Critics reviews

Tailor-made to divide audiences, this debauched drama – and a clear repudiation to those who once accused Chazelle of being too sentimental a director – puts a bullet in the head of any notion that the film industry’s silent era was ever austere or quaint.

Babylon is a film that’s thinking big, aiming big, acting big – but feeling small, and finally ordering us to care about the celluloid magic, a secondary emotional response that should be happening without any explicit instruction.

Frenetic as Babylon is, Chazelle himself remains clear-eyed. His view of Hollywood is romantic but not romanticized, a flaws-and-all look back at a party that was bound to end and be completely incapable of handling the crash. But oh, what a swell party it is.

In Babylon, [Chazelle's] affection for the fame-seeking business he works in has only curdled further, but his passion for film as a medium hasn’t diminished in the slightest. The subsequent raging contrast between these two notions is fascinating to watch.

Babylon is an emotionally cryptic tribute to Hollywood and its movies that’s too much of a tribute and not enough of an actual, thriving movie. It’s good when it’s showing off; when it isn’t, it doesn’t seem to know what to do... The movie should hit harder because a prurient party-fest with dark undertones of creeping irrelevance and impermanence seems ready-made to thrill us, if not move us.

Weeks after I saw it, I cannot quite decide if Babylon is a good film. But I’m entranced, and moved, and frustrated, and transported — which is what Hollywood has built its business on accomplishing from the very beginning.

It’s the movie’s good anecdotes, rather than any dramatic arc, that make “Babylon” engaging... It also takes such lore at face value, befitting the aura of legend that enhances both real-life incidents from classic Hollywood and its tall tales; these stories were born to be chazelled.

Despite the relentless churn on set and after hours, the movie is strangely juiceless. I don’t simply mean that it’s unsexy (which it is), but that there’s so little life in the movie, despite all the frantic action. There isn’t much going on other than the spectacle of its busily spinning parts, which might be tolerable if the first two hours weren’t so unrelievedly unmodulated... After a while, it feels punishing.

[Chazelle is] far too interested in the logistics of moviemaking to capture the emotional surge or exceptionable eroticism that defined not just Hollywood’s incandescent silent era but films at their most powerful.

What a sprawling, grotesque, self-indulgent, wretched, occasionally mesmerizing but ultimately over-the-top mess we have in Damien Chazelle’s Hollywood epic “Babylon” ... a flashy, sometimes dazzling but curiously uninvolving and often nauseatingly gross spectacle.

For a director known for more tasteful and sentimental excursions, “Babylon” is a lurid descent into debauchery. Sometimes it’s an unnatural fit. It’s too showy and too long. But Chazelle’s film is something to reckon with, and the kind of ambitious swing that a young director of talent deserves credit for daring.

[A] wild and pungent cinematic bacchanal... 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.