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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Available only in theaters on December 23rd. 

Brian Tallerico

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

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Babylon (2022)

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

189 minutes

Diego Calva as Manny Torres

Margot Robbie as Nellie LaRoy

Brad Pitt as Jack Conrad

Jovan Adepo as Sidney Palmer

Li Jun Li as Lady Fay Zhu

Jean Smart as Elinor St. John

Tobey Maguire as James McKay

J.C. Currais as Truck Driver

Jimmy Ortega as Elephant Wrangler

Marcos A. Ferraez as Police Officer

Lukas Haas as George Munn

Patrick Fugit as Officer Elwood

Eric Roberts as Robert Roy

Cici Lau as Gho Zhu

David Lau as Sam Wong Zhu

Rory Scovel as The Count

Max Minghella as Irving Thalberg

Samara Weaving as Constance Moore

Jeff Garlin as Don Wallach

Ethan Suplee as Wilson

Marc Platt as Producer

• Damien Chazelle

Cinematographer

• Linus Sandgren
• Justin Hurwitz

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‘babylon’ 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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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’ Review: Boozing. Snorting. That’s Entertainment!?

Damien Chazelle directs Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Diego Calva in a 1920s story about Hollywood’s good and sometimes very bad old days.

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By Manohla Dargis

The best that can be said about Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” is that there are still big Hollywood studios like Paramount around to spend wads of cash on self-flattering indulgences. It’s perversely comforting. Despite all the real and imagined existential hurdles that the movie business is facing, its agonies over the future of theatrical exhibition and of streaming, the industry holds fast to the belief that audiences will turn out to watch an ode to its favorite subject: itself. So kudos to Paramount, which also released this year’s box-office titleholder “Top Gun: Maverick” — at the very least, “Babylon” is further proof of life.

It’s also a bloated folly, which is in keeping with an industry that has a habit of supersizing itself in times of crisis. To tell his tale, Chazelle has turned back the clock to the years right before the business adapted synchronous sound as the industry standard. In basic outline, he frames this period largely as one of unbridled personal freedom, a time in which film folk partied hard, guzzling rivers of booze while snorting Sahara-sized dunes of drugs and joylessly writhing to jazzy squalling. The next morning, the freewheeling revelers then stumbled into the blazing California sun for another day of filmmaking.

Written by Chazelle, “Babylon” centers on three industry types — a powerful star, a soon-to-be minted starlet and an up-and-coming executive — whose lives first intersect in a frenzied blowout crowded with attendees thrashing wildly, their mouths, arms, legs, breasts and assorted other bits flapping in a simulacrum of ecstasy. The star is Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt in usual smooth form), an M.G.M. headliner with a dashing mustache, a string of hits and a romantic life that, despite his boozing, is as robust as his health. The movie’s humor — and Chazelle’s amused approach — is signaled when Jack tells a flirty waitress to bring him multiple drinks. He slurps buckets, and then gets it energetically on with the server.

Like the powder nasally vacuumed by another partyer, a grasping would-be star, Nellie LaRoy (a badly used Margot Robbie), Jack’s drinking is, for Chazelle, an emblem of the unfettered spirit of the age before the fun was spoiled by, well, it’s unclear by whom, since the only serious villain is a gangster played by a persuasively repellent Tobey Maguire. (Wall Street, which has done far more damage to the movies than any entity, is conspicuously M.I.A.) Jack’s and Nellie’s abilities to perform no matter what, on camera and off, are among their most defining traits, near-super powers as well as a steady source of strained comedy.

Much of the first two hours restively bounces from Jack to Nellie and Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a doe-eyed Mexican naïf whom Jack hires as an assistant. A fast, smart problem solver and a total mensch, Manny soon assumes greater responsibility and becomes a studio executive, a straighter trajectory than either Jack or Nellie’s hairpin roads. Manny is an outlier, an immigrant of color in a predominantly white business, but he’s a survivor, too, open to change and highly adaptable. Like Calva, Manny is appealing, even if the character is preposterously nice for a clichéd Hollywood striver. But it’s never really clear what makes him run and mostly he functions as a proxy for the audience, a gaga witness to the looniness.

Compared to the larger-than-life, at times cartoonish, more physically demonstrative performances delivered by Pitt and especially Robbie, Calva is relatively tamped down and reactive, which brings his turn closer to contemporary notions of realism. These differences add complexity and much-needed rhythm changes. Similarly to his characters, Chazelle has embraced excess as a guiding principle in “Babylon, and like his film “La La Land,” this one shifts between intimate interludes and elaborate set pieces, one difference being that Chazelle now has a heftier budget and is eager to show off his new toys. At the inaugural bacchanal, the camera doesn’t soar; it darts and swoops like a coked-up hummingbird.

