Watch Maps to the Stars For Free

Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Fresh and Exciting

Fantastic!

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

I haven't watched other movies by David Cronenberg but if people say that this one is the weakest one of his work then I have to watch more of his movies. This is a very bizarre look at Hollywood. Making the glamorous life look kind of miserable. The incest topic is pretty horrifying especially when we see how the characters are all dealing with it and the mental sickness that came with it.The cast is of very high class actors and they all do an amazing performance in the movie. Agatha Weiss is most impressive character and Mia Wasikowska does a great job portraying her with her vulnerability and mental problems. Julianne Moore also does an amazing job as an actress trying to make a comeback in a remake playing a role of her mother who molested her. Evan Bird does a very impressive performance for such a young actor portraying a teen star whose environment got him into being a nasty person and a drug abuser at a very young age yet we also see his pain that makes us feel for the young man.Glad I found this movie.

Daivd Cronenberg's 'Maps to the Stars' tells the convergent stories of several different characters in Hollywood: at first it appears as if this is one of those films about discrete lives that form a fine web of faint touches, but in fact it turns out that (most) of the characters have serious history, and are coming back together after events that have driven them apart. This reveal is quite well-plotted; the problem is that the characters are all mostly nasty (or at the very least weird), and moreover are so in a uniquely Hollywood way - you can believe there are such people in and around the movie business, but they're simply not the sort of people that most of us meet in our everyday lives. This makes it quite hard to sympathise with them, even if we can see the reason for their meanness and oddness. Cronenberg's movies can be considered cold in general, and although the charge isn't always justified, I watched this one very much from the outside. One thing it isn't, in spite of its billing as such, is a comedy.

Key Staff:'Maps to the Stars,' which released in 2014, is director David Cronenberg's latest feature film. I haven't seen any of Cronenberg's prior films, so I only have this film as reference when discussing him as a director and his artistic vision. The screenplay was penned by Bruce Wagner, who wrote and directed the 1998 film 'I'm Losing You.' The cinematography was handled by Peter Suschitzky, who has worked with Cronenberg before ('A History of Violence') as well as on 'Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.' The film's editor is Ronald Sanders, who also worked on 'A History of Violence' as well as the animated feature 'Coraline.' And the music was composed by Howard Shore, who is most known for his work on the 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy. Review:The film's narrative is loose, well suited for the psychological and thematic storytelling. Here, there isn't normal character archetypes or character arcs, such the hero's journey. Rather, the characters are all different windows from which we can gaze through to view the film's themes. One of these major themes is how scarred the cast of characters seem to be, haunted by their past. In fact, many of the characters are literally haunted by ghosts from their pasts, spirits who constantly remind the characters of their faults in past and present. More horrifying, some characters use their haunted pasts or the pain of others to full-fill their own desires. This is a fitting analogy for a film set in Hollywood, a place well known for full-filling the dreams of those willing to sell their bodies and souls. They want to get the part, they want to get high, they want to be sexually active, they want to be the center of attention. One character, played by Mia Wasikowska, is different as she is just as scarred on the outside as the inside, and she is seeking to make amends instead of selfish gain. However, all the characters eventually are their own undoing, destroyed by the truth they've been running from. The actors do a fine job, none stand out as particularly great or poor. Performances are cold when needed to present how the characters are self full-filling machines, and emotional when needed to observe the vulnerabilities of the characters. This dynamic works very well here, but isn't the best presentation of it I've seen in films either. The cinematography is rather exceptional and striking, being my favorite aspect of the film. Even more than the performances, the shots clearly highlight just how distant many of the characters are from one another, even when they are sitting next to each other. The characters are often shot in singles, which is especially noticeable during a board-room meeting with Hollywood executives. Rather than shoot the scene in a full, including all the characters in one shot and then cutting to closer shots when more dramatic content arises, the entire scene is shots and cuts of singles awkwardly speaking to one another. The editing is also great, leaving many horrific or tense moments to linger long enough to leave an impression, before cutting away to the next scene, implying that the characters have just "moved on" from said event. The musical score wasn't the most impressive, but it served best when further heightening the tension of the aforementioned horrific scenes. There is one scene in particular that should be highlighted as poor in an otherwise great film. Near the end of the film, one character is caught on fire and her husband attempts to put her out by pushing her in the pool. This is perfectly fine thematically, as death by fire and water is a common theme throughout, and I enjoyed the fact that the husband was so scared to get hurt by the fire that he takes his time go get a lawn chair and uses it to push her flaming body into the pool. However, what isn't admirable is the poor effects. The flames looked to be computer generated and uncanny. Also, the performance of the burning person isn't as horrific as it could have been, which is a fair criticism considering there is an extended scene where a character gets her head bashed in with a trophy. And the performance of the husband during this burning scene is also poor, almost comedic. This is a shame, as it happens near the end of the film, and I don't believe a humorous response is what was desired here.Verdict:'Maps to the Stars' is sexual, disgusting, insensitive, and brutally honest. But there is a melancholic beauty to it all. The film reveals the sick scars of glamorous or 'normal' life we tend to want to ignore, even if we suffer with them ourselves. The visual storytelling is superlative, the editing is spot-on, and the subject matter is thoughtful. On the whole, I highly recommend this film, particularly for film-buffs. I'm personally excited to view the rest of David Cornenberg's catalogue after watching this film.

