one hollywood movie review

Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood

The title of the ninth film by Quentin Tarantino, “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” is meant to recall Sergio Leone’s masterpiece “Once Upon a Time in the West.” It’s a nod to the Western genre influence on Tarantino’s latest—both structurally and in the actual plot—and the way movies about the Old West play with actual history. Just as the Western has often used real people and places as templates to tell fictional stories, Tarantino has crafted an elegiac ode to a time he’s only experienced through books and movies. Tarantino once said, “When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, ‘no, I went to films.’” And it’s that education by projector light that weaves its way through every frame of “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” a movie only he could have devised. And yet this is not the film that hardcore fans of “Pulp Fiction” and “Inglourious Basterds” may be expecting. It’s somber at times in the way it seems to be trying to grab something just out of reach—the promised potential of the people on the fringe of the city of angels, an attempt to capture a mythical time when movies, real life, and imagination could intertwine.

The majority of “Once Upon” takes place on a February weekend in 1969, introducing us to its two leads, TV actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his longtime stuntman and BFF Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). Rick was the star of a hit Western show called “Bounty Law” but he’s struggling to figure out what’s next, keenly aware that his days of heroism are ending as he ages out of Hollywood—and he’s encouraged by a bigwig played by Al Pacino to go to Italy to reboot his career with spaghetti westerns. Cliff is way more laid-back, the kind of guy who loves his dog almost as much as he loves Rick and says what he means even to someone like Bruce Lee (Mike Moh), whom he actually fights in one of the film’s most crowd-pleasing scenes. Lee is only one of the familiar names in the film, as Tarantino populates the world around his fictional creations with real famous faces from Steve McQueen (Damian Lewis) to James Stacy (Timothy Olyphant).

Of course, as most people know, the real-life figures living next to Rick Dalton are the most controversial ones—Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha) and Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). Much has already been written about Robbie’s limited line total, and it’s because Tarantino doesn’t see Tate as much as a person as an idea—a glimpse of Hollywood’s optimistic happiness. Whether she’s dancing at a party at the Playboy mansion or sneaking in to watch herself at a public showing of “The Wrecking Crew,” she’s almost glowing every time she appears on-screen, a counter to Dalton’s increasing anxiety. And Tarantino knows that this presentation of a star we know will be snuffed out in the real world adds a sense of melancholy and dread to the entirety of the production, even when it’s not explicitly about Sharon Tate or the hippies out at Spahn Ranch.

The bulk of Tarantino’s film is designed to be a dreamy snapshot of the movie business and life in Hollywood in the late ‘60s. We get dozens of shots of Cliff driving Rick around town, really just to show off the amazing production design, classic cars, and music choices on the radio. The approach by Tarantino and master cinematographer Robert Richardson is incredibly finely tuned, and yet the film never loses that dreamlike aesthetic for the sake of realism—we’re watching a movie not so much about an era but about the movies of that era. It’s a setting once-removed from reality, capturing a time through the way celebrity culture and movies defined it more than the historians. It’s a captivating movie just to live in, complete with long dialogue scenes that some QT fans will say lack the pop and zip of his most playful work but feel more in tune with his character-driven scenes in something like “Jackie Brown.”

Most of all, “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” is the first Tarantino film to feel like the product of an older director. Tarantino was the problem child of Hollywood for years, redefining the industry at such a young age, but “OUATIH” could not have been made by the ‘90s Tarantino (or, at least, it would have been a very different and much worse movie). One can see Tarantino reflected in Dalton, someone looking back at their career and wondering what’s next, still able to get excited by the fact that he lives next to the director of “Rosemary’s Baby” but also welling up over a book he’s reading about a fading hero because he sees himself in it. 

DiCaprio proves to be such a perfect choice for Dalton that one can’t really imagine anyone else in the part. He’s always had classic Hollywood charisma, but he imbues Dalton with that poignant mix of longing and fading optimism that often comes with aging—sure, he loves his life and hanging with his buddy but he’s nervous when he thinks about what’s next, wondering if he hasn’t missed out on something forever. It’s one of his best performances, although he’s arguably topped by a fantastic Pitt, who gets a part from his “Basterds” director that reminds viewers how wonderful he can be in the right material. He hasn’t been this playful and charismatic in years. 

A lot of people are going to focus on the end of “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.” The minute that we see that the film has jumped forward to August of 1969 and that Sharon Tate is very pregnant, anyone with even a passing knowledge of history knows what’s coming. Or at least they think they do. The final few scenes will be among the most divisive of the year, and I’m still rolling around their effectiveness in my own critical brain. Without spoiling anything, I’m haunted by the final image, taken from high above its characters, almost as if Tarantino himself is the puppet master saying goodbye to his creations, all co-existing in a vision of blurred reality and fiction. However, the violence that precedes it threatens to pull the entire film apart (and will for some people). Although that may be the point—the destruction of the Tinseltown dream that casts this blend of fictional and real characters back into Hollywood lore.

I do know this for sure—I can’t wait to see this film again. It’s so layered and ambitious, the product of a confident filmmaker working with collaborators completely in tune with his vision. Every piece fits. Every choice is carefully considered. Whether it all adds up to something is now up for audiences to decide, but this is a film that feels like it’s not going away anytime soon. It’s one of those rare movies that will provoke conversation and debate long enough to cement itself in the public consciousness more than the fleeting multiplex hit of the week. Love it or hate it, people will be talking about it. And that’s something the older Tarantino has in common with the younger one. He hasn’t lost any of his power to fire people up. If only there were more like him. 

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

• Leonardo DiCaprio as Rick Dalton
• Brad Pitt as Cliff Booth
• Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate
• Al Pacino as Marvin Schwarzs
• Kurt Russell as Randy
• Timothy Olyphant as James Stacy
• Dakota Fanning as Squeaky Fromme
• Luke Perry as Scott Lancer
• Margaret Qualley as Pussycat
• Damon Herriman as Charles Manson
• Mike Moh as Bruce Lee
• Emile Hirsch as Jay Sebring
• Damian Lewis as Steve McQueen
• Bruce Dern as George Spahn
• Fred Raskin
• Quentin Tarantino

Cinematographer

• Robert Richardson

Leave a comment

Now playing.

A Real Pain

Here (2024)

Memoir of a Snail

Don’t Move

Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band

Black Box Diaries

Your Monster

Latest articles.

HBO’s “Like Water for Chocolate” is Downright Sumptuous

Our Film Has A Power: Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham on No Other Land

CIFF 2024: The Light of Truth: Richard Hunt’s Monument to Ida B. Wells, Time Passages, Slice of Life: The American Dream. In Former Pizza Huts

CIFF 2024: Compensation, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Save the Children

The best movie reviews, in your inbox.

Film Review: ‘Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood’

Quentin Tarantino's tale of a TV-Western actor and his stunt double, and how they collide with the Manson Family in the Hollywood of 1969, is a heady engrossing collage of a film — but not, in the end, a masterpiece.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

• ‘Absolution’ Review: The Liam Neeson Action Revenge Genre Winds Down as He Plays an Enforcer with Memory Issues 4 hours ago
• ‘Martha’ Review: R.J. Cutler’s Splendid Documentary Taps Into Everything We Love, and Don’t, About Martha Stewart 2 days ago
• ‘Venom: The Last Dance’ Review: Tom Hardy and His Alien Entity Go Full Buddy Movie in a Finale That Shoots the Works, Because Why Not? 1 week ago

It has been 25 years to the day since Quentin Tarantino ’s “Pulp Fiction” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival , crystalizing a cinema revolution, and we have never looked back. Yet here’s one more QT anniversary, a bit less monumental but, in its way, as meaningful: It has been 10 years since the premiere of “Inglourious Basterds,” which also took place at Cannes — and for me, at least, that means it’s been a decade since Quentin Tarantino gave us an unambiguously great Quentin Tarantino movie.