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Babylon Reviews

Babylon is an adrenaline rush from start to finish, with said rush being raunchy, hilarious, powerful, confounding, just about anything you can imagine.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 25, 2024

Babylon is a story about people who want to be stars, become stars, and are ultimately reduced to stardust.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 16, 2024

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

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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.

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‘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.

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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 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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by Joshua Rivera

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 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

20 Jan 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Babylon review: Baby, it's way too much

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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• Margot Robbie fights a snake and Brad Pitt gets drunk in decadent first Babylon trailer
• Exploring Babylon , Damien Chazelle's star-studded new movie
• Tobey Maguire sets first acting role in years with Damien Chazelle's Babylon

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

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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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Babylon First Reactions: Ambitious and Extravagant but Messy and Excessive

Social media reactions to damien chazelle's latest have been wildly diverse, ranging from effusive praise to gross disappointment..

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Here’s what critics are saying about Babylon :

Is Babylon a grandiose success?

Damien Chazelle’s Babylon is a dazzling, dizzying cacophony of demented depravity. A rebellious, outrageous portrait of golden-era hedonistic Hollywood. –  Courtney Howard, Fresh Fiction

Extravagant, decadent and all together delightfully delicious. –  Jazz Tangcay, Variety

Damien Chazelle pulls out all the stops, works without a filter, and takes a mighty big swing on Babylon . It’s bold, audacious, wild filmmaking. –  Scott Mantz, Movie Mantz

Babylon is A LOT of movie – a purposeful mess. –  Yolanda Machado, Entertainment Weekly

Or is Babylon a bold failure?

Babylon is an ambitious mess of a film. – Scott Menzel, We Live Entertainment

Babylon is a flaming hot mess… Easily Damien Chazelle’s worst film. – Erick Weber, Awards Ace

Chaotic, opulent, and a bloated mess. – Matt Donato, Paste Magazine

(Photo by ©Paramount Pictures)

Is it a stunning sensation?

Babylon is a daring Hollywood epic that utterly shocks the senses. – Jeff Nelson, Showbiz Cheat Sheet

My eyes were never bored; my brain is still catching up. – Eric Kohn, IndieWire

Or is it just gross debauchery?

Truly monstrous in its thudding insistence on shoving the viewer’s face in the muck and claiming it’s something novel or moving. – Ryan Swen, In Review Online

Babylon feels like if someone read Damien Chazelle the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and then he said, “Hold my beer!” – Clayton Davis, Variety

Is there still some great work from Damien Chazelle?

Babylon is phenomenal filmmaking. – Jazz Tangcay, Variety

Damien Chazelle incorporates his signature musicality and movement throughout. – Jeff Nelson, Showbiz Cheat Sheet

Chazelle might be the most confident director in Hollywood today; of course, he’s also got some of the worst instincts out there. – Ryan Swen, In Review Online

Damien Chazelle brings buckets of energy to Babylon , but it’s never not pounding and obvious and, finally, uninsightful. – Joshua Rothkopf, Entertainment Weekly

How are the visuals?

Cinematically, it is super grand, some insane, incredibly ambitious tracking shots that are so impressive and choreographed. – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

Stellar production values and costume design. – Scott Mantz, Movie Mantz

Awe-inducing costume and production design. – Courtney Howard, Fresh Fiction

What about the performances?

Margot Robbie and Diego Calva give huge performances. – Jeff Nelson, Showbiz Cheat Sheet

Margot Robbie is a live wire. Diego Calva is sensational. – Courtney Howard, Fresh Fiction

Margot Robbie’s best performance to date. – Jazz Tangcay, Variety

Pitt and Jovan Adepo give the best performances in the movie. Robbie gives it her all but the character is so one note. – Gregory Ellwood, The Playlist

Margot Robbie tries but the script fails her. – Scott Menzel, We Live Entertainment

Is the soundtrack worth checking out?

Justin Hurwitz’s score is phenomenal from top to bottom! – Perri Nemiroff, Collider

The score is outstanding. – Jazz Tangcay, Variety

Justin Hurwitz’s score is one hell of a wall of sound. – Jeff Nelson, Showbiz Cheat Sheet

Justin Hurwitz ripping off his La La Land score is sending me. – Gregory Ellwood, The Playlist

The music!!! Oomph, the music and visuals are 100!!! – Yolanda Machado, Entertainment Weekly

Is it also a love letter to the movies?

