70
Features an excellent cast all of whom shine. Affleck as Reeves has never seemed more charming and Brody’s Louis Simo is pretty much a scumbag who still manages to gain our empathy.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
60
The New Yorker by Anthony Lane
Thanks to Lane, Hollywoodland, no great shakes as a thriller, becomes a quiet horror story about the monstrosity of time.
70
This film is brave enough to admit that not all failed movie careers are the result of evil corporate suits, and Affleck makes us care that this likable but weak-minded man threw away what was solid and good in his life for the chimera of fame.
70
Props then to Affleck. Coulter contrived a neat behavioral trick by inducing his star to play a comparably big-jawed bad actor. Surrounded as he is by canny professionals--Lane, Hoskins, Smith, and Jeffrey DeMunn as an unctuous glad-handing agent--it's an unexpectedly touching performance.
75
ReelViews by James Berardinelli
Coulter is a TV veteran but a motion picture newcomer. His work here indicates he is someone to watch. The pacing is slow and deliberate, but the story never ceases to intrigue.
83
Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum
The chief frustration of this otherwise well-made, well-acted, well-heeled picture -- a movie classy in its artful modesty, with every detail of plot and period furnishings lovingly conceived, every lick of jazz-influenced score true to the times -- is that it is so very self-absorbedly graceful about something so very insular and...unremarkable.
50
Austin Chronicle by Marjorie Baumgarten
The window Hollywoodland offers into old-style workings of the company town is fascinating to behold, however the film doesn't always know where to direct our gaze.
60
The Hollywood Reporter by Michael Rechtshaffen
Ultimately falls short of reaching the pleasingly pulpy heights of an "L.A. Confidential" or a "Chinatown" despite those obvious aspirations.
60
First-time scripter Paul Bernbaum's framing story, designed to stir up suspicion that George Reeves was a murder victim rather than a suicide, unfortunately proves far less intriguing than does the melancholy tale of a limited actor reaching the end of the line during a transitional period in Hollywood.