Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s new satire of Tinseltown is astonishingly starry, wildly intelligent and – just possibly – the perfect encapsulation of the film industry’s death croak

It’s never exactly a done deal when Hollywood decides to take itself on. The film industry is such a roiling combination of wealth, jealousy, fear and obliviousness that, when the right person decides to send it up, the results can be spectacular. Look at Sunset Boulevard, Barton Fink – or even Bowfinger – and you’ll see work that knows when to go for the jugular to inflict maximum damage.

On the other hand, Hollywood satires can all too readily fall into the cliches they’re deliberately trying to send up. They’re romanticised. There are too many chummy cameos. They lose their nerve. Look at Charlie Day’s film Fool’s Paradise, or 1997’s An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn (a movie about the name used when a film is so bad the director wants to remove his name from the credits, which was in turn so bad that the real-life director removed his name from the credits). Or, you know, Entourage.