Critics reviews

Tarantino has a powerful sense of narrative form, and I find myself appreciating the large structures that he builds around the giving of pleasure and the qualification of it, even when the actual pleasures that are his currency don’t hit home for me.

For those who have [seen it], I suspect you can guess the parts of this film I hated, though I dreamily enjoyed most of it. . . . The film treads a fine line: it’s so laid back as to be almost boring, but it isn’t quite. Like a more relaxed Jackie Brown. I personally found it quite sexist, despite Margot Robbie’s radiant portrayal of a very underwritten Sharon Tate.

More self-aware than Spielberg and less cynical than Hitchcock, Tarantino is absolutely sincere in his grateful, reverent attachment to Hollywood and his obsession with the movies of his adolescence. And in successfully implicating the audience and satisfying its bloodlust at the conclusion of Once Upon a Time, he pulls off an impressively Hitchcockian switcheroo.

Perhaps in keeping with its once-removed nature – its beautifully tailored motifs of role play and fakery, its wild and privileged liberties with history – Once upon a Time… in Hollywood leaves less of a residue than its predecessors.

Once Upon a Time… in one movie… these people lived. And then the song ends. I know it’s a song, but losing yourself in music – it’s one of the great pleasures of life, even if it makes you cry, even if you know some songs aren’t always the way real life goes. But the feelings sure are real, and that yearning sure is real. This is a Tarantino masterpiece.

What we know—about what really happened—makes Once Upon a Time satisfying; and what we know also makes it indescribably sad. It’s an impossible movie, and a movie about impossibility. . . . Tarantino has made a primal, powerful film that’s difficult to square; it’s hard to know what emotion to take with you when it’s over. This is also what keeps it lingering in the mind.

Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is catnip to Tarantino nerds like me. . . . If all of this assures that you’d never mistake Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood as the work of another director, other elements show Tarantino striking out in new directions. Chief among these is his mash-up of two normally distinct story types: the show-biz tale and the true crime yarn.

The movie is fine. There’s sensual pleasure to be found in watching Brad Pitt drive around and smoke cigarettes. And there is pleasure in the film’s campy, gory ending, if that’s your kind of thing. But as always, Tarantino’s historical revisionism falls flat: he remains trapped in an oral stage of psycho-cinematic gratification, cathartically curb-stomping historical villains with boots of liberal do-goodery.

Once Upon a Time is pop Proust conducted by a master reverist who has never forgotten the smallest detail of the culture that obsessed him as a young boy.

Tarantino’s melancholy epic conveys middle-aged nostalgia for the presumed innocence of the 1950s, before hippies existed and when someone like Sharon Tate could be guiltlessly cherished as a bimbo who always knew when to keep her mouth shut. It also celebrates the 1960s American practice of using napalm, or, in the case of racist Southern law enforcers, high-powered water hoses against diverse undesirables.

Rather than merely memorializing the time before 1969, Tarantino has ingeniously and complicatedly designed a movie that lets that period flourish unfiltered and uncorrected, a combination of his best and worst instincts.

“Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood” has been called Tarantino’s most personal film, and that may well be true—it’s far more revealing about Tarantino than about Hollywood itself, and his vision of the times in question turns out to be obscenely regressive.