You know the difference as well as I do, because it’s one that you can feel in your heart, gut, nerves, and soul. It’s the difference between a Quentin movie that’s got dazzle and brilliance and a number of hypnotic sequences, and is every inch the work of his fevered movie candy brain, and a Quentin film that enters your bloodstream like a drug and stays there, inviting (compelling!) you to watch it again and again, because it’s a virtuoso piece of the imagination from first shot to last, and every moment is marked by a certain ineffable something , the Tarantino X Factor that made “Pulp Fiction” the indie touchstone of its time.

Related Stories

Disney’s App Store Play Is Another Strategic Blow for Apple

Grateful Dead Named Persons of the Year for MusiCares' 2025 Gala Salute

“Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood,” which premiered today at Cannes, is not that total X Factor movie — though for long stretches (a good more than half of it), it feels like it could be. It comes closer than “Django Unchained” or (God knows) “The Hateful Eight.” It’s a heady, engrossing, kaleidoscopic, spectacularly detailed nostalgic splatter collage of a film, an epic tale of backlot Hollywood in 1969, which allows Tarantino to pile on all his obsessions, from drive-ins to donuts, from girls with guns to men with muscle cars and vendettas, from spaghetti Westerns to sexy bare feet. In this case, he doesn’t have to work too hard to find spaces for those fixations, since Tarantino, in this 2-hour-and-39-minute tale of a Hollywood caught between eras, is reaching back to the very source of his dreams.

Popular on Variety

In “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood,” Tarantino tells the dual story of Rick Dalton ( Leonardo DiCaprio ), who starred in a black-and-white TV Western series called “Bounty Law” in the late ’50s and early ’60s, but whose career is now hitting the skids; and Cliff Booth ( Brad Pitt ), Rick’s longtime stunt double and best pal, who has become his gofer and driver. Both are drawling, easy-going good ol’ boys who are functional drunks (Rick favors whiskey sours; Cliff likes his bloody Marys), and they’ve been kicked around Hollywood, but they’ve got a yin-and-yang thing going.

Rick, who appears to be based at least partly on Burt Reynolds, is an instinctive actor, a gentle charmer, and a secret softie in a tan leather jacket — the first Tarantino hero to prove that real men do cry. (When the tears come, it’s for how badly Rick has let his career melt down.) Cliff, by contrast, is a war veteran and rough-and-tumble stud bruiser who lives in a cruddy trailer next to the Van Nuys Drive-In but seems happy and satisfied, like most Brad Pitt characters, within himself. When he’s crossed, he will kick the bejesus out of anyone, and he’s got a bad reputation. The rumor is that he killed his wife and got away with it. (A flashback to a scene on a boat with that very wife, who digs at him mercilessly, doesn’t spill the beans, but it’s not exactly evidence that the rumor is false.)

The first two-thirds of “Once Upon a Time…” is set in February ’69, and Tarantino views these two characters with a straight-up macho humanity that is gratifyingly unironic. DiCaprio and Pitt fill out their roles with such rawhide charismatic movie-star conviction that we’re happy to settle back and watch Tarantino unfurl this tale in any direction he wants. And he does digress, in that following-his-free-associational-bliss way. A car-denting, fists-meets-martial-arts duel on the set of “The Green Hornet” between Cliff and Bruce Lee (played to ferocious perfection by Mike Moh)? Why not! A scene with Rick, playing a black-hatted villain on the new series “Lancer,” getting into a philosophical chat about acting with his 8-year-old girl costar, who’s a budding feminist Method Actor? Bring it. And when Cliff, driving Rick’s cream-colored Coupe de Ville, keeps passing an outrageously flirtatious teenage hippie vamp in cut-offs and a halter top, who lives with a guy named Charlie at the Spahn Movie Ranch, the sense of worlds colliding, in ways as sinister as they are vibrant, feels right.

Many have turned the spectacle of Charles Manson and his girls into drama, but Tarantino is onto something by viewing Manson’s followers as ominous harpies who also incarnated a new kind of sexualized feminine consciousness. And Tarantino takes us deeper than we’ve been into the life of Sharon Tate ( Margot Robbie ), who along with her husband, Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha), has rented the house next to Rick’s on Cielo Drive. Robbie nails Tate’s wide-eyed slightly aristocratic sensual daze, and has a lot of fun in a scene where Sharon goes to a movie matinee to watch herself in the Matt Helm caper “The Wrecking Crew,” exulting in her performance as she props her feet up on the seats, so that Quentin — in an image he uses as a motif more than ever before — can park his camera in front of them, as he does a little later with the Manson girls.

In “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood,” Tarantino re-creates the Hollywood of 50 years ago with a fantastically detailed and almost swoony time-machine precision, and it’s not just about the marquees and the billboards featuring end-of-the-studio-system-era corn like “Three in an Attic,” or all the juicy Top 40 chestnuts on the soundtrack. The movie captures how Hollywood, by 1969, was a head-spinningly layered place.

Here’s the TV-cowboy mystique of the ’60s, which is really a degraded schlock echo of the movie-cowboy culture of the ’50s. Here’s the rock ‘n’ roll of the moment (Paul Revere and the Raiders, “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man,” “Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show”), which popped like crazy yet with a rambunctious easy-listening bounce. And here, beyond the music, is the new noisiness of America: the “hip” commercials blaring from transistor radios, the TV sets that never get turned off (even the Manson girls are TV zombies), the flamboyant hippie garb that’s starting to go mainstream, turning the counterculture into a living fashion boutique.

Here’s a Playboy Mansion party where Steve McQueen (Damian Lewis) is hanging out, as you might expect him to be, but then so is Mama Cass (Rachel Redleaf). McQueen fills in the back story of Sharon, Roman, and their friend Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch), the hairdresser who is still in love with Sharon — and, according to McQueen, is hanging around with them because he’s biding his time, waiting for Roman to screw up his marriage. At that point, we’re hooked enough on Tarantino’s heightened version of true-life Hollywood that this love triangle sounds like a little movie of its own.

Rick, on the set of “Lancer,” turns out to be a desperate but terrific actor. There’s a sensational extended sequence of him playing the villain, forgetting his lines, hating himself in the trailer, then revving himself to go back and give a hell of a performance, and it’s all a testament to what an extraordinary actor DiCaprio is. Pitt is just as inspired. The sequence in which that Manson girl, named Pussycat (Margaret Qualley), gets Cliff to drive her back to the Spahn Movie Ranch, where Cliff used to shoot Westerns, and where he meets the Family (though not Charlie, who is only in the film for about 30 stray seconds), is creepy, suspenseful, and vengefully gratifying. All Cliff wants to do is say hello to his old colleague George Spahn (Bruce Dern). But to do that he’s got to threaten his way past Squeaky Fromme (Dakota Fanning), who sleeps with George to secure the place for the Manson cult. In the late ’60s, a lot of people passed through Spahn Ranch, and this encounter — though, of course, pure fiction — plays with an eerie plausibility.