This is Damien Chazelle’s love letter to movie-making. – Jazz Tangcay, Variety

A love letter to cinema that made me hate cinema. – Scott Menzel, We Live Entertainment

Does it ultimately lack focus?

Babylon has some incredibly strong sequences but overall lacked focus and couldn’t support so many key characters. – Perri Nemiroff, Collider

The tone is all over the place. – Scott Menzel, We Live Entertainment

A tonal disaster. – Erick Weber, Awards Ace

Is it reminiscent of any other films or filmmakers?

Babylon is like a raucous, wild mix of Singin’ in the Rain and Boogie Nights . – Courtney Howard, Fresh Fiction

Early PTA meets Baz Luhrmann vis-à-vis unchecked excess. – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

Everything about it is borrowed — even down to Tobey Maguire stealing the film as its Alfred Molina. A Scorsese coke film by a squeaky-clean director. – Daniel Howat, Next Best Picture

Does at least some of it work?

First half is great… – Clayton Davis, Variety

It’s wild, over-the-top bravura entertains for two hours. – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

Babylon throttles forward with excessive momentum to start, the first hour(ish) easily engages. – Matt Donato, Paste Magazine

But is it too long?

At three hours and eight minutes, it’s a lotta movie. – Scott Mantz, Movie Mantz

It’s A LOT of movie packed into that time but I was never bored and it flew by for me. – Courtney Howard, Fresh Fiction

Babylon is 3 hours long and the last hour, the fall of old Hollywood is purposefully dire, but enervating and draining, sucking some of the loopy whippet whirling dervish helium energy out of the picture. – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

Is the ending any good?

It has the best ending of the year, one of the all-time hat tips to the cinema. – Eric Kohn, IndieWire

Special shame must go to the ending, a shameless play for illogical importance and somehow an even more insulting tribute to Godard than Hazanavicius. – Ryan Swen, In Review Online

The very last scene, “the power of cinema” borders on (crosses for many) grand eye-rolling pretension that leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Not a great way to end a movie you mighta admired. – Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

Any final assessments?

Loved! – Courtney Howard, Fresh Fiction

Didn’t love it. – Gregory Ellwood, The Playlist

Babylon is one of the worst films of 2022. – Erick Weber, Awards Ace

Babylon opens in theaters everywhere on December 23, 2022.

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Babylon (United States, 2022)

Babylon has arguably the best first hour of any 2022 motion picture. Kinetic, frenzied, and energetic, the opening party enraptures with its soaring images and percussive music. (Courtesy cinematographer Linus Sandgren and composer Justin Hurwitz under the direction of Damien Chazelle.) It’s a fully immersive experience that deserves to be seen in a theater with a big screen and an excellent sound system. Unfortunately, Babylon clocks in at a bloated 3 hours, 8 minutes and the final two hours aren’t as involving as the first. Indeed, the movie has an unfortunate trajectory where the story becomes less interesting as the running time increases. This is the classic definition of being “front-loaded.”

Anytime I feel like saying something negative about Babylon , though, I keep coming back to the 30-minute prologue. It’s so damn good with its you-are-there, in-your-face admittance to a debauched Hollywood party set in the roaring ‘20s. (1920s, that is.) Throw in Margot Robbie at her most committed and the resulting mix is combustible in a good way. But, as was the case with Saving Private Ryan , when a film starts out at such an unforgettable pinnacle, there’s nowhere to go but down, and there are times during the course of Babylon when the descent is rocky.

The movie loosely follows three characters across the span of about six years (from 1926-1932) as they navigate the changing currents of Hollywood. When the movie opens, Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) and Manny Torres (Diego Calva) are new in town – hopeful nobodies with aspirations of entering the movie business. Manny wants nothing more than to work on a set and Nellie sees herself on the screen (“It's written in the stars, I am a star.”) Then there’s Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), MGM’s biggest earner who has a legion of fans to go along with an ever-increasing roster of ex-wives. After the big party that opens the movie, introduces most of the participants, and sets the stage for what is to come, Nellie gets her big break and Manny happens to be in the right place at the right time when he is tasked with helping a passed-out Jack get home safely.

