Maps to the Stars – reviews of 'nightmarish' Hollywood satire

What you need to know

David Cronenberg's satirical drama Maps to the Stars opens in UK cinemas today. Canadian director Cronenberg is best known as a master of 'body horror' and for films such as Naked Lunch, The Fly and Scanners. More recently he has directed Eastern Promises and A Dangerous Method.

In Maps to the Stars, Mia Wasikowska plays Agatha, a physically and emotionally scarred young woman who gets work as the personal assistant of ageing Hollywood diva Havana (Julianne Moore), while trying to reconnect with her celebrity obsessed family. With Robert Pattinson and John Cusack.

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What the critics like

David Cronenberg's "luridly enjoyable" new feature film is pitched somewhere between horror and satire, portraying a city where ordinary human values have become entirely twisted, says Geoffrey MacNab in The Independent. At times it plays like a comedy, but the humour fades as we gradually begin to feel sympathy for these desperate and tormented characters.

There's so much in this "nightmarishly compelling" film that one viewing is too much, and not nearly enough, says Robbie Collin in the Daily Telegraph. Cronenberg has made a film that you want to unsee – and then see and unsee again.

The horror maestro "scrapes away the surface of Hollywood to discover a magnificently Cronenbergian outbreak of tortured families, reprehensible behaviour and extreme violence", says Ian Nathan in Empire. It's his most cynical slice of sangfroid since Videodrome, but also his funniest.

What they don't like

It's "a gripping and exquisitely horrible movie about contemporary Hollywood - positively vivisectional in its sadism and scorn", says Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. It's tense and scary and perhaps too extravagantly cynical to be entirely truthful about Hollywood, but it has a sort of Jacobean power.