Sunset Boulevard

No other motion picture about Hollywood comes near Billy Wilder's searing, uncompromising and utterly fascinating portrait of the film community. Read full review

The finest movie ever made about the narcissistic hellhole that is Hollywood. Read full review

Sunset Boulevard remains the best drama ever made about the movies because it sees through the illusions, even if Norma doesn't. Read full review

Subtle, savage and insightful but with such a big heart it is as moving as it is informative about the value of making art that moves. Read full review

This is an unmissable commentary on Hollywood's rejection of its silent past: a kind of Sobbin' in the Rain. Read full review

Sunset Blvd. represents the center stone in Billy Wilder's glittering cinematic tiara. Read full review

Sunset Boulevard, one of the greatest movies about the movies, may be a fiction, but rarely is fiction shot through so glitteringly with real life. Read full review

Sunset Boulevard is that rare blend of pungent writing, expert acting, masterly direction and unobtrusively artistic photography which quickly casts a spell over an audience and holds it enthralled to a shattering climax. Read full review

Although Billy Wilder's 1950 Hollywood noir Sunset Boulevard gets less attention as a travelogue, it's both an examination of the dark psychological landscape of out-of-fashion show-business types (as underlined by the title) and an actual trip through its physical environment. Read full review

The icicle-sharp, endlessly quotable script is one of the greatest ever written, and the film remains relentlessly entertaining. If it’s not the director’s finest, it’s a testament to how much competition there is for that position. Read full review

It is a striking, ironical tribute to the vanishing glory of the silent screen, and a lively reflection of present-day conditions in Hollywood. [15 Sep 1950, p.14]

Smashing drama of the old-fashioned kind, plus elegant perceptive characterization of the modern school, combined to make Sunset Boulevard one of the greatest films of the decade. [22 Sep 1950, p.12]

Sunset Blvd. remains one of the best, truest, funniest, saddest and scariest of all movies about Hollywood. [09 Jun 2006, p.C8]

There's a long tradition of filmmakers poking fun at the movie business. But no one bit the hand that fed him more viciously or with sharper fangs than Billy Wilder in Sunset Boulevard. Read full review

No film since Sunset Boulevard has better captured the spotlight’s cruel, heartless glare. Read full review

It is a realistic drama, conceived and written into a brilliant and provocative screen play. [11 Aug 1950, p.52]

Still the best, most penetrating picture about Hollywood, its surface charm, its underlying cruelty, its lack of interest in its own history, its ruthless disregard for failure. The casting is perfect. [16 Mar 2003, p.7]

Director Billy Wilder's 1950 classic, after all, could serve as a capsule history of American movies: a flip book of the many styles and epochs of the medium as well as an anatomy of the vices, jealousies, vanities, egocentrisms and pettinesses that have long characterized our great national popular art and the people who make it. [02 Jun 2000]

In its precision, perversity and stinging wit, Sunset Boulevard still has mighty sharp teeth. Read full review

Performances by the entire cast, and particularly William Holden and Gloria Swanson, are exceptionally fine. Read full review

The picture is more than a brilliant exercise in moviemaking techniques; it is also a blistering commentary on Hollywood manners & morals. Read full review

Billy Wilder’s cynical edge is finely honed in this darkly amusing satire, which won three Academy Awards. It’s a film that is perennially ready for its close-up. Read full review

Sunset Boulevard is noteworthy because of its fine sensitivity of things cinema. [24 Aug 1950, p.25]

Sunset Boulevard posits that the business and process of making films can often turn writers and directors into soulless scavengers of narrative detritus, performers into howling husks of wasted talent. Read full review

What's not recognized enough is the indelible, self-sickened performance of William Holden as Desmond's boy-toy/hired hack. Read full review

A tour de force for Swanson and one of Wilder’s better efforts. Read full review

It's all deliriously dark and nightmarish, its only shortcoming being its cynical lack of faith in humanity: only von Stroheim, superb as Swanson's devotedly watchful butler Max, manages to make us feel the tragedy on view. Read full review

Sunset Blvd., directed by Billy Wilder, is an attack on Hollywood, especially its image-making fickleness and casual exploitation of all things shimmery. [20 Apr 1995, p.14]

Sunset Boulevard is one of those films which serve as milestones in the progress of the motion picture toward its goal of an entertainment art. [08 Sep 1950, p.22]

There are humor, pathos, tragedy and a good slice of real life in this picture. [25 Aug 1950, p.12]

Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, the smart writer-director-producer team, have cast a sardonic eye on Hollywood and come up with a picture of it that is not pretty, but is certainly fascinating. [25 Aug 1950, p.2D]

This brittle satiric tribute to Hollywood's leopard-skin past--it's narrated by a corpse-- is almost too clever, yet it's at its best in this cleverness, and is slightly banal in the sequences dealing with a normal girl (Nancy Olson) and modern Hollywood.