Some critics love La La Land because it is a immersive and transporting experience. They claim that “the songs are catchy” and it’s “a love letter to Los Angeles”, similar to the ones Woody Allen gave Manhattan. One says that it is “surprisingly perfect”. Clearly the film resonated with them and made them feel emotional. One reviewer believes that “you don’t have to think much” about it and that it’s a very passive viewership experience. Another reviewer doesn’t feel quite as strongly but still feels that the film is “a welcome concept, executed merely adequately”. He feels like the film succeeds less as a musical and more as just a feel good experience. However, he claims that at the end the musical elements of the film to deliver an “emotional wallop”. Other reviewers also enjoyed the film thoroughly, such as one who claims they found them self “falling under the ‘La La Land’ spell”. This seems to be a recurring reaction, that the film can make the audience feel like they are involved in the story and the magic.

On the other hand, some critics feel like La La Land is a very poor musical and “doesn’t understand” the genre it’s in. The film is trying to hard to be musically inspired and ends up falling flat. They claim that “Ryan Gosling is no Fred Astaire”. The actors can’t sing or dance, and they opted for big name stars rather than actual worthy actors, “too bad Broadway stars aren’t big box office”. Some complain that the ending of the film is unfair because we see Seb’s character progression in buying the club and getting his dreams whereas Mia is kind of pushed into the sidelines and we don’t see her slowly achieve her dreams and we just see her after she has.

Anthony Lane’s Article:

This article recognises the fact that La La Land is an original script, completely independent from from any books or previous films. However, the article argues that the plot is still a fairly standard love story least for most of the film. It is also inspired and derivative of previous musicals and has a lot of inspirations, such as the homage to “Falling Down” in the opening sequence. This opening is very unrealistic and that is shown to be a positive and negative feature. One of the themes presented in La La Land from the article is the career plans of both characters, they are both dreamy and magical rather than realistic and grounded.

It is stated that the second half of the film is not up to par in quality with the first half. The article says that the pay off shown in this second half is not good enough. This is said to be due to the 5 year jump that the film includes because it misses out important details on how Mia achieves her dreams that she wanted