SUNSET BOULEVARD

Utterly transfixing from the opening moments, in which Midwestern journalist-cum-skint-screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) begins to posthumously narrate his sob story while floating face-down in a swimming pool in the Hollywood Hills, Wilder’s Tinseltown gothic is a movie steeped in love and hate for the movie business and the monsters that it attracts and nurtures, like Gillis and his sugar mama, faded silent film star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). An industry inside joke both funny and haunting, often stolen from and quoted (“I’m ready for my close-up”) but never diminished in its eerie grandeur.

"Billy Wilder’s 1950 classic not only pioneered the portrait of the camphorously demented American shut-in (and therein opened one of the drains leading to PSYCHO), but brilliantly joined it to the hip of Hollywood. Here was an Industry vision of the Industry’s fake-life boneyard, wherein the meta-world of movies — already so notorious for corrupting the hopes and sensibilities of moviegoers — also condemns its godlings to an empty afterlife. Wilder’s Norma Desmond is the paradigmatic matinee-idol has-been witch-beast, alone with her glory days for so long in a curtained mansion that eventually Gothic clichés are reborn as Beverly Hills pathology." - Michael Atkinson

"Still the best Hollywood movie ever made about Hollywood." - Andrew Sarris