Film & Television
John Maguire: Exhausting, over-the-top Hollywood blowout bedazzles and bores by turns
Damien Chazelle’s Babylon mash up follows imagined and real-life figures of the 1920s as they try to negotiate the film industry’s transition from silent films to sound
What to make of Damien Chazelle’s fourth feature film, Babylon? It’s a shambles; a sprawling, lurid, self-indulgent, overly-long, cringingly earnest mess of half-formed ideas, cardboard characters and gruesome grotesques. But it is also an occasionally mesmerising, dazzlingly staged and breathlessly energetic celebration of the hedonistic paradise that was Hollywood in the 1920s that, over the course of three bumpy hours, drags us through 30 years of cinema history whether we like it or not.
Its ...