Rick has an offer on the table, from a shrewd if scuzzy agent (Al Pacino), to shoot a Western in Rome. The prospect fills him with despair; he thinks spaghetti Westerns are the bottom rung of the entertainment totem pole. In a sense, he’s right, but he goes and does it, taking Cliff with him, and he spends six months there, making a few more movies; he comes back with an Italian wife. And it’s just at around the point of his return that “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood,” which thus far has been an enchanting Quentin ride, begins to move forward with less cocksure bravura, less virtuoso snap. In the movie, Tarantino has already introduced a narrator, who he uses sparingly, but then he starts to use the narrator more often, breaking the show-don’t-tell mystique, and we wonder why. Isn’t he the master of showing?

It’s now August 8, 1969, and the rest of the film is devoted to Quentin Tarantino’s version of how the Manson murders play out, which I will not reveal. I will say that what Tarantino does here rhymes, to a point, with the violent climax of “Inglourious Basterds.” Yet that movie, as much as it toyed with history (which was no more, really, than any of the late-studio-system World War II movies it drew from), was also, in the largest sense, true to history. Hitler got destroyed, and the Americans won. Which is, in fact, what happened. The way Tarantino plays with the Manson murders in “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” is at once more extreme and more trivial. And frankly, for this Tarantino believer, that made it less satisfying.

You can say, as many will, that it’s only a movie. But for much of “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood,” Tarantino brilliantly uses the presence of the Manson girls to suggest something in the Hollywood cosmos that’s diabolical in its bad vibes. And the way the movie resolves all this feels, frankly, too easy. By the end, Tarantino has done something that’s quintessentially Tarantino, but that no longer feels even vaguely revolutionary. He has reduced the story he’s telling to pulp.

Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Competition), May 21, 2019. Running time: 159 MIN.

• Production: A Sony Pictures Entertainment release of a Columbia Pictures, Heyday Films, Bona Film Group, Visionaria Romantica production. Producers: Quentin Tarantino, David Heyman, Shannon McIntosh. Executive producer: Georgia Kacandes.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Quentin Tarantino. Camera: (color, widescreen): Robert Richardson. Editor: Fred Raskin.
• With: Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Margot Robbie, Dakota Fanning, Damon Herriman, Austin Butler, Emile Hirsch, Scoot McNairy, Luke Perry, Al Pacino, Nicholas Hammond, Spencer Garrett, Mike Moh, Lena Dunham, Damian Lewis, Bruce Dern, Kurt Russell, Timothy Olyphant, Zoë Bell, James Marsden, Michael Madsen, James Remar, Brenda Vaccaro.

More from Variety

‘Joker: Folie à Deux’s’ Fatal Flaw Is Turning the Fans Into the Villains of the Sequel 

The Talent Compensation Question Hanging Over Netflix Earnings

Why Critically Panned ‘Joker 2’ Could Still Be in the Awards Race for Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix

The Time Bomb Ticking Beneath the CTV Advertising Boom

More from our brands, mariah carey heralds the holiday season with addams family-themed clip.

Rosie O’Donnell’s Former Waterfront Miami Beach Home Lists for $54 Million

Dwyane Wade Sculptor Faces Critics, Recalls Response to MJ Bronze

The Best Loofahs and Body Scrubbers, According to Dermatologists

Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage Faces Its First Major Hurdle in Episode 3

Advertisement

Supported by

critic’s pick

‘Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood’ Review: We Lost It at the Movies

Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt star as midlevel entertainment industry workers whose relationship forms the core of Quentin Tarantino’s look at the movie past.

• Share full article

By A.O. Scott

There is a lot of love in “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” and quite a bit to enjoy. The screen is crowded with signs of Quentin Tarantino’s well-established ardor — for the movies and television shows of the decades after World War II; for the vernacular architecture, commercial signage and famous restaurants of Los Angeles; for the female foot and the male jawline; for vintage clothes and cars and cigarettes. But the mood in this, his ninth feature, is for the most part affectionate rather than obsessive.

Don’t get me wrong. Tarantino is still practicing a cinema of saturation, demanding the audience’s total attention and bombarding us with allusions, visual jokes, flights of profane eloquence, daubs of throwaway beauty and gobs of premeditated gore. And yet “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” whose title evokes bedtime stories as well as a pair of Sergio Leone masterpieces, is Tarantino’s most relaxed movie by far, both because of its ambling, shaggy-dog structure and the easygoing rhythm of its scenes.

Though trouble percolates on the horizon and mayhem arrives in the final act, this is fundamentally a hangout movie, a bad-guys-come-to-town western more like “Rio Bravo” than “High Noon.” Above all, it’s a buddy picture about two middle-level entertainment industry workers doing their jobs and making the scene over a few hectic, sunny days in 1969.

The friendship between Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) functions for Tarantino as both keystone and key. It’s an organizing principle and a source of meaning, and a major reason that “Once Upon a Time” is more than a baby-boomer edition of Trivial Pursuit brought to life.

Unlike many of the people they share the screen with — the period-specific A-list characters include Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), Steve McQueen (Damian Lewis) and Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) — Rick and Cliff are made-up. Rick is an actor on the downward slope of a moderately successful career. A star in a handful of westerns and combat pictures, and of a popular TV western series , he is now mostly cast as a one-episode villain on other people’s shows. He’s considering an offer to make spaghetti westerns in Italy. (Tarantino supplies perfect fake clips to annotate Rick’s filmography.) Not a has-been, exactly, but not quite what he used to be or might have been.

Cliff is his longtime stunt double, but as Rick’s roles have shifted, his role has changed too. His duties include driving Rick (whose license has been suspended) to and from auditions and sets, performing minor household repairs and generally being available as a sounding board and drinking partner. You can’t really call Cliff a sidekick — we’re talking about Brad Pitt — and he’s not really a servant, either, even though Rick pays him for his time. An older vocabulary is needed: Cliff is a gentleman’s gentleman, a man Friday, a dogsbody, a squire. “More than a brother but less than a wife” is how the movie puts it.

The relationship isn’t defined by money or sex, but by a difference in rank accepted without comment or complaint by both parties. The inequality between the men — Rick lives in a spacious ranch house up in the hills, Cliff in a cluttered trailer down in the valley — is what dignifies their bond, just as the contrast of their temperaments sustain it.

Rick, a sloppy drinker and a furious smoker, wears his feelings close to the surface. He weeps aloud over the state of his career, throws an epic tantrum in his trailer when he messes up a scene and is moved to tears by the exquisiteness of his own acting. Cliff is a different kind of cat — lean, taciturn, self-effacing, slow to anger but capable of serious violence. Some say he’s a murderer; he himself occasionally alludes to a criminal past. Better not to ask. Apart from Rick, his main attachment is to his dog, Brandy, whose loyalty is the mirror of his own. (DiCaprio’s baroque, exuberant emotionalism perfectly complements Pitt’s down-to-the-bone minimalism. They’re both terrific.)

If the guys aren’t quite Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, their companionship nonetheless takes shape within a fundamentally aristocratic social order. Joan Didion, in an essay first published in 1973 , described the Hollywood of that era as “the last extant stable society,” and Tarantino’s tableau confirms this view. Life isn’t perfect, but it is coherent. People know their place. They respect the rules and hierarchies. Rick’s neighbors, Sharon Tate and her husband, Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha), live higher up in the canyon (at the end of a gated driveway) and also on the status pyramid. They are regarded not with envy or resentment, but with awe.

