‘Babylon’ Review: Damien Chazelle’s Latest Is An Overlong, Overstuffed, Derivative Mess

Melting away the winter blues. Brad Pitt and new flame Ines de Ramon soaked up the sun on a New Year’s Eve vacation amid their budding romance.

EXCLUSIVE: Damien Chazelle will be recognized with the Advanced Imaging Society’s Gene Kelly Visionary Award at the 13th annual Lumiere Awards, taking place at The Beverly Hills Hotel on February 10. 

in 2022, please. These days, Brad Pitt is dating jewelry executive Ines de Ramon, and the couple rang in 2023 together on a trip south of the border, People reports. , 59, and de Ramon, 32, celebrated New Year's Eve in Mexico's Baja peninsula, a popular tourist destination. “They are dating and having fun,” a source, who is keeping it vague, told .

It’s official: Damien Chazelle‘s “Babylon” is a box office bomb, and one of the biggest bombs of 2022, to be precise. The film made only $5.3 million over the four-day holiday weekend off a budget of $80 million.

When it was originally announced, Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” seemed like a no-brainer, Oscar favorite. An epic tale of Old Hollywood, written and directed by the filmmaker behind “Whiplash,” “La La Land,” and “First Man.” That’s such an easy sell.

When it was originally announced, Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” seemed like a no-brainer, Oscar favorite. An epic tale of Old Hollywood, written and directed by the filmmaker behind “Whiplash,” “La La Land,” and “First Man.” That’s such an easy sell.

Damien Chazelle’s$80M 1920s-set Hollywood epic Babylon went up in a blaze of fire at the domestic box office this past weekend with an awful $5.3M 4-day start.

How do you know, without seeing the film, that “Babylon” is full of chaos and debauchery? Well, you can read all of the early reviews, which use the term “cocaine-fueled” quite a bit, or you can watch the new trailers for the film. One is called the “naughty” trailer.

2ND UPDATE, 9:20 AM: Paramount has released a pair of new trailers for Babylon — one deemed “naughty” and the other “nice.” Watch them here, and see the first trailer for Damien Chazelle’s early- Hollywood extravaganza starring Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt farther below.

How do you know, without seeing the film, that “Babylon” is full of chaos and debauchery? Well, you can read all of the early reviews, which use the term “cocaine-fueled” quite a bit, or you can watch the new trailers for the film. One is called the “naughty” trailer.

attended the at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, California. Wilde stars in the A-list heavy ensemble cast of Damien Chazelle's Old Hollywood drama alongside , , , and more.For the red carpet event, Wilde wore a black blazer dress with a floral broach detail and an unexpected sheer ruffled skirt. She paired the look with a simple pair of strappy heels, keeping her hair down in loose waves and going for a . Olivia Wilde attends a "Babylon" screening on December 15, 2022.This is the second time this month that Olivia Wilde has added a goth twist to 2022's biggest red carpet trend.

something, and by the end of the three hours and eight minutes of Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon,” viewers will have been exposed to any number of bodily secretions, including urine, vomit and tears.The tears come at the film’s climax, no doubt in the hopes that the audience will follow suit, but of all the aforementioned emittances, they feel the least organic to this bloated, hyperbolized and ultimately dreary extravaganza of decadence and nostalgia.Both a valentine and a poison-pen letter to the American film industry in its infancy, “Babylon” aspires to the grandiosity of “The Last Tycoon” and “The Day of the Locust,” though it more often recalls Ryan Murphy’s embarrassing and wildly ahistorical “Hollywood” miniseries.The film opens with a seemingly endless Hollywood party – it’s the 1920s, and Bel Air is still a nondescript, undeveloped hillside – where we will meet most of the major players: Hero and audience surrogate Manuel Torres (Diego Calva, “Narcos: Mexico”), one of the unfortunate handlers of the incontinent pachyderm, has dreams and ambitions in the nascent film industry. Screen king Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) loves women and booze, not necessarily in that order.

After enormous success and Oscars for films ranging from Whiplash to La La Land to First Man Director/Writer Damien Chazelle returned to an early dream project first envisioned 15 years ago, a no-holds barred look at early Hollywood, a time when not only movies were transitioning from silent to sound, but Los Angeles itself was booming from desert to bulging metropolis. People were caught up in a turbulent time of change, and it didn’t always work out for some. As witnessed in the resulting film and years of meticulous research, Babylon is a sight to behold, a decadent, free wheeling, at times even poignant look at a series of dreamers, stars, fringe players, and all who wanted a piece of a world that felt out of control, uninhibited, and full of promise – and downfall.