David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars sees Hollywood as a disease

Maps to the Stars places elements of ghost story, black comedy and Hollywood satire in a screwball framework.

(Photo By Fading icon: Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore) stars in Cronenbergâ?Ts satire.)

Maps to the Stars (18)
dir: David Cronenberg

Sympathy for the devil is all very well but David Cronenberg was the first film-maker to display affection for the parasite and tenderness towards the tumour. He hasn’t made a movie that could be categorised fully as horror since his squelchy 1986 version of The Fly but the horror label stuck early on. Arguably his best film – and certainly his scariest – is The Brood (1979), in which a woman’s anger manifests itself in the form of hammer-wielding, monkey-faced children who can’t be placated by the threat of an early night and no pudding.