Pacing is an issue with Babylon – a not-unexpected occurrence considering the length. One reason why long movies (pretty much anything exceeding 150 minutes) used to have intermissions was to smooth out such issues. By not providing a break, the narrative shoulders the burden of keeping the viewer engaged over a 3+ hour period – something it’s not capable of doing with consistency. The story bogs down during the third hour and Chazelle has difficulties figuring out the appropriate ending. In at least one of the three main storylines, he fumbles the ball. In another, the denouement is protracted, including an epilogue set in 1952 that adds little. He then embarks on a weird salute to 20 th century cinema that belongs in another movie.

Baked into Babylon ’s DNA is the 1952 classic musical Singin’ in the Rain . Although that movie was made two decades after the events of this one, Chazelle postulates that the story was based on the lives of his (fictional) characters. Clips from Singin’ in the Rain are included to emphasize the connection.

Babylon is uneven, to be sure, but any missteps are more than compensated for by the exultation derived from the moments of frenetic exuberance that have become Chazelle’s bread-and-butter since he exploded on the scene with Whiplash and took La La Land to the brink of an Oscar victory.

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Common Sense Media Review

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

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…

Why Age 17+?

Several scenes of people engaging in graphic simulated sexual acts in semi-publi

Extremely strong, constant language includes countless uses of "f--k," plus "s--

Frequent use/overuse of alcohol and drugs, as well as cigarette smoking. Several

Several characters die by suicide, violence, overdose. One character shoots hims

The studio names are real, as are several landmarks (restaurant and hotels) and

Any Positive Content?

The movie is a tribute to the idea that movies (and art) last forever, even if e

Lots of morally ambiguous characters. Manny has a kind heart and helps several p

Among principal cast, two are men of color: Manny (Diego Calva) is Mexican and S

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.

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.

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.

Products & Purchases

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

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.

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

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid 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 - Golden Globe Award Winner
• Last updated : June 20, 2024

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.

Suggest an Update

What to watch next.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Singin' in the Rain

L.A. Confidential

Drama movies that tug at the heartstrings, best epic movies, related topics.

• Music and Sing-Along

Want suggestions based on your streaming services? Get personalized recommendations

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

What Rotten Tomatoes Reviews Are Saying About Babylon

Some may argue that we are living in an age of the "critic-proof" blockbuster, but with an auteur-driven project like Damien Chazelle's upcoming old Hollywood epic "Babylon," prospective viewers might be particularly attuned to what the film critic crowd has to say about the film.

"Babylon" has an expansive ensemble cast, led by Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, and bolstered by such ringers as Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, Lukas Haas, Tobey Maguire, Olivia Wilde, Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist and occasional actor Flea, Jeff Garlin, Eric Roberts, and many more. It has an expansive runtime to go with it, clocking in at three hours and eight minutes – another factor that might have indecisive viewers seeking critical guidance.

So, is "Babylon" another great Hollywood myth about itself in the tradition of "Sunset Blvd," "Singin' in the Rain," or "The Bad and the Beautiful"? Or is it more of a throwback to bloated, out-of-control epics like "Cleopatra" or "Doctor Dolittle"? Here's what film critics who have already filed their takes on the movie, set to open wide on the upcoming holiday weekend, had to say.

The film currently has a respectable Tomatometer score

If you've been looking forward to catching "Babylon" in theaters (three-hour runtime and all), you'll be pleased to know that with 49 reviews and counting on Rotten Tomatoes , critical response to the film is much more positive than negative, with a Tomatometer score of 71 percent as of this writing.

Beth Webb of Empire Online describes the film as "[a] daring, formally audacious yet messy ode to cinema from one of the most enterprising filmmakers working today. Bravura and baffling in equal measure" in her review, which awards the film three out of five stars.

That kind of mixed praise seems to be something of a motif, at least in the reviews of "Babylon" that have made it online so far. Moira MacDonald of the Seattle Times is even more ambivalent, admitting "I can't say I truly enjoyed watching 'Babylon,' or that I'd ever want to see it again, but I definitely haven't stopped thinking about it since screening it," an assessment that will either encourage or discourage you from giving the movie a try, depending on what type of moviegoer you are.

But Edward Douglas of The Weekend Warrior is unreservedly enthusiastic in his review. "Damien Chazelle's tribute to Old Hollywood is absolutely nuts in the best possible way," Douglas says.

But of course, when even a movie's positive reviews seem a little exasperated by a movie, you can expect a few pans as well.

