales or Beau Is Afraid , Babylon shouldn’t limit its director’s future .

Why Babylon Bombed At The Box Office

Babylon’s lengthy hollywood satire was too much for audiences and critics.

Babylon failed at the box office for a variety of reasons, among them its mixed reviews, its lengthy runtime, and its unclear storyline. Although trailers promised Pitt and Robbie in major main roles, Babylon ’s main character was left unclear by the marketing materials. Furthermore, although Stephen King defended Babylon from detractors, the decision to center the movie's story on the silent era may have alienated viewers . Since the most iconic, enduringly popular movies from the silent era are typically family-friendly affairs, showing viewers the debauched, decadent, and sometimes even disturbing realities of their production wasn’t all that alluring.

Babylon ’s depictions of excess bordered on outright grotesquerie at times, most notably when Tobey Maguire’s sadistic villain James McKay appeared.

The roaring ‘20s have been brought to life onscreen before, with Baz Luhrman’s The Great Gatsb y memorably using CGI and contemporary music to update the era’s parties. However, Babylon ’s depictions of excess bordered on outright grotesquerie at times, most notably when Tobey Maguire’s sadistic villain James McKay appeared. Chazelle’s obvious affinity for the classic era of Hollywood clashed with dark elements like Maguire’s vile Babylon villain , and the movie's attempts to illustrate the harsh realities underpinning the movie industry were undone by the director’s evident love for the movies of the time. This resulted in a muddled, unclear tone.

Every Damien Chazelle Movie, Ranked From Worst To Best

Babylon’s disastrous box office shouldn’t define damien chazelle’s career, chazelle has potential despite this major flop.

Even though Babylon was a flop, Damien Chazelle should still be able to make big-budget movies. His career is still in its early stages, and he has already written and directed a pair of major successes in 2014’s Whiplash and 2016’s La La Land . La La Land made $447 million on a budget of $30 million while Whiplash made a staggering $49 million on a budget of only $3.3 million. Chazelle has proven that he has box office potential, but this also shouldn’t be the only metric that defines his potential. All of Chazelle’s movies prove his critical credibility.

When advertising costs are taken into account, its lifetime loss is pretty colossal, and this will inevitably impact Chazelle's future.

Chazelle's unfairly forgotten Ryan Gosling vehicle First Man , a biopic of Neil Armstrong from 2018, received rave reviews even though the movie under-performed upon release. La La Land and Whiplash were both hugely successful with critics, while even Babylon ’s harshest detractors had to admit that it was visually impressive and undeniably interesting. Babylon made only $63 million on a reported budget of $110 million. When advertising costs are taken into account, its lifetime loss is pretty colossal, and this will inevitably impact Chazelle's future. However, it is by no means a terrible movie and, as such, it shouldn’t have an outsized negative effect.

Damien Chazelle Has Proven He Can Work On Smaller Budgets

Whiplash and la la lands showcased what chazelle can do with less.

With Whiplash and La La Land , Chazelle proved that he could make major hits on a low budget, winning over both critics and audiences.

While Chazelle still deserves the chance to make bigger-budget movies , his best opportunity to do this might be by sticking to smaller projects for the time being. With Whiplash and La La Land , Chazelle proved that he could make major hits on a low budget, winning over both critics and audiences without relying on a recognizable IP. Now, he can return to his roots for his next project and, in the process, avoid the risk of losing money on another ambitious failure. While Babylon bombing at the box office did hurt Chazelle’s standing, its failure was compounded by First Man ’s underperformance.

Babylon ’s reviews prove that its biggest problems had little to do with its budget, meaning director Damian Chazelle should use some smaller projects to win back viewers.

Now that Chazelle has made two ambitious big-budget movies that both failed to recoup their investment, it is time for him to return to the limitations of smaller budgets. This can allow Chazelle to showcase the economical filmmaking skills seen in La La Land , Whiplash , and Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench , thus proving that he can be trusted with bigger projects despite the issues that Babylon and First Man faced. Babylon ’s reviews prove that its biggest problems had little to do with its budget, meaning director Damian Chazelle should use some smaller projects to win back viewers.

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Emma Stone Wins Her Second Best Actress Oscar for ‘Poor Things’

Stone, who portrayed Bella Baxter in the Yorgos Lanthimos-directed film, was visibly overwhelmed in her acceptance speech.

