| Paramount Pictures | Release Date: December 23, 2022 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
33
Mixed:
25
Negative:
5
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Critic Reviews
Dec 16, 2022
Babylon is a movie that absolutely shouldn’t work, but objectively does, three hours and nine minutes that didn’t bore me for a single second. Instead, it sails, on the crest of a glorious wave of blood, sweat, tears, tits, shit, vomit, and piss. Damien Chazelle elevates Cinema by dragging it back to the gutter.
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Dec 19, 2022
The kind of full-throated, barrel-chested, more-more-more exercise in gusto and ambition that comes around once a decade, Babylon might either take Chazelle’s impressive career to new heights, or sink it to the bottom of the La Brea Tar Pits. Either way, the filmmaker deserves attention for throwing his entire self into making a delirious, lurid and sprawling concoction whose magnificent reach just about meets its grasp.
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Dec 28, 2022
In keeping with the exuberance of early Hollywood, Mr. Chazelle and his creative team—Linus Sandgren’s cinematography, Florencia Martin’s production design and Mary Zophres’s costumes all have to be dazzling to maintain Mr. Chazelle’s vision, and they are—create the feeling of a madcap, whirling ride.
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Dec 21, 2022
As outrageous and fun as Babylon can be, it feels even more self-indulgent than happy hour on Mardi Gras. Granted, excess is the point of it all. Even the film’s running time, at a bladder-busting 3 hours 9 minutes, tests limits. Making matters worse is that for most of the film’s first half, it’s all setting and no story. And, yet, I think I love it.
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Dec 19, 2022
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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The Film StageDec 16, 2022
Babylon is a brash, bombastic, unwieldy comic opera conveyed with enough bad taste and directorial panache that it—refreshingly—registers as a refutation of the well-mannered prestige drama to which these kinds of nostalgic odes often conform. And while there’s a touch of wistfulness in regards to the communal power of big-screen cinema, the film is more defined by an acidic unsentimentality, both when it comes to its characters and the precarious world they inhabit.
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IndieWireDec 16, 2022
It reminds us the movies have been dying for more than 100 years, and then — through its heart-bursting, endearingly galaxy-brained prayer of a finale — interprets that as uplifting proof they’ll actually live forever. It just doesn’t have any idea how the movies will do it, or where the hell they might go from here.
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Jan 2, 2023
Artistically, what Babylon adds to the classic Hollywood that it celebrates is sex and nudity, drugs and violence, a more diverse cast, and a batch of kitchen-sink chaos that replaces the whys and wherefores of coherent thought with the exhortation to buy a ticket, cast one’s eyes up to the screen, and worship in the dark.
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RogerEbert.comDec 19, 2022
Dec 16, 2022
It would be too dismissive to call Babylon—Damien Chazelle’s incessantly bravura period piece set during Hollywood’s transition to the sound era—a “giant swing at mediocrity” (to borrow a phrase the silent star played by Brad Pitt uses to describe one of his films). Babylon is better than that. But the swing still registers more strongly than the results.
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Dec 22, 2022
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.
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The GuardianDec 16, 2022
Babylon is a film that’s thinking big, aiming big, acting big: but feeling medium, and finally ordering us to care about the celluloid magic, a secondary emotional response which should be happening without any explicit instruction. Yet it’s always a pleasure to be in the presence of such black-belt movie stars as Pitt and Robbie and there is something funny in Babylon’s wild, event-movie gigantism.
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Jan 2, 2023
Emma Stone, in Chazelle’s “La La Land” (2016), was granted a beautiful lull in which to deliver her saddest song, but Margot Robbie has no such chance to breathe. Her performance isn’t over the top, but her character, as conceived and written, most definitely is, and she has no option but to follow suit. Such is Babylon. It goes nowhere, in a mad rush.
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Dec 23, 2022
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, with everything synced to the same monotonous, accelerated pace. This hyperventilated quality initially serves the story and Chazelle’s concept of the era’s delirious excess, but the lack of modulation rapidly becomes enervating. After a while, it feels punishing.
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Dec 23, 2022
Dec 21, 2022
Despite some admittedly impressive production design and the star-power presence of Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, Babylon comes across as a hard-R cartoon that will have you feeling like you need to take a shower once it finally collapses at the finish line with a faux-sentimental, movie-within-the-movie ending that rings hollow.
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Dec 20, 2022
Dec 16, 2022
Dec 16, 2022
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.
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Dec 20, 2022The PlaylistDec 16, 2022
Dec 16, 2022
Babylon isn’t a film made with love, or even with any degree of exactitude; it pretends to be a movie about “loving movies,” but more than anything else, it seeks to reflect glory on its creator. It advertises its alleged extravagance and glamour, loud and hard, but only comes off looking tinny and cheap.
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