[In the] late afternoon of the studio system, Wilder’s exercise in gothic neorealism is pure magic hour, satirizing yet attesting to the power of motion pictures to reanimate the past and raise the dead.
— J. Hoberman (Artforum)
[*Sunset Boulevard*] was the movie which suddenly convinced me that films were our contemporary cathedral murals, our stained glass windows, our new visual masters. [It] was transformative. The realization that films actually were paintings that moved, so to speak, has never entirely left me, and it has also drawn me into a love affair with movies that accepts the fact that they are a stolen series of photographic stills rapidly filtered past a shining lens.
— Donald Brackett (Senses of Cinema)
Synopsis: A hack screenwriter writes a screenplay for a former silent film star who has faded into Hollywood obscurity.