I can't remember the last time I saw a look at the world of Hollywood and just downright ego as awful as Maps to the Stars. I mean that as a compliment though; this could go one of two ways quite possibly, as being just tawdry melodrama like a soap opera, or into such terrain that aside from the characters being unlikable (which is not an inherently bad thing) it becomes boring. The latter of these was a problem on David Cronenberg's previous film, Cosmopolis, where I didn't give a s*** about the characters even in the satirical setting. But what makes Maps to the Stars for me such a captivating experience is that these are people in some earth-bound reality, but they are for the most part consumed by their own sense of self-worth either due to their pasts and legacy in Hollywood (Julianne Moore's Havana with her deceased star mother; John Cusack as a best-selling kooky New-Age-like author), or those who are getting subsumed by it or those around (Evan Bird's young actor character Benjie, and his beleaguered mother played by Olivia Williams).It's a complicated film in ways that include it being a ghost story. By this I don't mean Paranormal Activity or in some 'Gotcha' kind of spooktacular thing. This is more like, if I can think back to anything, like during a play when there are ghosts that appear to characters on stage to haunt them in a more existential/familial sense (the closest I can compare it to are the few moments in Fanny & Alexander where the father's ghost appears). While the characters in this story, eventually revolving around the reappearance of Mia Wasikowska's character Agatha, who was away for years after starting a fire and nearly killing her family (Cusack, Williams, Bird), it's a strange mixture of just cutting, acidic satire on not so much the industry but what it does to people's self-worth - the parts to obtain, ageism, sex appeal, who's f***ing who over - and also with this sense of other spiritual beings messing with Benjie and Havana.I think what struck me the most was how straightforward Cronenberg presents these ghosts. They're there, we know they're not really there, and the only predictable thing is that, once or twice of course, reality blends into the un-reality in fatal ways. There are a few instances the movie gets bloody, and almost kind of savage (when a gun goes off in a particular scene it's almost to a point of 'Why?' but that's the point and it's a savage moment). But this is more about how the characters cope with the world around them, whether it's Pattinson's chauffeur, the one sort of outsider who is trying to break in as an actor, or of course Moore as this completely vulnerable but extremely, shall one say, 'clever' about the business and what it does to a person. I wonder if Moore would've played it the same had the original plan gone through, which was to make the film 10 years prior; Moore looks spectacular for her age, any age, but maybe ten years ago it wouldn't be as believable she wouldn't get the part because of this or that reason having to do with looks, which is the subtext here.A large part of why this film works rests on the acting I think. Cronenberg's direction is sure-footed here and he goes a long way to find the little human moments between characters in the midst of what is a very bleak and dark world where business meetings have a detached air (and notice how often Cronenberg shoots singles on actors, that is we often don't get a full wide view of a room or who's in it, people feel disconnected as they have to talk and look at one another, like they're in different spaces in the same space). But I think this is a case where the script probably read one way, and the actors give it a kind of extra life and lift, so that Moore and Wasikowska and even Cusack, who plays basically a self-promoting, pseudo-psychcic BS artist, and gives them dimension. We may not like them, but that's not the point. I think if you can find these people interesting enough, even when they do some really terrible things, it can pull you through.The ending starts to get... too weird, if that's possible for a Cronenberg film, but more in a subtle, quiet way than you'd see in his early work, maybe even disquieting, how two characters in particular end up together. For the most part, I felt in capable hands in a filmmaker and screenwriter who were attempting to experiment with expectations on how people who we know are human beings have become or could become monstrous, whether they're thirteen years old or middle-aged. And Evan Bird, the one principal actor I didn't know well, gives this character an air that makes him probably the least likable of all - the arrogant adolescent "star" actor - but doesn't make him cartoonish or too broad. There's deeper things going on under the surface here, even if it can't really be totally seen all the time; it's the kind of black-death-comic look at Hollywood (and needless to say some of this dialog is quite funny when it's not dramatic or just weird) that would make a helluva double bill with Barton Fink.