Era Uma Vez em… Hollywood

The portrayal of Bruce Lee and the othering of Mexicans has the appearance of Tarantino punching down for the sake of cheap humor.

Spellbinding.

If there's something potentially dangerous or reactionary about Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood's nostalgia for a bygone era and its trickle-down frontier heroism, it's a tension that Tarantino plays with thoughtfully...

Like most of Tarantino's work, Once Upon A Time in... Hollywood is eliciting very strong emotions on both sides of the spectrum.

I love this movie... When [director Quentin Tarantino] pulls the ripcord and it goes bananas, it is just so much fun.

[Tarantino's] most personal film, it is also the one he has hinted may be his last. If so, he will have quit while he's ahead.

A bittersweet, complex, conversation-starting look back at the film business at the close of a tumultuous decade, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood also works as a strong argument for why it's too soon for Tarantino to pack it in.

Tarantino has become such a pro at telling these big-canvas stories, you barely notice he's picked up the pace until it's fully cranking.

There's a melancholy that runs deeper, and sadder, than nostalgic longing. After all, how do you truly long for a time and place that was never real to begin with?

It's dispiriting to suspect that part of why Tarantino wanted to stage a Manson-adjacent story was because the accoutrements-the period cars and costumes and neon signs, the glowering barefoot hippie girls, the acid-laced cigarettes-were just so cool.

It has a confident, leisurely pace. If this represents the beginning of a new, more mature era for the aging phenom-his Cliff Booth phase, if you will-I couldn't be more excited for it.

Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood is at once a wickedly entertaining, nostalgic, tragic, yet timely look at a town consumed with narcissism and, ironically, its own mortality.

The filmmaker may be on a mission to get everything right about 1969, down to the sounds and smells, but he's also inviting us to smoke a little wrongness.

Firmly rooted in the Tarantinoverse, Once Upon a Time is an elegiac mash note to Hollywood 1969, at times sublimely, almost surrealistically moving while simultaneously managing to be the director's funniest and least violent film to date.

Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood may be a familiar exploration of the line between justice and revenge, but it's also Quentin Tarantino's most melancholic, introspective movie in years.

Don't mistake me: This movie is good. It all depends on how hard you're willing to work to justify its pleasures.

The complete package isn't a home run, but it's still loaded with unforgettable moments showcasing the chemistry between DiCaprio, Pitt and other ensemble standouts - particularly Julia Butters, Margaret Qualley and Austin Butler.

Although DiCaprio seems miscast as an aging, washed-up actor (mostly because he never seems to age), Pitt, in a rangy, lived-in performance, is marvelous. As Sharon Tate, Margot Robbie is quite touching as the film's golden emblem of innocence.

Tarantino has become a nudnik filmmaker, who grabs a viewer by the lapel and says-and says and says-what's on his mind.

It feels like Tarantino is so wrapped up in indulging in his own filmmaking style that he loses sight of what made his best movies work.