Sunset Boulevard is every bit as relevant as when it first premiered in 1950, due to Wilder's compelling directing as well as writing.

| Dec 5, 2024

Its performances, music, cinematography and direction continue to awe-inspire even seventy three years after its release.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 19, 2024

Sunset Boulevard is the most intelligent film to come out of Hollywood for years : lest the idea of intelligence in the cinema should lack allure, let me say that it is also one of the most exciting.

| Oct 3, 2023

Billy Wilder’s chillingly cold-blooded satire of Hollywood is one of his finest films — and indeed arguably one of the greatest movies of the period.

| Jun 27, 2023

... the blackest of Hollywood’s self-portraits is an old dark house of a ghost story inhabited by the living shadows of its discarded stars.

| Apr 14, 2023

Thematically, Sunset Boulevard is depressing fiction, but it isn't commonplace, and in its incidental realism, it has a peculiar, ingrown integrity. And for Miss Swanson, of course, it constitutes a veritable triumph.

| Aug 16, 2022

Disturbing yet bitterly funny, Sunset Blvd. stands as perhaps the greatest of all films about Hollywood.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 14, 2022

My nomination for the best movie of the year so far is Sunset Boulevard, starring Gloria Swanson and William Holden. Swanson's comeback portrayal of an aging silent motion picture star who won't face her lost fame and lost youth is unbearably real.

| Dec 15, 2021

Sunset Boulevard is like no other picture that was ever made. They threw away all the old patterns when they made this one.

| Oct 11, 2021

Smashing drama of the old-fashioned kind, plus elegant perceptive characterization of the modern school, combined to make Sunset Boulevard one of the greatest films of the decade.

| Oct 11, 2021

Division of honors goes to Miss Swanson and Holden. They are superb. But the lady deserves the lion's share of the laurels.

| Oct 11, 2021

It is Hollywood craftsmanship at its smartest and at just about its best, and it is hard to find better craftsmanship than that, at this time, in any art or country.

| Oct 11, 2021

The acting is very good, but outstanding is the exceedingly fine performance of Gloria Swanson, who is as glamorous as ever.

| Oct 11, 2021

It takes you behind the scenes in the celluloid city and into the hearts of those who make the pictures.

| Oct 11, 2021

The direction is by Billy Wilder who did Lost Weekend, and it is superb -- detailed, evocative and absorbing. Hollywood, with its mania for success is sardonically observed and there are a hundred witty touches to enliven the general atmosphere of decay.

| Oct 11, 2021

The photography is outstanding and some of the dialogue suggests that unlike Narcissus, Hollywood has not fallen completely in love with its own reflection.

| Oct 11, 2021

Hollywood has the rare courage to pull the wool from its own eyes in Sunset Boulevard.

| Oct 11, 2021

Not in many a year has so large a cast and such extravagant production been utilized to tell a story of such dazzling drama that one forgets its few minor flaws.

| Oct 11, 2021

Quibbles about plausibility aside, the characters come to life within their narrow, melodramatic framework.

| Oct 11, 2021

As Norma Desmond, silent screen queen living in luxurious seclusion and dreaming of a comeback, Gloria gives a terrific performance.

| Original Score: 2.5/3 | Oct 11, 2021