dvd of the week
Barely released this winter, Maps to the Stars is Julianne Moore’s other great performance of 2014, and I think she’s better in this David Cronenberg movie about the darker side of Hollywood than in Still Alice, for which she won an Oscar. Moore is a needy, fading starlet trying to be cast playing her mother in a movie about the making of the movie that made her a star (yes, really). Her guru is Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), whose son is a child star just out of rehab (Evan Burd); he was driven there by, among other things, the trauma of a fire set by his now-missing sister. Mia Wasikowska is a celebrity-obsessed and scarred young woman who arrived in Los Angeles via bus and is quickly befriended by a handsome limo driver played by Robert Pattinson. The film is a bizarre fever dream, something of a cross between of Mulholland Drive and Magnolia but not remotely as skillful or deep as either of those classics. But Moore is so transcendently good, vulnerable and funny and tragic, it’s worth it.
