First *REVIEWS* following the Press Screening for "Maps to the Stars"...

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!!!! The reviews can be spoilerish...

from Telegraph (5 stars)

Jerome, a chauffeur and would-be actor winningly played by Robert Pattinson.....

My instant reaction, after stumbling, open-mouthed, from the cinema, was a pathological need to stumble back in again. There’s so much in this seething cauldron of a film, so many film-industry neuroses exposed and horrors nested within horrors, that one viewing is too much, and not nearly enough. Cronenberg has made a film that you want to unsee – and then see and unsee again.

from The Guardian (4 stars)

Maps to the Stars is a tense and scary movie, unwholesome in the hold that it has on the audience. Perhaps, in the end, it is too extravagantly cynical to be entirely truthful about Hollywood and LA, but it has a Jacobean power, the kind of thing that John Webster or Thomas Middleton and William Rowley might write if they were living in the 21st century: a claustrophobic nightmare of despair

from Film 4

Maps To The Stars is a film having plenty of fun with the notion of Hollywood dynasties and the processes by which success is achieved and cemented – who knows whom, who’s seeing whom, who hates whom: all the invisible, untraceable connections that bind Hollywood together. The joke is that there is no map to these stars, and without an innate sense of direction you’ll soon be lost. Hollywood is often decried as incestuous, and this film plays that idea to the hilt, with the product of incestuous breeding even more troubled and egotistical than the generation before that. 

from Little White Lies

True to style, David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars is a work of cinematic fusion. Like the weeping vagina hidden underneath Marylin Burns' armpit, here we have a bracingly blasé investigation into unmentionable family taboos which has been forcibly integrated onto the body of a noxious (and not wholly convincing) La La Land burlesque. There are no waspish one-liners or ironic rib-nudges here — this is a punk jeremiad which rams your face into the constipated asshole of Hollywood. The thrill of watching the film comes from attempting to locate the strained sinews where these two strange sides converge — or, as the film would have it, finding "the flesh that says yes".

from Twitch Film

Julianne Moore's raw power is on display, but the Blanche DuBois act feels equally wrought. Mia Wasikowska and Robert Pattinson are perfectly fine. Newcomer Evan Bird can spout "Jew cunt" as written on the page and come across as douchey when called for, but his venom comes across more as school-bully than truly demonic child actor.

from Time Out London

The story is wild, but it’s dragged through the rough patches, when satire rubs up against exaggeration, by three killer performances from Waskikowska, Moore and newcomer Bird. Cronenberg’s direction feels at home in a world of soulless homes and offices, clubs at night and flash cars. He locates a deeply sick spirit in his tale and explores it through far-fetched fiction told with deadly seriousness, also adding a dose of baroque to proceedings and a streak of wicked humour. ‘Maps of the Stars’ offers some ludicrous moments and a fair few bum notes, but we’re still left with a troubling sense of infected bloodlines, sick Hollywood genes and a world any sane person would run a mile from.

will be update...

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