The governing virtue in this world is courtesy. The things produced within it are ridiculous, but also beautiful. Residents take seriously things that are objectively silly, which lends a measure of charm to otherwise pedestrian moments. A series of on-set interactions between Rick and two other actors — a leading man played by Timothy Olyphant and a juvenile played by the phenomenal Julia Butters — demonstrate the workings of this code. What they’re collaborating on might look like disposable commercial trash, but making it involves craft and tradition, folk wisdom and spiritual discipline, trust and integrity.

Tarantino’s sense of the movie past is often described as nostalgic. He tends to be seen — by admirers and critics alike — as a film geek, a fanboy, a fanatic cinephile with an encyclopedic command of archaic styles and genres. True enough. But “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” shows that he deserves a loftier, possibly more contentious label. It’s the expression of a sensibility that is profoundly and passionately conservative.

John Ford, one of old Hollywood’s greatest conservatives, ended one of his greatest movies with the exhortation to “print the legend.” Tarantino’s answer is to film the fairy tale.

Alongside the knight and his squire, there is a princess — Tate — who lives in something like a castle and is married to a man who looks a little like a frog. Tarantino has never been much interested in sex or romance — violence and vengeance are what makes his stories run — but he has a sentimental investment in marriage and a thing about wives.

Sharon, who is barefoot, pregnant or both in most of her scenes, is not so much a symbol of innocence or glamour as an emblem of normalcy. The best stretch of the movie follows her, Cliff and Rick through their separate routines on a single day. Rick is at work, fighting off a hangover and his own self-doubt. Cliff picks up a hitchhiker — a girl he’s noticed before, played by Margaret Qualley — and drives her to the Spahn Movie Ranch in Chatsworth, where she lives with a bunch of other young people (and an old guy played by Bruce Dern, one of many memorable cameos). Sharon also gives a stranger a ride, buys her husband a gift and stops in at a theater in Westwood to watch herself in “The Wrecking Crew,” a spoofy action caper starring Dean Martin.

That’s a real movie, as are most of the others whose titles appear on billboards and marquees. In the real world, six months after that magically ordinary imaginary day, Tate was murdered in her home on Cielo Drive, along with four of her friends. The killers lived at the Spahn Ranch, and were disciples of a failed musician named Charles Manson.

That’s the opposite of a spoiler, by the way. If you don’t know about the Manson family, or if you’re vague on the details of their crimes, you may not feel the tingle of foreboding that is crucial to Tarantino’s revisionism. Didion, in “The White Album,” wrote that “ many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on Aug. 9, 1969, ended at exactly the moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brush fire through the community.” But what if the ’60s never ended? Or rather, what if the ’60s, as a half-century of pop-culture habit has taught us to remember them, never really happened.

[Seen the movie? Let’s talk about the ending .]

The political struggles of the decade are deep in the background, occasionally crackling through car radio static along with traffic and weather reports. The music we hear isn’t a soundtrack of rebellion, but an anthology of pleasure. Tarantino’s anti-ironic celebration of the mainstream popular culture of the time amounts to a sustained argument against the idea of a counterculture. Those who would disrupt, challenge or destroy the last stable society on earth are in the grip of an ideological, aesthetic and moral error. Hippies aren’t cool. Old-time he-men like Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth are cool.

You don’t have to agree. I don’t think I do. But I also don’t mind. There will be viewers who object to the movie’s literal and metaphorical hippie-punching on political grounds. There will be others who embrace it as a thumb in the eye of current sensitivities, and others who insist the movie has no politics at all.

To which I can only say: It’s a western, for Pete’s sake. Politics are wound into its DNA, and Tarantino knows the genome better than anyone else. Which is just to say that like other classics of the genre, “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” is not going anywhere. It will stand as a source of debate — and delight — for as long as we care about movies. And it wants us to care.

Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood

Rated R. Not the bloodiest Tarantino, but still Tarantino. Running time: 2 hours 41 minutes.

A.O. Scott is the co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

Explore More in TV and Movies

Not sure what to watch next we can help..

Jump Scares That Still Make Us Jump : With Times film writers, filmmakers and stars weighing in, we ranked the 25 most chilling, spine-tingling, utterly terrifying scenes  that get us every time.

Is ‘Conclave’ Accurate? : Edward Berger’s new film isn’t the first to involve a papal election, but perhaps no other has focused so much on the liturgical details .

Seth Meyers Isn’t as Nice as You Think : The “Late Night” host has crafted a comedically precise but genial persona. A new stand-up special finds him reveling in his more acerbic side .

Streaming Guides:  If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings   on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime  and Hulu  to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

Watching Newsletter:  Sign up to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows  to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.

Things you buy through our links may earn  Vox Media  a commission.

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Is a Seductive Pipe Dream

Quentin Tarantino isn’t the only director who makes movies that address, invoke, extol, parody, imitate, and fetishize other movies, but he’s one of the few whose dialogues with the past can occupy the same artistic plane as the objects of his reverence — and can even, on happier occasions, transcend it. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a very happy occasion. It’s a ramshackle ’60s pastiche that acquires a life of its own, evoking not just an era and its pop culture but also celebrating the impulse to recreate and (the effrontery!) rewrite the past in line with his fantasies. Say what you will about those fantasies — they’re innocent, they’re deviant, they’re sometimes weirdly both at once — but no one imparts his pipe dreams so seductively.

The ’60s that engages Tarantino doesn’t touch on the healthy and corrective elements of the counterculture. If anything, he’s a reactionary, nostalgic for the lone-gunman TV Westerns of the ’50s and early ’60s, while using the Manson “family” member s to represent hippies. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, a fading Western TV star with a star-size drinking problem. Rick would self-destruct in private but for his bud, his amigo, his stuntman/driver/gofer/one-man entourage, Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt. Discomfort is built into the relationship, because Cliff can’t get work on his own (there’s a scandal in his past) and because Rick no longer has the clout to ensure that Cliff will be hired along with him. It gets awkward. Tagging along, Cliff seems like a bit of a masochist: After chauffeuring Rick home, he returns to his trailer, watches Mannix , and eats a bowl of macaroni and cheese (from a box) while his big dog beside him has a bowl of dog food (from a can — and slimy). They’re both good dogs. Rick, meanwhile, must consider a life in Italy with or without Cliff, where spaghetti Westerns beckon to American actors past their prime.

For a while, Once Upon a Time seems as if it’s going to be nothing but a series of extended digressions. But it’s shaped like a Western, and gets better, tighter, and more surprising as it moseys along, plainly building to the grisly, still-inexplicable tragedy that’s said to have ended the hedonistic feel of late-’60s Hollywood. Next door to Rick on Cielo Drive in the Hollywood Hills live Roman Polanski — super-hot off Rosemary’s Baby — and his young bride, Sharon Tate ( Margot Robbie ), whom we know going in will be butchered on the night of August 9, 1969, by Manson family members at the behest of their psychotic overlord. Tate is the film’s third and lesser protagonist, but Robbie has one of its most moving scenes, in which Tate goes to a theater to watch herself in a new Dean Martin–Matt Helm movie. If Tarantino has a Dream Girl, it would be Robbie here, her dirt-smudged bare feet (he’s notorious for his foot fetishism) on the chair in front of her, wide-eyed at seeing herself best Nancy Kwan in a karate fight. Be still my heart! That the footage onscreen is of the real Sharon Tate makes the sequence even more poignant.

