Maps to the Stars

Director: David Cronenberg

2014 / 111min / DCP

The years-in-the-making meeting between Cronenberg and Bruce Wagner, indefatigable chronicler of the jaundiced spiritual life of Los Angeles, began as a Wagner screenplay written for Cronenberg, was repurposed into the 2012 novel Dead Stars when production stalled, and finally came to the screen two years later, starring Mia Wasikowska as a young burn victim who arrives in Hollywood with a shadowy past as baggage, Julianne Moore as the second-generation starlet who she finds work as a personal assistant for, and Robert Pattinson as the struggling actor/aspiring screenwriter/limo driver who brushes shoulders with all manner of Tinseltown’s human oddities. The odd-couple pairing of Wagner’s fiery apocalyptic vision and Cronenberg’s gelid, somber approach lends singular frissons to Maps to the Stars, a film at once plaintive and purgative.

Distributor: Universal

Part of What Price Hollywood?