The Bad and the Beautiful Reviews
Cinema Sight
Three disjointed stories awkwardly connected by a frayed thread.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Electric Sheep
Charles Schnee's whip-smart script, packed with sharp one-liners and passionate dialogue is a pitch-perfect accompaniment to the noir-ish look of Robert Surtees's cinematography.
The List
The Bad and the Beautiful took home a quintet of Oscars from 1953's ceremony and in its title alone we have possibly the greatest ever description of Hollywood.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Movie Mom at Yahoo! Movies
Classic take on classic Hollywood.
| Original Score: 4/5
Top CriticDouglas gives a terrific study of male ego, all relaxed charm and going places.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Little White Lies
A gaudy soap opera that also manages to satirise gaudy soap operas. Hows about that?
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Classic Film and Television
Dramatically strange - but visually splendid - inside look at Hollywood film making.
Film and Felt
If it's not quite Sunset Blvd., Vincente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful stands on its own as a scathing portrait of Hollywood's cutthroat ways and means.
Full Review
| Original Score: 72/100
Observer [UK]
A warts-and-all portrait of Hollywood at its zenith, a tale of how the bad created something beautiful.
Total Film
Even without a knowledge of the background, this is sharp, cynical fun.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Tim Dirks' The Greatest Films
The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) is director Vincente Minnelli's (and producer John Houseman's) quintessential movie about Hollywood and moviemaking.
EmanuelLevy.Com
In Minnnelli's hands, the noirish melodram is less critical of Hollywood and more ambiguous in depicting the tawdry absurdities and operatic splendors of a bizzare industry, in which the players are more of frustrated dreamers than cold manipulators.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
Under Minnelli's direction it becomes a fascinating study of a man destroyed by the 50s success ethic, left broke, alone, and slightly insane in the end.
Guardian [UK]
Hollywood here looks diabolically seductive.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