I’m slightly older than Tarantino (I was born in ’59, Tarantino in ’63) but we share a nostalgia for a culture we saw only from afar, too young to have gotten in on all the R-rated fun. As shot in glowing hues by Robert Richardson and designed by Barbara Ling (production) and Arianne Phillips (costumes), the bric-a-brac constitutes its own kind of fetishism. Marquees with titles like Three in an Attic (what did the trio do up there?) are tantalizing, and so are radio commercials for perfume and trailers for such movies as C.C. and Company with Joe Namath on a motorcycle (plus Ann-Margret). There was no home video, of course, and no streaming, so you saw movies in theaters or waited for them to show up (edited, panned-and-scanned, broken up by commercials) on TV (on one of only six or seven channels). There’s no reason for Tarantino to have Rick’s effusive new agent (Al Pacino) mention that he watched Rick’s movies at home in 35 millimeter and TV shows in 16 except that it sounds so exotic, like saying you listened to a single at 45 rpm. An issue of TV Guide (how umbilically attached we were to it!) sits on Cliff’s table. Robert Goulet murders “MacArthur Park” on the TV screen. Tarantino sets off the Mannix opening with its floating split screens and brassy Lalo Schifrin theme the way Warhol set off his soup cans. The jam-packed soundtrack, chockablock with goodies, is its own love letter to the ’60s. Tarantino gives you the sense that he makes movies to be able to live inside them. They’re his time machines.

His dialogue doesn’t have the tension of his other movies, but after the interminable macho patter of The Hateful Eight , I welcomed the gentle pacing and the characters’ introspection. I’ve never enjoyed DiCaprio more than in the middle section, in which Rick is a guest villain on a pilot for another TV Western starring an actor played by Timothy Olyphant. He has an exchange on a porch with little Julia Butters (a star is born!) as an endearingly serious child actress that proves DiCaprio doesn’t have to grandstand to draw you into his character’s alienation. He doesn’t even have to furrow that wide brow to suggest deep thoughts — they’re there in his stillness and in his melancholy, near-musical drawl. There’s a scene in his trailer (“You’re a fuckin’ miserable drunk!” he screams at himself in the mirror. “Get the lines right or I’ll blow your fuckin’ brains out!”) that taps into an aspect of DiCaprio’s personality I’ve never seen onscreen before — the fear of screwing up to a point where he won’t be noticed anymore. (Nicholas Hammond is wonderful as the show’s director, Sam Wanamaker, an actor who’d go on to recreate Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London; Tarantino introduces just enough Shakespearean diction into Wanamaker’s lines to capture the essence of his passion.)

Cliff’s big sequence is almost as amazing. Tarantino has never written something as quietly foreboding as Cliff’s visit to the Spahn Ranch, a former set for Westerns in which the Manson family has taken up residence. Cliff has given a lift to one of the “girls,” played by Margaret Qualley (best known for The Leftovers ), who beckons to him with her eyes and then her whole body — so light it’s as if she’s wafted on air currents. (This is another star-making turn.) Cliff trudges around the compound under the suspicious glare of other girls — a posse that includes Lena Dunham and Dakota Fanning as “Squeaky” Fromme — in search of the owner he worked with a decade earlier. In Mary Harron’s recent Manson drama , Charlie Says , the blind, elderly Spahn was seen being fellated by a Manson girl, but here he’s a full-blown figure of pathos played by Bruce Dern, whose customary cantankerousness suggests a man whose age and disabilities have helped transform him into a helpless addict. (Manson doesn’t appear in this sequence. Damon Herriman plays him with spooky dishevelment in a scene in which the madman wanders onto Tate’s property looking for its previous resident, the music producer Terry Melcher.)

It’s hard to do justice to the riches of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood , to its cameos (Damian Lewis as mean Steve McQueen!) and its droll bits of business, among them a devilish shot featuring a speargun. Tarantino has audaciously written Bruce Lee (played by Mike Moh) as an arrogant dick who lectures Hollywood stuntmen on his superiority. There are lapses. Al Pacino doesn’t have the fine-tuning for a Tarantino movie — his generalized hamminess sticks out. The shots of the lank-haired, scowling Manson girls spread out in a line are a misogynist’s nightmare — they look ready to tear Cliff to pieces like the Dionysian harpies in The Bacchae . I’m troubled that Tarantino suggests (even satirically) that square-jawed macho cowboys were victims of the counterculture and would have been (along with their fists, guns, and flamethrowers) the answer to its excesses.

But on its own terms, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a farrago of genius. Because of the horror that’s imminent, a sequence in which Hollywood’s neon signs (El Coyote, Musso & Frank, and more) hum to life as the sky darkens on August 9 is both lyrical and bristling with dread. The convulsively brutal climax I wouldn’t dare to spoil. The finale is a wonder. Has there ever been a scene so simultaneously euphoric and heartbreaking? Tarantino’s dream world is a sadistic place, but in a way it’s sublime, like heaven nestled inside hell.

• vulture homepage lede
• once upon a time in hollywood
• movie review
• quentin tarantino
• leonardo dicaprio

Most Viewed Stories

• Cinematrix No. 219: October 31, 2024
• Young Thug Freed After Guilty Plea in YSL Trial
• The 32 Best Horror Movies to Watch on Every Streaming Service
• Agatha All Along Finale Recap: Like Mother(s) Like Son(s)
• How Escape at Dannemora Actors Compare to Their Real-life Counterparts
• Every Bob’s Burgers Halloween Episode, Ranked
• Love Is Blind Reunion Recap: Dropping a Grenade

Most Popular

What is your email.

This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us.

Sign In To Continue Reading

Create your free account.

Password must be at least 8 characters and contain:

• Lower case letters (a-z)
• Upper case letters (A-Z)
• Numbers (0-9)
• Special Characters (!@#$%^&*)

As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York , which you can opt out of anytime.

Review: A Quentin Tarantino skeptic takes great pleasure in ‘Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood’

• Copy Link URL Copied!

I go back with Quentin Tarantino, way back, starting with being in the room at 1992’s Sundance Film Festival when his debut feature, “Reservoir Dogs,” had one of its very first screenings.

When a visibly pained audience member asked Tarantino in the Q&A how he justified the film’s tidal waves of violence, the director almost didn’t understand the question. “Justify it?” he echoed before just about roaring, “I don’t have to justify it. I love it!”

Over the next quarter-century, little has changed. To enjoy Tarantino was to embrace his preening style, to share his reductive view of cinema and the world and violence’s preeminent place in both.

I was a chronic dissenter — I still get occasional grief about my “Pulp Fiction” review — so how is it that I reacted with distinct pleasure to the writer-director’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood”?

The film toplines Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt as, respectively, TV star Rick Dalton and his stuntman Cliff Booth, longtime best friends kicking around Hollywood in 1969 with Charlie Manson and company lurking in the background. Had Tarantino changed, had I, or was it both of us?

At age 56 and recently married, Tarantino talked at the film’s Cannes press conference about “taking stock,” and in fact “Once Upon a Time” strikes a chord that is distinctly elegiac and unexpectedly emotional, especially coming from him.

Hollywood Inc.

Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood’ is Sony’s big summer gamble. Will it pay off?

Sony Pictures fought hard to land Quentin Tarantino’s first film after Weinstein. Will the $90-million bet on originality and star power pay off?

July 24, 2019

Though florid Italian westerns, primarily those of Sergio Corbucci , one of Tarantino’s idols, are front and center in the story line, the tone of this film owes as much to low-key, end-of-an-era Hollywood westerns like the Joel McCrea/Randolph Scott pairing in Sam Peckinpah’s “Ride the High Country.” Really.

Don’t misunderstand, the familiar Tarantino gut-clenching ultra-violence, especially against women, has hardly disappeared. But it has been in effect quarantined to several wrenching minutes near the end of what is for most of its leisurely two-hour, 41-minute length a tribute to both a bygone era and the kind of masculine charisma and camaraderie the movies have always specialized in.

What this means in practice is that what would be peripheral elsewhere is central here. Things like character moments and quirks of personality as well as detailed specifics of popular culture, whether they be from film, TV, music or commercials, are not window dressing to pass the time until the plot kicks in; they are the essential reason “Once Upon a Time” exists.

When Tarantino says in the press notes “I tried a couple of different stories and then I decided no, I didn’t want to put them [his protagonists] though some typical melodramatic plotline,” he’s not being coy, he’s telling the truth.

With Victoria Thomas as casting director, “Once Upon a Time” is rich in involving acting across the board, including Dakota Fanning as Manson honcho Squeaky Fromme, the ageless Bruce Dern as rancher George Spahn and Margaret Qualley, a would-be nun in “Novitiate” here seen as the inescapably promiscuous Manson follower Pussycat.

Best of all, not surprisingly, are DiCaprio and Pitt, completely at ease with their parts and each other, the joke being that they use their enormous movie star presences to play a below-the-line stuntman and a second-tier star afraid of falling further, characters Tarantino feels unmistakable warmth toward.

Inspired by real-life relationships like those between Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham or Steve McQueen and Bud Ekins, the pair function here a bit like Raymond Chandler’s tarnished knights, doing good despite themselves, an association heightened by a bookstore scene reminiscent of one in Humphrey Bogart’s “The Big Sleep.”

Also front and center is Tarantino’s passion for the late ’60s in general and its popular culture and moviemaking machinery in particular.

The specificity of “Once Upon a Time’s” references to the artifacts of the era is astonishing to the point of obsession, including having production designer Barbara Ling fabricate false fronts to place in front of today’s Hollywood Boulevard establishments and encouraging Musso & Frank to pull period dinnerware out of storage.

Every item we see onscreen, and we see lots of them, from not one but a series of Hopalong Cassidy mugs to a copy of a “Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos” comic book, looks like it was carefully selected because of its closeness to the filmmaker’s heart.

Talking to Tarantino about the era, DiCaprio said at Cannes, was “almost like tapping into a computer database — his knowledge is unfathomable,” adding accurately, “He’s made a love letter to his industry.”

After providing us with a brief but pithy introduction to “Bounty Law,” the recently discontinued show that made Rick Dalton a household name, “Once Upon a Time” walks us through three days, two in February and one in August, in star and stuntman’s intertwined lives, starting with Dalton’s Musso lunch with top agent Marvin Schwarzs.

Expertly chewing the scenery like he just came off a hunger strike, Al Pacino brings us up to speed on Rick Dalton’s filmography, lavishing special praise on the action epic “The 14 Fists of McCluskey.” (No one invents names like Tarantino.)

But that career is hanging in the balance, Schwarzs explains, before holding out a lifeline à la Clint Eastwood of doing westerns in Italy, something Dalton, with no love of cinema made by “I-talians,” initially resists.

Introduced at this point are Dalton’s recently moved-in neighbors on Cielo Drive in Benedict Canyon, the glamorous Sharon Tate ( Margot Robbie ), briefly seen husband Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha) and best friend Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch).

Also glimpsed momentarily is Charlie Manson (Damon Herriman), though members of his family hanging out at Spahn Movie Ranch (including characters played by Lena Dunham and Maya Hawke) are given more visibility.

While conventional plot elements do appear from time to time, especially toward the conclusion, most of “Once Upon a Time” consists of the string of stand-alone vignettes that Tarantino clearly cherishes.

The most memorable include Sharon Tate spending an afternoon enjoying her performance in “The Wrecking Crew” at the Bruin in Westwood and Rick Dalton having an elaborate heart-to-heart chat with a wise-beyond-her-years 8-year-old actress (wonderfully played by Julia Butters) prior to a big scene.

And then there is Pitt’s Cliff Booth, improbably up on a roof to fix a TV antenna, casually taking off his shirt to reveal a perfectly toned and impeccably lit upper body. Movie star moments don’t get any purer than that.

Also pure and not to be underestimated is how personal so much of what we see is to Tarantino. He’s showcased the massive three-sheet-size poster for “The Golden Stallion,” one of his favorite films; given a cameo to his wife, Daniella Pick; and even found time for a charming montage of great L.A. neon (El Coyote, Musso & Frank, Chili John’s and more) lighting up at twilight.

Tarantino was a boy of 6 in 1969, living far from the center of Los Angeles, and in a sense what he’s done here is re-create the world he’s imagined the adults were living in at the time. If it plays like a fairy tale, and it does, don’t forget the first words in the title are “Once Upon a Time.”

'Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood'

Rated: R, for language, some strong graphic violence, drug use and sexual references Running time: 2 hours, 41 minutes Playing: Starts July 26 in general release

More to Read

George Clooney fires back at Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell in Q&A with Brad Pitt

Aug. 14, 2024

Robert Towne, Oscar-winning screenwriting icon behind ‘Chinatown,’ dies at 89

July 2, 2024

The 50 best Hollywood books of all time

April 8, 2024

Only good movies

Get the Indie Focus newsletter, Mark Olsen's weekly guide to the world of cinema.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Kenneth Turan is the former film critic for the Los Angeles Times.

More From the Los Angeles Times

Review: ‘Here’ takes the elements of a ‘Gump’ reunion and flattens them into faux-cosmic tedium

Oct. 31, 2024

‘Finding Mr. Christmas’ challenges men to ‘lead with kindness’ for a role as a Hallmark hunk

Review: Civic duty leads to an inconvenient moral quagmire in Clint Eastwood’s ‘Juror #2’

Motion picture academy lays off staff at archive and library amid broader restructuring

Most read in movies.

Stanley Tucci talks to us about his new film ‘Conclave’ and, of course, Italian food

Oct. 23, 2024

Review: Provocatively, ‘Blitz’ evokes England’s finest hour to take on fascism at home

The makers of ‘Alien: Romulus’ defend their AI-resurrected Ian Holm: ‘We did it all with a lot of respect’

Aug. 19, 2024

What was the first episode of ‘SNL’ really like? Fact vs. fiction in ‘Saturday Night’

Oct. 11, 2024

• Login / Sign Up

Support fearless, independent journalism

The election is less than a week away and the stakes are higher than ever. Despite the need for strong independent journalism, it is under attack, both from politicians and from billionaires who hold power. At Vox, we lead with courage and call things as we see them . We know the stakes of this election are huge, and we believe you deserve to understand how the outcome will affect your life.

