La La Land

Damien Chazelle's follow-up to *Whiplash* is a full-throated revival of the movie musical, executed with staggering technical bravura: an opening number shot as one continuous take in a Los Angeles freeway traffic jam, dance sequences filmed in long unbroken shots so you see performers' whole bodies, and magic-hour photography that makes the city itself look like a dream. Critics were near-unanimous that the craft delivers, and just as unanimous that the film's emotional engine is the chemistry between its two leads — a jazz pianist scraping by in bars and an aspiring actress facing endless failed auditions — with reviewers repeatedly noting that without them the film would be a beautiful empty exercise. Justin Hurwitz's jazz-and-pop score and its signature songs became instantly iconic, and the film's romantic, melancholy glow was hailed as jolting a supposedly dead genre back to life.

The main body of criticism clusters around the film's relationship to its influences. It is openly a pastiche of Golden Age Hollywood musicals and the French New Wave musicals of Jacques Demy, and a persistent strain of critics found that referentiality emotionally insulating — beautifully mounted, but so controlled and so bound up in homage that it can feel like a museum piece rather than living feeling, a few notes short of the greatness it salutes. Other recurring complaints: the leads sing and dance competently rather than spectacularly, the heroine is written with noticeably less interiority than the hero's big jazz lectures, and those lectures themselves have drawn fire — Sebastian's jazz purism reads to some as lecturing, and to others as a sentimental, whitewashed view of the music's history. A minority of viewers simply found stretches of it dull.

Critics agree almost completely on the film's finale, widely cited as its most powerful sequence — but they split on what to make of it: some find its what-might-have-been melancholy earned and devastating, others find it a manipulative bid for tears. There is a similar divide over whether the film's love letter to old Hollywood is sweetly sincere or an escapist retreat from messier truths. In other words, most disputes are about the depth of the story and the taste of its nostalgia — very few are about whether the filmmaking delivers.