The Lesson of ‘Babylon’: Every Great Filmmaker Has to Fall on Their Face Once and Learn From It

Watching Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon,” in all its superficially titillating, occasionally exciting and mostly exhausting wretched excess (the orgies, the elephant poop, the contempo actors overdoing it as dawn-of-cinema stars, the general air of cynical performative effrontery), I thought to myself: We’ve been here before, so many times. You sit down to watch a movie by […]