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is Tarantino’s fun, haunting homage to the summer of ’69

Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Margot Robbie lead this star-studded film about a fading era.

by Alissa Wilkinson

Name a movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and you’re tipping your hand from the start. Quentin Tarantino’s ninth feature (and penultimate, if the director’s threat to retire after his 10th is to be believed) is a fairy tale, a fantasy, and a wistful elegy for a world that most of us wish we lived in — most of all, Tarantino himself.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a historical drama, sort of. Tarantino has often worked in the historical mode; in films like Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained , he also fantasized about the past. In those movies, he chooses to rewrite history as a kind of act of revenge and righting of wrongs.

Before the film’s Cannes premiere, the director issued a request to those who’d be seeing the film that they not reveal plot spoilers, which — given those known historical predilections — mostly succeeded in sparking murmured speculation about what he was up to. After all, we know Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is at least partly about the grisly, infamous 1969 Charles Manson family murders, which claimed the lives of five people, including director Roman Polanski’s wife, actress Sharon Tate.

And, of course, I’m not going to tell you what happens (not because of Tarantino’s request, but because I’m a professional movie critic). But you don’t need to have any idea of the plot of the film to understand that, if Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained (and, to an extent, even The Hateful Eight ) are fantastical, revisionist histories, Tarantino’s latest movie is wish fulfillment on a much grander scale — but simultaneously a more intimate one.

Tarantino, famously obsessed with the history of cinema and its preservation , has recreated a world he wishes he could have worked in with such care and skill and love that, for the most part, it feels like his most personal film. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is lots of fun, but it’s also strangely, hauntingly sad.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood tells a story of a fading world

I should start by confessing that I usually find myself put off by Tarantino’s films. He is clearly one of the most technically competent filmmakers of our time — probably of all time — but his storytelling frequently strikes me as sophomoric and smug, sometimes interested in taunting the audience for their love of violence and sometimes too seemingly pleased with its own cleverness.

I say all that because it sets up my own reaction to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. On the whole, I really liked it, possibly more than I’ve liked any of Tarantino’s other films. This is the story of Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), an actor who was huge in the 1950s but whose star is fading. Rick’s stunt double, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt, who is mesmerizing in this role), also acts as his driver, best friend, and pep talk provider.

By 1969, Rick, as it turns out, is living next door to the Polanskis on Cielo Drive. He doesn’t know them at all, though he catches sight of Roman (Rafal Zawierucha) and Sharon (Margot Robbie) sometimes as they come up the driveway, living the life he covets.

Two main stories run on parallel tracks in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood . One concerns Sharon, who is carefree, innocent, and eager to please. The other follows Rick and Cliff, which often splits into two stories of its own: Rick’s struggle to be an actor of real worth in a changing industry, and Cliff’s brush with a group of teenaged girls (and a few guys) living on an abandoned ranch that once functioned as a movie set. That group, of course, turns out to be the Manson family.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood feels like Tarantino’s attempt to capture a past that could have been

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a wistful story about the past that’s obviously meant to speak to the present, both eras of a fiercely changing industry. There are nuggets scattered throughout for cinephiles and classic Hollywood aficionados, but also things that recall today’s Hollywood: discussions of various characters’ whispered indiscretions and violent pasts that nobody dares to act on; the small screen threatening to overtake the big screen; young people with different tastes and morals than their elders; cheap knock-offs and factory-line productions imitating earlier, groundbreaking films, that are churned out to make fast bucks. It’s a movie about 2019 as much as 1969.

But on its surface, this is a movie that walks and talks and acts like it’s 1969, and it’s obvious that Tarantino simply loves that time in cinema. There’s a glow over the whole film that feels partly like it’s just California and partly like it’s a retrofitted Golden Age made literal. Part of what makes the director so interesting — and so beloved at history-obsessed film festivals like Cannes — is that he’s possibly the most skilled contemporary wielder of cinematic pastiche: He borrows images, sounds, techniques, and music from different eras but always manages to make them his own.

That’s clear right down to the way he shoots his two main leads, Pitt and DiCaprio, who feel almost Redford- and Newman-esque in the way they swagger and talk and flash a grin. It’s also strangely clear (by design or not, I can’t say for sure) in the fact that Robbie, despite being third billed in the film’s credits (behind Pitt and DiCaprio and ahead of a lengthy list of other stars), doesn’t have a lot to say or do in the film.

Tarantino received some heat at the Cannes Film Festival for his (unnecessarily combative) response to a journalist’s question at a press conference , in which he vehemently told a New York Times reporter who asked about Robbie’s relatively small number of lines in the film that he “rejected [her] hypothesis.” But as the actress herself said in her response, her character has some of the film’s most moving scenes. Sharon Tate is often remembered as little more than the actress from Valley of the Dolls , the wife of Roman Polanski, and the girl who got murdered by the Manson family. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood gives her emotional depth.

I can’t quite explain this part without giving anything away, so you’ll just have to trust me: The way Once Upon a Time in Hollywood unwinds its story makes it clear that it’s more of a lament — a requiem for a past age, one that he deeply wishes didn’t have to pass away.

Tarantino is not alone in this. Joan Didion, who was an acquaintance of Tate’s, wrote in her famous essay “ The White Album ” of the murders on Cielo Drive as the marker for many people of the end of the ’60s. It was the moment when “the tension broke,” she writes, but it’s also one of the most significant events of the summer of 1969, one that made her feel as though the world had quit making sense and was going to pieces.

Popular culture has continued to try to make sense of the event, which takes on mythic proportions. Movies from 1976’s Helter Skelter to 2015’s Manson Family Vacation and TV shows like NBC’s Aquarius and FX’s American Horror Story: Cult have replayed the story and its cultural legacy, either literally or as a template for stories about cults and killings. Hollywood historian Karina Longworth’s excellent podcast You Must Remember This devoted an entire season to Manson’s Hollywood . In 2016, Emma Cline’s novel The Girls fictionalized the events in an attempt to look inside the Manson girls’ psychology. Two movies have already come out in 2019 about Manson and the murders: Charlie Says and The Haunting of Sharon Tate.

But for Tarantino, the murders aren’t the main interest. He’s most fascinated by the world around them, in the fact that Manson ultimately wound up in Hollywood and not some other place. The factors that might drive girls to follow a man like Manson might also be linked to what caused Rick Dalton’s star to start fading.

Tarantino is nostalgic for that time, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is more his tribute than an unpacking or analysis of what it all means (unlike, for instance, the Coen brothers’ 2016 film Hail, Caesar! , which has something to say about warring ideologies in the industry at the same time).

By the end of the film, Tarantino falls back into some of his familiar tropes. It’s as though he just can’t stop himself from dipping into old habits but doesn’t really know why and isn’t sure how to stick the landing. But until that point, it is a star-studded joy to watch. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood doesn’t have a lot to say, in the end. And yet it manages to capture some of that old-time Hollywood movie magic.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May. It opens in US theaters on July 26.

More in this stream

Most Popular

• Who came out looking the worst on Love Is Blind season 7
• The big lie behind Biden’s “garbage” gaffe scandal
• Gen Z is shocked by Trump’s Access Hollywood video. We should be, too. Member Exclusive
• Diddy was hiding in plain sight Member Exclusive
• 2024 election violence is already happening

Today, Explained

Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day.

This is the title for the native ad

More in Culture

The latest attempt to find love in the pods was good for Netflix, but bad for everyone else involved.

How hip-hop’s Dionysus rose to power, decade after decade.

