Plot: At the dawn of the sound era, a tawdry collection of people working in silent films must reckon with their rapidly changing fortunes as the talkies, and a new strict morality, become commonplace.

Review: Within the first ten minutes of Babylon, you get an anus-first view of an elephant having diarrhea and then, shortly after, a golden shower performed by a woman on a very content customer. This is all lovingly shot by director Damien Chazelle and his Dp Linus Sandgren, as if to announce, “hey – if you thought The Wolf of Wall Street was over the top, get a load of this!” As it turns out, the brown and the golden showers are only the beginning of Chazelle’s nightmarish descent into the seemingly depraved world of 1920s Hollywood. As Al Jolson said in The Jazz Singer, the movie that spells doom to many of the characters here,...