Movies about moviemaking constitute a virtual cinematic genre; there are far more of them made now than either musicals or westerns. Robert De Niro played Monroe Stahr, a fictionalised version of the MGM producer Irving Thalberg, in the Elia Kazan version of Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon. He now plays a fictionalised version of producer Art Linson in a film adapted by Linson from his memoir What Just Happened, subtitled 'Bitter Hollywood Tales From the Front Line'.

Closer to The Player than to Sunset Boulevard, it's a comic celebration of tawdry Tinseltown, part farce, part satire, following a week in the life of Ben, a fraught freelance producer working at a major Hollywood studio. He's juggling two productions, attending conferences, trouble-shooting, driving the children of two failed marriages to school, worrying about alimony and undergoing therapy with his second ex-wife to help them move on.

The people are vain, drug-addicted, power-crazed egotists, obsessed with money and largely divorced from everyday reality. It's all pretty amusing and the funniest sequence takes place at the funeral of a top agent who has just committed suicide. During the service, the mourners do deals, pitch scripts, indulge in backbiting, speak ill of the dead, think ill of each other and Ben also discovers that his 17-year-old daughter was having an affair with the famously womanising deceased. In his autobiography, King Vidor recalls an identical incident in 1931 when he and Thalberg discussed a Billy the Kid script on the way to, during and back from silent star Mabel Normand's funeral.