babylon

  “Babylon” — Film Review Like La La Land before it, Damien Chazelle puts Hollywood at the forefront of his latest film, Babylon . It’s an audacious, sprawling three-hour ode to cinema and Hollywood during the beginning of its supposed Golden Age. Babylon begins on the precipice of the “talkies,” the fundamental shift in filmmaking from a silent artform to something more akin to what we now know as a movie. The film’s focus is on two dreamers, Nellie (Margot Robbie) and Manuel (Diego Calva), who are desperate to become involved in movie-making. Their quest for fame and fortune introduces them to Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), a silent film star, and Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) and Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), two regulars in the Los Angeles party scene. Babylon is by far the most ambitious of all Chazelle’s movies. It takes a certain amount of confidence to ask for three hours of a viewer’s time and to believe that the story you’re telling is deserving of that time. If La La L...