Popular reviews

• 

  Review by Colin the dude ★★★★½ 10

  It almost feels like even back then, Douglas was looking at his peers thinking, "I'm outlasting every last one of you pinheads. I'm hitting 100. I will be the oldest living legend someday."

• 

  Review by Janica ★★★★ 2

  On the one hand, The Bad and the Beautiful is the trashiest instance of 1950s Hollywood self-reflexivity, exuding gossip, revelling in scandal, and begging the audience to identify the various inspirations for actress Georgia Lorrison (Lana Turner), screenwriter James Lee Bartlow (Dick Powell), director Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan), and tyrannical producer Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas), around whom they are clustered— if only because all four play slightly parodic versions of themselves. Yet, despite never quite achieving the grittiness of Sunset Boulevard or In A Lonely Place, Minelli manages to provide a series of relatively realistic insights into life behind the camera, particularly in terms of the complicated, frequently homosocial relationship between director, producer and executive producer, as well as the manner in which these…

• 

  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★★ 27

  Movies are made on emotion, but Hollywood consumes only a cannibalistic diet of its own hatred. Any love in the mix, comes up only as a vomit of bile. 

  Slammed between two bright musical comedy masterpieces; “American in Paris” and “Band Wagon,” Vincente Minnelli created “The Bad and the Beautiful,” one of the most vitriolic and self-loathing films ever made about filmmaking. 

  “Bad” is tale told in three part flashback; the account of Kirk Douglas as an ambitious producer who destroyed three relationships along with three lives, of the three people he once held most dear. 

  Douglas, ever at his best when he is playing the worst of humanity, is also at his most frustratingly manipulative in the part of…

• 

  Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★★ 7

  "Don't worry. Some of the best movies are made by people working together who hate each other's guts."

  A big studio exec calls a writer, a director, and an actor into his office to pitch them a gig with a big producer they all hate. The director had his pet project, his cinematic baby, stolen out from under him; the actor was negged into a romance with him, after which he cheated on her; the writer's wife died on his watch, and he had his Hollywood breakout script overtaken and driven into the ground. "But, no!" the exec tells them. "Look closer! Can't you see how all these awful experiences brought you to where you are today?"

  The thesis here…

• 

  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★½ 2

  Hollywood, while it was at its pinnacle, gets an uncomplimentary portrayal in this Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film which Vincente Minnelli directs with natural exquisiteness. Kirk Douglas displays his charismatic charm as well as his range as in actor in his role as independent film producer Jonathan Shields, who possesses an antagonistic necessity for external sources in nourishing his self-esteem arising from a toxic narcissism for his deceased father, a notorious former head of a movie studio. Shields ultimately pushes away those around him and the drama unravels through a series of flashbacks after a screenwriter, director and movie star, who all feel emotionally wounded by Shields, are collected together in the office of a movie producer to talk on the phone to…

• 

  Review by Jordan Horowitz ★★★★★ 2

  An epic masterpiece every time. The best movie about movies I have ever seen. Long live producers.

• 

  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★★ 1

  Hollywood eats itself.

  This is the quintessential film of the classical era; meanness hidden under pettiness disguised by ugliness in all characters involved. But somehow from all of that  - glamour and beauty. 

  ‘Bad and Beautiful’ is full of despicable characters behaving even worse than advertised. It also might be the best way of reckoning with the legacy of Old Hollywood. Was it the evil of certain individuals or the malfeasance of the entire studio system that caused irreparable psychological and physical destruction to so many?

• 

  Review by eely 🍂 ★★★

  “there are no great men, buster. there’s only men.”

  georgia smoking her cigarette in that meeting with her heavy lidded eyes the exact way jonathan taught her...i live for the subtlety!!!

• 

  Review by Josh Larsen ★★★★ 4

  The Bad and the Beautiful opens with a kiss—a kiss between two cameras. We’re on a Hollywood set, and we swoop in, via a crane shot, on an actress sprawled on a couch, just as a crane with a camera on it approaches the actress from the other side. The two cameras converge on the woman, but they’re really not concerned with her. The shared object of infatuation here is Hollywood itself.

  Full review here.

• 

  Review by sakana1 ★★★★½ 10

  The opening third of The Bad and the Beautiful is so thrilling and audacious that it nearly makes you laugh with delight. And Vincente Minnelli's direction of those thirty-ish minutes -- whether it's the sneaky seduction of his camera movements, the way he insists we watch Kirk Douglas tear up on camera, or the shamelessly romantic nature of the relationship between Jonathan Shields (Douglas) and Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan) -- is so confident and assured that it's immediately apparent we're in the hands of a master. It's all done with such wit and joy that we cannot help but get caught up in it -- not only in Minnelli's work, but in what Shields and Amiel are building together.

  The…

• 

  Review by Ben Reiss ★★★★★ 7

  A good friend of mine in sales always likes to say that the essence of sales is “aligning incentives”. I get his drift - it’s one thing to convince someone that they need to buy something, it’s another to convince someone that they need to buy something AND that buying something is going to help the seller achieve their goals. That said, the Jonathan Shields of The Bad and The Beautiful may be credited in his films as a producer but at his heart he is a salesman. 

  The Bad and The Beautiful charts the material rise and moral fall of producer Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) seen through the eyes of three people who worked with him. We begin the…

• 

  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★½ 1

  67/100

  Now that's how you begin a movie! Couldn't wait to find out how Douglas' big-time producer had alienated these three people, and while the broad strokes aren't hard to guess—disloyalty, corrosive ambition, seduced and abandoned, etc.—there's plenty to savor in the ugly details. Terrific dialogue, too, full of trenchant and widely applicable lines like "I'm flattered you want me and bitter you've got me." For some reason, the roman à clef aspect mostly escaped me, so I wasn't distracted by wondering whether Shields is meant to be Selznick (didn't even know about David O.'s dad, to be honest), or whether we're meant to perceive Georgia Lorrison as Minnelli's thinly veiled portrait of Judy Garland. Just played like a wholly…