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What to Know

Babylon 's overwhelming muchness is exhausting, but much like the industry it honors, its well-acted, well-crafted glitz and glamour can often be an effective distraction.

Babylon has some entertaining moments and its ambition is impressive, but the movie's chaotic and disjointed execution makes it difficult to really enjoy.

Critics Reviews

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Damien Chazelle

Jack Conrad

Margot Robbie

Nellie LaRoy

Diego Calva

Manny Torres

Elinor St. John

Jovan Adepo

Sidney Palmer

Movie Clips

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: Damien Chazelle’s debauched masterpiece has orgies, elephants, spanking and Margot Robbie

Tailor-made to divide audiences, this is the ‘la la land’ director’s rocket-powered rebuke to claims he’s too sentimental, subscribe to independent premium to bookmark this article.

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Babylon is Damien Chazelle ’s rocket-powered dive into the early days of Hollywood, decorated with orgies, elephant faeces and cocaine. There is spanking. Bacchanalian dancing. Chairs tossed through windows. And that’s all in the first 15 minutes. La La Land , Chazelle’s Oscar-winning, Bambi-eyed paen to artists, poets and the “fools that dream”, would drop dead from fright if it ever came face-to-face with it.

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. This was a frontier time, where the art of cinema was built from the ground up with zero rules and very little restraint. It was a place where the soul-sick and hungry could reinvent themselves, but not without considerable personal cost.

We enter this world through the eyes of two such ravenous individuals, actress Nellie LaRoy ( Margot Robbie ) and film assistant Manny Torres (Diego Calva). Both are fictional amalgamations of real-life figures, as almost all the characters of Babylon are. Nellie combines aspects of Clara Bow, Joan Crawford, Jeanne Eagels, and Alma Rubens. The Mexican-American Manny is a stand-in for the many immigrants who carved out spaces for themselves within the industry.

The duo intertwine not only romantically, but spiritually, too – twinned stars on a rapid-fire ascent. Calva wears a poet’s heart on his sleeve, and beautifully so, while Robbie’s feral performance feels extracted from some higher plane of existence. The film may have an extensive ensemble cast, but it’s Robbie who funnels the true spirit of Babylon . She wrestles with (literal and metaphorical) snakes and bids adieu to polite company with the killer line: “I’m gonna go stick some coke up my p****”.

The film’s vision of the Twenties may be propelled to the very border of believability, but it’s rarely inauthentic. This is a work of studious imagination. Justin Hurwitz’s hip-shaking, feet-stomping jazz score is pulled right from the underground music scene of early Los Angeles. When a newly famous Nellie steps out in a blue-sequinned, skimpy two-piece, she may seem ready to party down at Studio 54 decades later, but Mary Zophres’s costume work is extrapolated directly from the daring looks already sported by Clara Bow and her ilk. Nellie’s hair and makeup, by Jaime Leigh McIntosh and Heba Thorisdottir, were partially inspired by mugshots from the era.

But it’d be a mistake to believe that Babylon presents excess merely for excess’s sake. These extremities call to mind F Scott Fitzgerald’s portrait of the Jazz Age, in which material splendour was the gauzy curtain pulled across the corruption and carelessness beneath. Chazelle’s film is really about the cost of immortality – what it takes to achieve that one perfect moment, like the single tear Nellie conjures in her first on-camera role.

Reinvention is a playground to some, like established star Jack Conrad ( Brad Pitt , whose presence is coloured by the recent accusations of domestic violence by ex-wife Angelina Jolie, which he denies). He gets to dip his toe in a little white exoticism by painting himself as an Italian lover. But it’s a stark contrast to singer Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), who must carefully cultivate a kind of sensual Orientalism whenever she enters white spaces. Or Black trumpet player Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), who’s offered a chance at screen stardom – in the film’s starkest, most painful scene – only if he darkens his skin in order to comply with the industry’s racist preconceptions. In Babylon, you have to stand out to be seen, but only as long as it doesn’t upend social norms.

The film, which opens in 1926, frames Hollywood’s transition into the sound era as one of creative catastrophe. Directors become confined to poky soundstages. Actors must hit their marks in order to be heard by the microphones. A new conservative moral code starts to take hold as the industry becomes increasingly corporatised. Chazelle draws a throughline from here to the most famous depiction of the silent era on film, 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain , and then onwards into the modern era – how he achieves it feels too wondrous and surprising to spoil here. The film then closes on a character’s silent tears. Are they crying at the transcendent beauty of it all? Or at the pain suffered in its creation? Chazelle, in his ultimate provocation, leaves the answer unclear.

Dir: Damien Chazelle. Starring: Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, Tobey Maguire. 18, 189 minutes.

‘Babylon’ is in cinemas on 20 January

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