Chaotic, decadent, and packed to the gills with movie-making madness, this is a love-or-hate viewing experience.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 18, 2024

Attempts to out-Fellini Fellini are regrettable and for much of its length Babylon is an unsubtle and indigestible mess so that despite all the talent involved and the fascinating subject matter, it must be seen as something of a disaster.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jan 27, 2023

Subtle it is not. Nor is it good.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 23, 2023

Chazelle’s film commemorates the era’s hubris as it indulges in a bit of its own. This is how a world ends. Not with a whimper but a great deal of banging, baby. And vomiting. And snorting.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 21, 2023

Babylon is a disaster of biblical proportions, precisely because it had so much potential.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Jan 20, 2023

Babylon is not so much a film of two halves, but a third of a brilliant movie and two hours of unmitigated mess and chaos.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 20, 2023

In the end, Chazelle does evoke the elegiac mood he’s after, finishing with a wistful meditation on the evanescence of fame and the fragility of those who fail to survive its demands.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 20, 2023

If the running time is a tribute to 1920s excess, Chazelle should have listened harder to his old ghosts. Kid, you’re meant to leave ’em wanting more.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 19, 2023

I didn't buy one second of it, for one moment.

| Jan 18, 2023

I absolutely loved it... What [Damien Chazelle] does that I love is tell the story in such an exaggerated, maniacal fashion that it feels truer than it's ever felt before.

| Jan 18, 2023

For a director skilled at mounting set-pieces, Chazelle is extraordinarily duff at managing structure on a larger scale: perhaps those talents don’t sit well together. Babylon has spectacular scenes yet is hopelessly unwieldy as a whole.

| Jan 17, 2023

Under Chazelle’s bruised showman sensibility, to love something means honestly seeing all the ways in which it is broken and still hearing violins when you look at it anyway.

| Dec 29, 2022

One of the year’s richest and most ambitious films.

| Dec 28, 2022

Chazelle is trying to make a point with all the excess... I’m not sure if I agree or if I was simply beaten into submission after more than three hours, but Babylon is the kind of grandiose folly that at least gives the viewer a big old mess to chew on.

| Dec 28, 2022

Its panache begins to feel more like the idea of panache -- like a bodysnatcher lurking under a skin of actual cinematic style, all empty gestures and wiry nothingness. The disappointment is that the movie wields so much and achieves so relatively little.

| Dec 28, 2022

Despite a stellar cast and showy moments (given who’s involved how could there not be?), the writer-director’s sprawling, messy, three-hour-plus endurance test isn’t ready for its closeup.

| Dec 28, 2022

Babylon is a profoundly humanist film, mourning the tragedies that litter Hollywood histories. But it’s also a worshipful film, one that gladly buys into the dream, the spell, the mystery of it all.

| Dec 27, 2022

The performances are fun, the music raucous, the costumes glorious. And yet, the entire visual feast of a movie recalls the excessive party scene in Baz Luhrmann's overstuffed The Great Gatsby, beautiful and damned.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 27, 2022

It is too much and often, especially in call-outs to "Singin' In The Rain," a little on the nose. It is also clearly heartfelt and that counts.

| Dec 26, 2022

I didn’t love Babylon but I can’t condemn it either. How could I when its finale is a love letter to movies and the way they can lift our spirits? Any filmmaker who strives for that shouldn’t be dismissed, even if he made us sit still for over three hours

| Dec 24, 2022