Ryan Gosling’s La La Land follow-up a ‘humiliating wreck’, according to critics

HE’S on a career high from the success of La La Land, but Ryan Gosling’s anticipated follow-up is being savaged by the critics.

Ryan Gosling’s newest flick doesn’t quite scale the heights of La La Land. Picture: Van Redin/Broad Green Pictures via AP

RYAN Gosling has landed with an almighty thump after the near-universal praise he received for award show favourite La La Land.

His follow-up film, the Terrence Malick-directed Song To Song, is at the receiving end of some savage reviews, with one critic even describing it as a “humiliating wreck of a movie.”

The film is set amid the Texas music scene and stars Gosling alongside fellow A-listers Natalie Portman, Michael Fassbender and Rooney Mara. Telling the story of two intersecting love triangles, the film is “short on traditional dialogue and heavy on voiceovers and improvisation,” states the Hollywood Reporter.

Gosling and Michael Fassbender, right, star in the ‘experimental’ film. Picture: AP

Written and directed by the man who gave the world 2011’s acclaimed Tree Of Life, the film is set for limited release in the US this week, and early reviews have not been kind.

Take a look: “In terms of content and meaningfulness, Terrence Malick’s Song to Song is the cinematic equivalent of a Trump press conference. Incoherent, disconnected, self-interrupting, obsessed with pointless minutiae and crammed full of odd, limp stabs at profundity from a closed-off man in his 70s who apparently has no ability to edit or accept constructive criticism. Malick, too, still inspires a passionate minority of hardcore devotees who will defend everything he does, no matter how inept or ludicrous ... Even for those groupies, this new humiliating wreck of a movie — the reclusive director’s worst­ ever — presents a test of will..” - Entertainment Weekly

“It pains me to say it, but Malick might want to consider another lengthy hiatus.” - Variety

Natalie Portman also stars. Picture: AP

“It is unlikely to fare [well] at the box office. If it does, credit the draw of Ryan Gosling, whose younger fans will be wholly unprepared for what they get (and don’t get) here.” - The Hollywood Reporter.

Malick “has abandoned narrative cinema, for a fragmented, quasi-experimental form, that while once unique, has curdled into cliche, and even self-parody.” - The Playlist.

“Sex and Malick have never been an easy fit, but Song to Song plumbs new boreholes of cringe in that department, and its various bedroom encounters, shot in the usual extreme wide-angle by the director’s regular cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, are gauzy and bloodless. The film is to sex as a lepidopterist is to a butterfly cabinet — it gets right in there with the magnifying glass, but perish the thought that anything might flap.” - The Telegraph

Ouch. There is no Australian release date confirmed for Song to Song yet ... maybe that’s just as well.