In a 1.15.23 Variety piece about epic film disasters (or the kind of woeful misfires that only talented directors are capable of making), Owen Gleiberman delivers a perfect description:

“You sit down to watch a movie by a director whose work you love. He’s swinging for the fences. His ambition is on full display and so, in fits and spurts, is his talent. Yet something else is on display too: a lack of judgment that starts out like a worm, wriggling through the proceedings, before growing and metastasizing until it’s eating everything in its path.”

Besides Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon, Gleiberman’s examples include Francis Ford Coppola‘s One from the Heart, Steven Spielberg‘s 1941, Martin Scorsese‘s New York, New York, David Lynch‘s Wild at Heart, Steven Soderbergh‘s Kafka, Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Zabriskie Point, Baz Luhrmann‘s Australia.

HE feels that Oliver Stone‘s most calamitous, worm-consumed film by far is Heaven & Earth.