Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019)

Directed by Quentin Tarantino. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Margaret Qualley, Julia Butters, Al Pacino, Emile Hirsch, Timothy Olyphant, Austin Butler, Kurt Russell, Nicholas Hammond, Mike Moh, Dakota Fanning, Luke Perry, Bruce Dern, Lorenza Izzo, Damian Lewis, Kate Berlant. [R]

Movie star on the decline, Rick Dalton (DiCaprio), and his best friend and stunt double, Cliff (Pitt), navigate a late-60s Hollywood that has left them behind and is barely even recognizable anymore; Dalton also happens to live next door to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate (Robbie) while the Spahn Movie Ranch is becoming overrun with squatters under the spell of evil Charlie Manson. Director Tarantino’s fetishes are on full display here (pop culture references, explosions of graphic violence, camera lingering on bare feet, etc.), but so is his mastery of storytelling, the rhythm of dialogue, crisp and vibrant direction, and encouraging great acting across the entire (large) cast. Those performances, particularly from DiCaprio and Oscar-winner Pitt at the top of both of their games, aid in carrying the audience over some uneven pacing in the midsection and retrieving focus when the narrative outskirts start to ramble. An intriguing curveball in the Tarantino oeuvre: rather than capping off long, suspenseful scenes with the catharsis of sudden bloodshed, he more often than not lets the dread build and build and then hiss out like air from a balloon as the scene moves on; squirms of discomfort rather than laughs or screams for release. The unorthodox climax is bound to puzzle, infuriate, excite, divide, but whatever one thinks of it, how else was Tarantino going to send us off, and would any other director have dared to do the same?

90/100