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By Julia Jacobs

• March 10, 2024

Last year’s Oscar for best actress went to a universe-hopping laundromat owner who at one point appears to have hot dogs for fingers . Naturally, this year had to go even stranger.

The award went to Emma Stone for her performance in the Yorgos Lanthimos-directed “Poor Things” as Bella Baxter, once dead but resurrected by a mad scientist, who implanted the brain of her unborn child into her skull.

The result is a full-grown woman with the impulses of an infant, until she progresses into a child testing boundaries and searching for independence in a world where men are accustomed to dictating women’s lives.

Stone, who was visibly overwhelmed in her acceptance speech, shared a conversation she had with Lanthimos, who is a frequent collaborator.

“The other night I was panicking, as you can kind of see happens a lot, that maybe something like this could happen,” she said, “and Yorgos said to me, ‘Please take yourself out of it.’ And he was right because it’s not about me. It’s about a team that came together to make something greater than the sum of its parts.”

The victory is Stone’s second for best actress: she won for her turn as a striving Hollywood performer in the 2016 musical “La La Land.”

In the fantastical, absurdist world of “Poor Things,” Stone’s Bella Baxter is charmingly blunt, brash and intent on being free to experiment. In one memorable scene at a restaurant in Portugal, Baxter launches into a wild and silly dance, inspiring her lover (played by Mark Ruffalo) to furiously try matching her vigor.

“She’s drinking up the world around her in such a unique and beautiful way that I just dream I could,” Stone, 35, said in an interview with The Times in November.

This past year was something of a crossroads for Stone’s career as she made a sharp turn away from the kind of mainstream roles that made her famous (“Easy A,” “The Help”). On TV, Stone starred alongside Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie in “ The Curse, ” a satire of a home renovation show filled with little absurdities that almost rival the duck-headed bulldog in “Poor Things.”

Baxter’s unusual character arc provided Stone a unique actor’s playground as her character learned how to walk and talk, discovered her sexuality, learned the deepest horrors of humanity, and sought to forge her own life as an adult.

“I felt like I kind of lived with her for a long time,” Stone told Vanity Fair . “Yorgos and I still talk about how we miss her now.”

An earlier version of this article misstated the country where a scene in “Poor Things” took place. It was Portugal, not Spain.

How we handle corrections

Julia Jacobs is a general assignment reporter who often covers legal issues in arts and culture. More about Julia Jacobs

Our Coverage of the 2024 Oscars

The 96th academy awards were presented on march 10 in los angeles..

Our Critics’ Take: The Oscars were torn between the golden past and the thorny present. But to our critics Manohla Dargis and Alissa Wilkinson, the show mostly worked .

A ‘Just Ken’ Spectacle: In one of the most anticipated and exuberant moments of Oscar night , Ryan Gosling took the stage to perform “ I’m Just Ken ” from “Barbie.”

Cillian Murphy’s Career: If you’re looking to expand your knowledge of the Irish actor’s work after his now Oscar-winning performance  as the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, here are some excellent options .

Universal’s Success: Under the leadership of the executive Donna Langley, the studio behind “Oppenheimer” has managed the rare feat of achieving creative dominance and commercial supremacy at the same time .

Inside the After Parties:  Here’s what we saw at the Governors Ball  and Vanity Fair’s party , where the famous (and the fame-adjacent) celebrated into the night.

Review: Full of biceps and bullets, 'Love Lies Bleeding' will be your sexy noir obsession

Sultry, sweaty and sufficiently bizarre, “Love Lies Bleeding” is a neo-noir thriller packed with barbells and bullets that’s fearless in its depiction of lesbian love and over-the-top mayhem.

Director Rose Glass follows up the unholy terror of 2019’s “Saint Maud” by rubbing a grimy sheen across a zesty retro combo of a revenge flick, addiction narrative, body horror show and queer love story. Newcomer Katy O’Brian is sensational as a bisexual bodybuilder who gets mixed up in some bad business – with Kristen Stewart as her troubled romantic interest – in a muscular yet incomplete yarn (★★★ out of four; rated R; in select theaters now, nationwide Friday) exploring the seedier corners of Americana.

In small-town New Mexico circa 1989, Lou (Stewart) oversees a ramshackle gym where her days are spent unclogging nasty toilets and laminating membership cards. One night, Jackie (O’Brian) stops by on the way to a competition in Las Vegas: Working her ripped physique garners male attention, though she only has eyes for Lou, and vice versa.

