A black-and-white silent film set in late-1920s Hollywood: a beloved silent movie star sees his career destroyed by the arrival of talkies, while a young dancer he once mentored rises to the top of the new sound era. Hazanavicius lovingly pastiche the grammar of the silent era — the intertitles, the iris shots, the exaggerated pantomime — with meticulous period production values, creating an affectionate and melancholy letter to a lost art form.
