movie reviews

One Man Calls A Star Is Born the Greatest Achievement in the History of Cinema

A Star Is Born. Photo: Warner Bros.

Will Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born be a camp classic, or just a regular classic? We won’t know until the film premieres at Venice later this week, but in the meantime, we’ll have to content ourselves with a review that Talkhouse.net accidentally published before the embargo lifted, which favorably compares Cooper’s movie to the work of the greatest and deadest 20th-century filmmakers. Not only is the film “the most impressive directorial debut by an actor since Robert Redford’s Ordinary People — maybe since Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter,” it also combines “the breadth of an epic ensemble piece and the intimacy and undiluted emotional impact of a character study by Bergman or Cassavetes.” What of the script? You’ll be happy to know that it’s “filled with insight and incident but as cleanly structured as the best of Robert Towne or Lawrence Kasdan.” In conclusion, “like Scorsese … Cooper has somehow figured out how to marry the precision of a Hitchcock or Kubrick with the emotional generosity and psychologically probing nature of a Cassavetes or Kazan.” In the words of Lady Gaga: “HAAAHAHAAAWAAAAH.” The review has since been deleted, but excerpts have been floating around Twitter.

One Man Calls A Star Is Born the Greatest Film of All Time