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

Margot Robbie as Nellie LaRoy and Diego Calva as Manny Torres in Damien Chazelle’s Babylon from Paramount. Picture: Scott Garfield

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 ...