Let’s not forget Trump’s decades of documented sexual misconduct.

Red 3 has been banned for use in cosmetics and topical drugs since 1990. Why is it still in our food?

The Trump campaign’s anti-trans advertising is pure scapegoating — with a bigger, sinister purpose.

Policies boosting gender equality are popular. The word “feminist” is not.

Movies | ‘Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood’ review:…

Share this:.

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on X (Opens in new window)
• Click to print (Opens in new window)
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
• Music and Concerts
• The Theater Loop
• TV and Streaming

Things To Do

Movies | ‘once upon a time … in hollywood’ review: south of a masterwork, but still tarantino’s best in years.

The year is 1969. Dalton’s glory days — he came to stardom on a TV series called “Bounty Law” — have fallen away to insecurity, alcohol and a general, multidirectional disdain for hippie culture and the so-called New Hollywood. Where does he fit in?

Like so much in American culture, from “All About Eve” to “Hamilton,” this film is about egocentric power players and muscling your way into the room where it happens. At one point in “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” Dalton is on the set of a show (he’s doing a guest shot in a vaguely humiliating bad-guy mustache). He strikes up an unlikely conversation with an eight-year-old girl (Julia Butters), also an actor, intent on honing her craft.

Dalton’s reading a Zane Grey-type novel between scenes. What’s it about, she wonders? Well, he says, slowly, it’s about a man “coming to terms with becoming slightly more useless each day.” In other words it’s Dalton’s own saga in a nutshell, and the movie’s heavily underlined thesis.

It’s Booth, played by Brad Pitt, not Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who exudes confidence and skill. Booth exists within a bubble of old-school glamour as well as freedom from doubt, fear or hippies. He’s the real object of Tarantino’s man-crush in his extravagant, lavishly detailed fairy tale that intersects at various key points with Charles Manson’s “family,” the strung-out sirens wandering around the George Spahn ranch in rural Chatsworth. This is where Booth and Dalton worked on “Bounty Law.” Portents of doom, Manson’s wrecking crew lies in wait, ready for their close-up, and for a fateful trip to 10050 Cielo Drive.

Like a looser, more indulgent variation on E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime,” Tarantino’s script spins a leisurely fantasy set in a real time and place. Tarantino plunders real-world movies and TV shows (“The Great Escape,” “Mannix”) for background, and the background often slips into the foreground.

Margot Robbie, not exactly overtaxed in a largely non-verbal role, plays Tate, who is depicted by Tarantino as a mini-skirted goddess of sweetness and hope in a commodity universe. With her husband away making a movie in London, Tate slips into a theater to watch herself in the Matt Helm spy spoof “The Wrecking Crew.” Tarantino is plainly nuts about both Tate and Robbie (and Robbie’s bare feet, but that’s another, well-chronicled story ). But he’s also sweet on Tate’s comic talent. Watching Tate enjoy the movie theater audience’s appreciation of her comic shtick, she becomes worthy in Tarantino’s eyes.

Similarly, it’s tough guy Booth, kicking the stuffing out of fledging action star Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) in one droll sequence, who represents the quintessence of Hollywood gold. He’s notorious for the probable murder of his wife and getting away with it. (In a brief speculative flashback, set on a boat, the movie rips a page out of the mysterious-death-of-Natalie Wood ledger.) But that killer aura gives him an edge, in a city on the verge of an ultimate death trip.

Part trivia contest, part alternate universe fable and part triumph of cinematic atmosphere, the movie owes a lot to Barbara Ling’s mouth-watering production design. Tarantino’s enjoyment of period re-creation on a grand scale pays some wondrous dividends. At dusk, in one sweet, quick montage, famous neon signage all over Hollywood comes to life. (The reported production budget was $90 million, making it second only to his Americanized spaghetti western “Django Unchained” for expense.) I’d see “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” simply to listen to it again: Tarantino and company deploy radio commercials of the period just so, akin to the way “American Graffiti” made its AM radio soundscape as compelling as the characters. If not more so.

Tarantino’s preoccupations, limitations and strengths are all on display in “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.” At heart, he’s a movie-besotted pastiche artist, recycling the movies he fell for in his adolescence. He’s a thrill-seeking Peter Pan, with no interest in growing up. This is a boys’ club movie starring DiCaprio, who has worked out a shrewd set of character “tells” and details (a slight stammer, a glimmer of panic in the eyes when he’s imploding with self-loathing). Pitt, at 55 DiCaprio’s senior by 11 years, keeps things close to the chest, relaxing into a project requiring mainly what the studio publicists used to call “It.” And Pitt still has It, along with It’s frequent co-star, Abs.

Cleverly, Tarantino twirls the fictional material plausibly around the facts and eerie inhabitants of the Spahn ranch, and the otherworldly, zonked-out denizens of the Manson family. Dakota Fanning makes a scarily convincing Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme. Manson himself, like Roman Polanski, makes only a brief cameo. The movie can’t be bothered to fully characterize any of the females on screen, including Robbie’s Sharon Tate.

That’s a serious drawback. So is the climax, which goes whole hog with wishful dramatic thinking. Some will love it; I found it sort of cheap and more than a little exploitative. It’s “fun,” which tastes wrong.

On the other hand: I got a lot more out of Tarantino’s latest than several of his recent movies. The filmmaking, and Robert Richardson’s cinematography, is infinitely more fluid and expressive than the static aggravations of the 2015 western “ The Hateful Eight .” A key inspiration for “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” comes from the Sergio Leone canon, notably “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968). That film, a financial disappointment in its day but now considered a masterwork, wrote a mournful valentine to a movie genre as well as a transitional point in American history. Tarantino has something similar in mind here.

The real payoff in “Hollywood” is just that: Hollywood, and Tarantino’s sincere adoration of the actors and genres he so admires. His best film, I think, is “Jackie Brown” (1997) largely for the pleasure of seeing Pam Grier and Robert Forster go to town. Despite some wonderful actors, “Hollywood” is more about idealized memory than fully realized people. The movie’s best fleeting images are the ones that linger, such as Tarantino’s re-creations of Hollywood Boulevard and the Valley and the Hollywood hills, as they might have looked in the summer of 1969. Alfonso Cuarón accomplished a similar magic trick in the Mexico City street scenes of “ Roma .”

The results? More evocative than provocative. But evocative is not nothing.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

[email protected]

“Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” — 3 stars

MPAA rating : R (for language throughout, some strong graphic violence, drug use, and sexual references)

Running time : 2:41

Opens : Thursday evening

More in Movies

Movies | ‘Juror #2’ review: In Clint Eastwood’s intriguing courtroom drama, a possible guilty verdict comes with extra guilt

Movies | In appreciation: Teri Garr was an original who fought typecasting to the end

Movies | Review: ‘Here’ has Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, very nearly human

News Obituaries | Teri Garr, offbeat comic actress of ‘Young Frankenstein’ and ‘Tootsie,’ has died

Trending nationally.

• Infants died from birth defects at higher rates after abortion ban was imposed in Florida
• Lawyer for convicted ‘Fitbit’ killer seeks to overturn guilty verdict. Here’s what he argues.
• A Maryland man spent thousands building a go-kart track for his son. Now, it’s at the center of controversy.
• FBI: Fired Disney employee hacked restaurant menus so they falsely claimed certain foods as peanut-free
• Billy Corgan’s mother-in-law injured when car crashes into his tea shop