Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Fame, wealth, power, and success are the enviable goals of most people in Hollywood. Once achieved, the struggle and pressure to maintain them are unrelenting and will drive some to drastic lengths to ensure their survival.

Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore) is an actress in the twilight of her career who still lives in the shadow of her more famous deceased mother. Constantly plagued by jealously, insecurity, and personal demons, she is desperate to keep her star status active while the delicate balance of her life and sanity rapidly unravel. John Cusack is her therapist, a prominent New Age self-help guru with a book deal, a TV show, and a young son who found success in a franchise film series called Bad Babysitters. Mia Wasikowska is Agatha, a young woman who has just arrived in Hollywood to find work in the industry and hopefully reconnect with her estranged family, and Robert Pattinson is a limousine driver also dreaming of stardom and contemplating Scientology as a career move.

This colorful cadre of characters shares a resonant interconnectivity with each other, and they are hopelessly locked on a collision course with disastrous consequences. But this catastrophe of a yarn is populated almost entirely with shallow, selfish, and vacuous individuals, so it’s hard to feel any real sympathy for them—but maybe that’s the point. Maps to the Stars unfolds like a perverted cross between Robert Altman’s The Player and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, and director David Cronenberg shows admirable restraint in his visual approach to this dark story in favor of letting his superlative cast breathe life into these complex and quirky characters and allowing the story to guide itself to its inevitable conclusion.

The HD picture is consistently solid and sports an even contrast and color scheme throughout. Daylight exteriors are fetching, but nighttime interiors can suffer from pixilated grain and soft blur issues.

The audio performs admirably well for a low-budget, character-driven drama. The center-channel dialogue track holds primary focus, while the surround channels give us intermittent flashes of subtle background ambience. Disappointingly, this disc is completely absent of any supplements, though a downloadable Digital Copy is included.

Unless you find train wrecks humorous, it’s unlikely you will wrestle any mirth out of this darkly comic fable. Proceed with caution.

Blu-Ray
Studio: Universal, 2014
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Audio Format: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
Length: 112 mins.
MPAA Rating: R
Director: David Cronenberg
Starring: Julianne Moore, John Cusack, Mia Wasikowska