They hit it off, and Lou taps into her steroid supply to help Jackie get extra jacked for the big day. But the more Jackie immerses herself into Lou’s tumultuous world, the more trouble she finds. Jackie starts working for her new love’s skeezy estranged dad (Ed Harris), the bug-chomping criminal owner of a local gun club and also meets the abusive husband (Dave Franco) of Lou’s sister (Jena Malone).

An act of familial violence goes too far, the vengeful aftermath tests Jackie and Lou’s fledgling relationship, Lou threatens to expose her father’s shady dealings, and the bodies pile up as our lovers get desperate.

'I want to do the gayest ... thing': Kristen Stewart on donning jockstrap for Rolling Stone cover

Lives go off the rails, but Glass keeps the plot from following suit, weaving in a dark sense of humor (there’s a whole bit with a jawless corpse) and a fantastical bent. “Bleeding” gets weird but not too weird, and the intense chemistry between Stewart and O’Brian powers an insightful exploration of how love can save just as easily as it can turn one’s entire existence into pure chaos.

Stewart is solid as the frazzled Lou, who struggles to find steadiness even when Ms. Right walks through her gym door. But none of it works without O'Brian, whose first lead big-screen role is a performance she nails physically and emotionally. A former bodybuilder herself, the actress superbly navigates the arc of a hulking character transformed by steroids and her increasingly volatile situation. O’Brian finds the unsettled soul underneath Jackie’s rippling muscles and lets her loose, flaws and all, but is also game for a healthy amount of strangeness too.

When Jackie and Lou aren’t together, the movie suffers because neither of their individual points of view are particularly strong. Bits of their backstories come out but not enough for two people whose cryptic pasts seemingly inform their unhinged present. You’re left wanting more – they’re both called “monsters” by different people, which does pay off in a sense – in a film that otherwise is pretty good at juggling style and substance. 

“Love Lies Bleeding” is a blood-soaked throwback to '80s erotic thrillers and action cinema but also Glass’ deconstruction of cinematic hypermasculinity through a female lens. Instead of dudes named Schwarzenegger and Stallone, it’s a woman named Jackie with the veiny biceps, who when offered a gun, says she doesn’t need one: “I prefer to know my own strength.” For this movie, that is the teaming of Stewart and O'Brian, who's about to be movie lovers' powerful new obsession.

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The Comedy Man review – manic gusto from Kenneth More’s 60s-style Withnail

More’s hopelessly vain out-of-work actor is joined by a blue chip cast in a zippy tale that does unfortunately rather show its age

B efore Richard E Grant’s Withnail, there was Kenneth More’s Chick Byrd. In Alvin Rakoff’s 1964 British drama, Byrd is an out-of-work actor whose breezy, cynical exuberance masks increasing terror of permanent unemployment and, like Withnail, he is desperate for his agent to call, stunned by his flatmate booking a glamorous film job and stuck living in a scuzzy boarding house in Camden Town (although exteriors were shot in Paddington).

After being fired from his job in provincial rep, Chick has come back down to London to try his luck, meeting up with all the old faces, the familiar parade of ageing thespian losers hanging round West End pubs and cafes during the day and mooching desolately past theatres with huge hoardings showing rave reviews for successful actors. Jaded, nasty agent Tommy Morris (Dennis Price) has no time for Chick, and neither does the raffish Prout (Frank Finlay), while slippery actor Rutherford (Cecil Parker) owes him money. But he meets up with old flame Judy (Billie Whitelaw) and a new one, Fay (played by More’s future wife Angela Douglas). And then, when something terrible happens to his pal Jack Lavery (Alan Dobie), Chick makes an awful decision which gets him a kind of fame and fortune, at a price.

It’s all performed with manic gusto and plenty of zip in the dialogue, and the opening scene, with Chick’s chaotic curtain-call speech, is in fact rather amazing. But it has to be said there is something a bit dated and tatty in the wrong ways about The Comedy Man, and for me this is down to More, a performer who is oddly pompous and self-satisfied in what is supposed to be a comedy role, albeit a melancholy one. He never looks like a professional actor, more like a golf club bore who fancies himself something of a card. Of course, Chick is supposed to be insufferable – but is he supposed to be quite that insufferable? And then there are the moments of casual misogyny and homophobia, which of course modern audiences can be aware of and even make allowances for, but are here not redeemed by any great wit or humanity in the way they might be for other pictures of the era.

