What Just Happened
Magnolia Pictures | Release Date: October 31, 2008 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
51
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 18 Critic Reviews
Positive:
3
Mixed:
14
Negative:
1

Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
90
Christian Science MonitorPeter Rainer
Directed with deadpan flair by Barry Levinson and based on a memoir by Hollywood producer Art Linson, it's a pitch-perfect sendup of the movie colony with a marvelous cast. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalle
As presented in "What Just Happened?" the world of Hollywood looks like a very expensive, lethal version of high school, not fun to live in, but lots of fun from a safe distance. Read full review
63
ReelViewsJames Berardinelli
If The Player set the bar high for this sub-genre, Levinson's attempt, which too often falls prey to self-indulgence and tedium, comes up significantly short. Read full review
60
EmpireAndrew Male
A playful industry satire made by victors. That's actually pretty cold when you think about it. Read full review
60
Total FilmStaff (Not Credited)
Barry Levinson’s comedy is stronger on the incidental detail: Keener ruthlessly expelling an underling from her office, or Variety’s acid reporting of an agent’s suicide (‘10 per center puts himself in turnaround’). But the big finale at Cannes feels inauthentic – a bit of a letdown from the director who so brilliantly pilloried Robert Evans in Wag The Dog. Read full review
60
VarietyTodd McCarthy
A story very much by, about and for middle-aged men, and with the commercial limitations that implies, this intermittently amusing outing is graced by one of Robert De Niro’s more engaging performances of recent vintage. Read full review
60
Time OutDavid Jenkins
That it doesn’t have anything new to say about the coldly efficient Hollywood machine and its stratum of fearsome executives only hinders it further, leaving you with a film that feels every bit the product of its purportedly ruthless and artistically corrupting milieu. Read full review
50
The New York TimesA.O. Scott
The lampooning is sometimes funny and occasionally offers up a tidbit of small truth. But much of it is awfully familiar. Read full review
50
RogerEbert.comRoger Ebert
The flywheels of the plot machine keep it churning around, but it chugs off onto the back lot and doesn't hit anybody in management. Only Penn and Willis are really funny, poking fun not at themselves but at stars they no doubt hate to work with. Read full review
50
Rolling StonePeter Travers
There are funny scenes, nicely directed by Barry Levinson. Other stuff, involving De Niro's ex-wife (Robin Wright Penn) and their daughter (Kristen Stewart), are not much of anything. It's a tossup. Your call. Read full review
50
TV Guide MagazineJason Buchanan
The resulting film is compellingly watchable and consistently entertaining, even if it does feel somewhat disingenuous, given the pedigree of talent involved. Read full review
50
Portland OregonianHeidi Williams
Levinson keeps the film locked into a sort of low-key middle-age depression. Read full review
50
Seattle Post-IntelligencerPaula Nechak
The film strains to achieve the comedic gait of "Wag the Dog" or the improvised, overlapping style that so defined Robert Altman's Hollywood movie, "The Player." Read full review
50
Austin ChronicleJosh Rosenblatt
The real tragedy of What Just Happened isn’t that it succumbs to predictable pseudo-satirical farce but that when it does, it loses sight of the very thing that could have made it a film worth caring about: the story of a man perpetually caught between art and business, between strength and weakness, between adoration and loneliness, between success and failure, between the movies and reality. Read full review
50
Slant MagazineMicah Towery
Generally, the film is a compelling portrait of Hollywood egoism, though it suffers from this very egoism itself. It’s hard to tell where the film is representing reality, and where it is representing a caricature of reality. Read full review
40
TimeStephanie Zacharek
The picture promises to be a gossipy, biting tale about the travails of a middle-aged Hollywood player who doesn't always have the magic touch -- or, perhaps more accurately, finds he has it less and less. But the picture is more self-congratulatory than it is vicious, or even illuminating, and it dawdles when it needs to crack along at a clip. Read full review
40
The GuardianPeter Bradshaw
De Niro is the most fluent and relaxed I've seen him for many years, but this is still very low-octane stuff, and the film lamely and unsatirically ends up at the Cannes film festival. Read full review
30
IGNTodd Gilchrist
Overall the biggest problem with What Just Happened is that its character studies and conflicts are so far inside the eye of Hollywood's celebrity-clad storm that its melancholy calm completely fails to interest anyone. Read full review
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