Film

The Bad and the Beautiful

Vincente Minnelli's glossy, vicious valentine to Hollywood itself: three people who loved and lost to producer Jonathan Shields recount, in flashback, exactly how he built his empire on their backs. Kirk Douglas is magnetic and monstrous in equal measure, and the studio-system sheen makes the cruelty go down disturbingly smooth. For anyone who wants old Hollywood glamour with teeth.

TMDb rating7.3

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Sunset Boulevard1950

Billy Wilder's own cynical valentine to the industry, narrated by a corpse and starring a has-been star clinging to relevance. Same appetite for showing Hollywood eating its young, with even blacker humour.

But Gloria Swanson's performance is enormous, camp and tragic at once, and some viewers find that pitch exhausting rather than thrilling.

Sunset Boulevard poster

All About Eve1950

Ambition wearing a smile as it slits your throat, theatre instead of film, but the same merciless anatomy of how talent gets used and discarded. The dialogue is savage and quotable.

But It's talkier and more theatrical than cinematic; if you want visual spectacle over verbal sparring, this one moves slower.

All About Eve poster

A Star Is Born1954

The flip side of the Shields story: what happens to the person being made famous, not the man doing the making. Judy Garland is devastating, and the collapse is just as brutal.

But It's long, musical, and openly weepy where Bad and the Beautiful stays cool and clipped, a very different emotional register.

A Star Is Born poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Kid Stays in the Picture2002

Jonathan Shields is a composite of real studio moguls; this documentary lets an actual one tell his own version of the same story, in the same seductive, self-serving register.

Robert Evans narrates his own rise and fall as Paramount's boy-wonder producer in that same seductive, self-mythologizing voice, glamour, wreckage, and ego, but true.

But Evans is narrating his own legend, so it's unreliable by design; if you want objectivity, look elsewhere.

The Kid Stays in the Picture poster
More like this (8)

Citizen Kane1941

The template this film is quietly borrowing: a powerful man reconstructed through the fractured, contradictory memories of everyone he burned on his way up. Endlessly rewarding on structure alone.

But It's been so thoroughly absorbed into film culture that its innovations can feel more studied than felt now.

Citizen Kane poster

The Player1992

Robert Altman drags Shields' world forward forty years and turns the knife with a satirist's smile, the same industry, the same casualties, just with fax machines instead of contracts.

But Its satire is inside-baseball; if you don't know the players it's skewering, some jokes land soft.

The Player poster

Two Weeks in Another Town1962no page yet

Minnelli and Douglas reunited a decade later for a sourer, sadder coda about faded Hollywood glory, practically a spiritual sequel, made by the same hands.

But It's messier and less disciplined than the original, and the melodrama occasionally tips into camp.

Mank2020no page yet

David Fincher's black-and-white portrait of screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz gives the era's wounded, drunk, brilliant insiders their own devastating flashback structure.

But It assumes real familiarity with 1930s studio politics and Citizen Kane's backstory; newcomers may feel adrift.

The Aviator2004

Another portrait of a driven, magnetic man whose genius and self-destruction are the same engine, this time transplanted to aviation and early Hollywood glamour.

But At nearly three hours it's a much bigger commitment, and Scorsese's sympathy for Hughes is warmer than this film's for Shields.

The Aviator poster

Ed Wood1994

Tim Burton's tender flip side: a producer-director who loves the movies too much rather than too little, failing upward with genuine joy instead of cruelty.

But It's affectionate where this is bitter; if you want the exposé's teeth, Ed Wood's warmth might feel like the wrong movie.

Ed Wood poster

Whiplash2014

Same moral engine as Shields, a mentor who destroys the people he pushes toward greatness, relocated from Hollywood glamour to a drum kit and a practice room.

Swap the studio lot for a jazz conservatory and the producer for a conductor, and you get the same brutal question: does genius justify the wreckage it leaves behind?

But It's tighter and more claustrophobic, a two-hander instead of an ensemble, with none of the glossy studio-era scope.

Whiplash poster

What Price Hollywood?1932no page yet

This is the movie A Star Is Born was remade from, and the direct ancestor of the Hollywood-devours-its-own story The Bad and the Beautiful tells with sharper teeth twenty years later.

The film that started this whole genre, a waitress-turned-star and the director who makes and then loses himself alongside her, twenty years before Minnelli refined the formula.

But It's an early-talkie curiosity: creakier pacing, rougher production values, and a much gentler bite than the 1952 version.

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Recommended by

The Kid Stays in the Picture, Sunset Boulevard, All About Eve, The Studio, Entourage, Mommie Dearest