Having said all this, it is solidly performed by its blue chip cast – though how sad to see Dennis Price, the legendary star of Kind Hearts and Coronets, not being properly used in a British film. It’s a vivid glimpse of early 60s Britain.

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‘Arcadian' Review: Even in a Post-Apocalyptic World, Nicolas Cage Just Wants His Kids Home by Curfew

N icolas Cage has enjoyed an unparalleled run of indie film weirdness over the past decade, applying his distinct brand of onscreen "Cage-iness" to everything from psychedelic metal revenge sagas to animatronic-laden B-movies and a meta comedy where he played Nicolas Cage . The actor was once mocked for his perceived low standards for roles, but recent reappraisals of his 2010s output have led many to see his willingness to leave everything on the court for small projects as something worth admiring. Even the simplest of premises and the lowest of budgets can become something special as long as Cage is afforded enough screen time to go apeshit.

But that framing, while partially accurate, negates the equally important flip side of Cage's love affair with independent genre films. His penchant for cinematic freak-outs is unquestioned, but the actor is perfectly willing to lay down his metaphorical weapons and give restrained performances when a script calls for it. Cage is the kind of star whose name can get a bizarre script greenlit at the right price and instantly catch the attention of midnight moviegoers, and some of his most generous contributions to the space have come when he lent his talents to something strange without any expectation of a moment in the spotlight.

"Arcadian" firmly fits into that latter category. While the lines stretching around the block for its SXSW premiere at the Paramount Theater likely had plenty to do with the prospect of seeing Cage in a post-apocalyptic horror movie, his performance won't generate any viral "Cage moments." Instead, the actor gives a much more muted (but no less impressive) performance as a father struggling to protect his two sons in a world overrun by monsters.

Directed by Cage's "The Trust" filmmaker Ben Brewer, "Arcadian" splits the difference between contemporary horror movies and '80s Spielberg blockbusters, relying on clever jump scares and sentimental music cues in equal measure. An elegant little film about the things in life that are worth taking risks for, "Arcadian" is a reminder of how much Cage has to offer us when he's not contorting himself into something indescribable.

Set in a world so irreparably broken that nobody can even remember exactly what caused the downfall of human society, the movie follows Paul (Cage) as he shields his twin teenage sons Joseph (Jaeden Martell) and Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins) from the horrors that lurk outside the boundaries of their farm. The family lives in fear of a flock of nameless nocturnal monsters who try to enter their home each night, and Paul spends his days reinforcing the system of locks and barriers that keep the house secure. At night, all they can do is push against the doors and try to ignore the claws scratching against their walls.

But teenagers don't stop being teenagers just because the world is ending. Paul still deals with many of the challenges that have plagued fathers since the beginning of time - namely that his sons always want to take the car out and they're never home before their curfew. He's set strict rules with the hope of ensuring that nobody is ever outside when the sun sets and the monsters come out, but the allure of riding their makeshift ATV to visit the other humans inhabiting their sparse rural oasis is often too strong for the boys to resist.

Paul's lectures about safety probably started falling on deaf ears long before this movie begins, but his concerns shift from the abstract into reality when Thomas doesn't come home one night. After staying out late to pursue a budding romance with a local girl named Charlotte (Sadie Soverall), he falls into a crevice on the way home and finds himself trapped in the woods as darkness falls.

When Paul ventures out to save him, all three men end up in their own form of danger. Thomas is considerably outnumbered by the monsters when he's left to defend their house by himself, and Paul finds that his years of preparation still haven't made him immune to the dangers of the woods. It becomes clear that their only option is to rely on help from their neighbors - no easy task in a world where everyone is focused on hoarding resources for their own survival.

Alternating between terror and sentimentality until its final moments, "Arcadian" is another solid addition to Cage's genre filmography. What starts as a simple survival story finds its footing as a nuanced exploration of the value of safety and security and the moments when we decide it's worth giving up. While the ostrich-like creatures with extendable limbs and vibrating mouths are terrifying in their own right, the film's biggest scare might be how it reminds us that we can't shield our kids from danger forever.

"Arcadian" premiered at SXSW 2024. RLJE Films will release it in select theaters on Friday, April 12.

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