Not all critics have been enthusiastic

Interestingly, some of the more negative reviews of "Babylon" seen on Rotten Tomatoes seem to paint a similar picture of the movie. Kristy Puchko of Mashable calls it "a ghastly, sticky, indulgent mess of a movie, slinging shock value in lieu of anything interesting to say," while Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair says "[i]t begins to feel, as 'Babylon' stretches out across three hours and eight minutes, that Chazelle has no clear idea where all of this is going."

At Cup of Soul, Kathia Woods compares "Babylon" to other Hollywood auto-epics, and finds it lacking by comparison: "Many films have been made about the beginnings of the film industry, and the majority of them have been informative and entertaining, but 'Babylon' is not one of them."

It appears that the one word everyone can agree on to describe "Babylon" would likely be "polarizing," and it will be interesting to see how its Tomatometer score holds up as more and more reviews come in. And its audience score, which will probably start racking up votes in the near future, will be interesting to watch as well.

You'll be able to make your own decision about the film's artistic value when "Babylon" opens wide in the US on December 23, 2022.

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Babylon film review — Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie star in ambitious ode to Hollywood

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‘drive: steelbook edition’ 4k ultra hd movie review.

Long before being the extreme “Fall Guy” earlier this year, Ryan Gosling was a brooding stuntman in Danish film director Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 action drama Drive (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, rated R, 100 minutes, 2:39:1 aspect ratio, $45.99) that now debuts to American audiences in the 4K disc format and celebrated in a limited SteelBook edition.

Mr. Gosling plays a professional stuntman simply known as “The Driver” who occasionally moonlights as a getaway driver for heists.

After meeting neighbor Irene Gabriel (Carey Mulligan) and her son Benicio (Kaden Leos), he begins a flirty relationship with her until her husband, Standard (Oscar Isaac), gets released from prison.

Standard quickly gets beaten up and forced by a mob boss to rob a pawnshop of $1 million as payback for his protection in prison.

The Driver agrees to help him out, but the job goes horribly wrong, and the stuntman gets pulled into a deadly double cross that also threatens his life and his new friends as he tries to return the money.

The film offers plenty of nail munching and some heart pounding as The Driver, through whatever gruesomely violent means necessary, tries to extricate himself from the dilemma.

Mr. Gosling consumes the role of a daring, calculated and methodical human with a brutal psychotic streak. His performance is richly supplemented by Brian Cranston as his handler and auto shop owner Shannon, and Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman as a team of nasty mobsters.

And, equally impressive as the cast and narrative, the first 10 minutes of the film offer a clinic on shooting a stealthy vehicle chase through the Los Angeles streets at night as The Driver ducks police cars and even a helicopter spotlight.

4K in action: The welcome ultra-high definition presentation, approved by the director, allows for even a crisper look at Mr. Winding’s neon and noirish visual love letter to driving through a nighttime Los Angeles complete with numerous panoramic and overhead shots of the illuminated city skyline.

Viewers will also appreciate exploring the city and its outskirts in detailed and color-balanced day or night scenes with recognizable moments at MacArthur Park, Pacific Coast Highway, Echo Park and a famed concrete bed of the Los Angeles River.

Unwelcomed to the 4K release is the uptick in detail to the occasional bloody violent scenes, including a human head getting stomped, crushed to the point that it will make viewers wince.

Best extras: The 4K disc contains a new, much-appreciated featurette offering 13 minutes of memories with writer Hossein Amini, editor Matthew Newman, actors Christina Hendricks (who played criminal accomplice Blanche) and Mr. Perlman and composer Cliff Martinez.

Move to the include Blu-ray version of the film to find extras mirrored from the 2012 high definition release.

They are led by a 25-minute documentary focused heavily on the director and his thoughts on the origins and creation of the film as well as his discussing of the actors, key crew members and musical score.

An additional four featurettes (roughly 30 minutes in total) cover the director, the development of the characters, the relationship between The Driver and Irene, and a brief breakdown on creating the three main chase sequences.

Also, Sony tempts home entertainment collectors with an eye-popping SteelBook for “Drive.”

The front cover is a colorful illustration of a profile view of The Driver above the Los Angeles skyline surrounded by palm trees, all highlighted in neon pinks and blues with also an upper-body version of him, in the famed scorpion jacket, walking toward a car.

The back cover offers a collage of The Driver looking over his shoulder in a torso profile, again wearing his jacket with the pink scorpion design, and spotlighted above a car driving in the Los Angeles river.

The interior delivers a full-spread color photo of the stuntman leaning against his car looking toward a building on a Los Angeles street.

• Joseph Szadkowski can be reached at [email protected] .

Copyright © 2024 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission .

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