Quentin Tarantino’s last movie to date is a rich and lovely immersion in the dying days of the Old Hollywood, LA, 1969. The culture clash is defined by the generation gap, and the innocence of 1967’s Summer of Love is already congealing into hard drug abuse and eruptions of violence reflecting the escalating conflict in Vietnam.
In this time and place Tarantino invites us to hang with TV cowboy Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), an actor uncomfortably aware that his movie career is on the wane and leading roles may be behind him. Rick’s best friend is his stunt double, Cliff (Brad Pitt), who embodies the manly virtues Rick only acts out on screen. It’s Cliff who happens across the group of dropouts who have taken residence at the old Spahn movie ranch. Meanwhile, Rick’s neighbour Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) appears to be on the cusp of stardom herself…
A film of luxuriant and digressive beauty, Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood is in no rush to come to climax, but very subtly, bit by bit, Tarantino injects notes of tension and anxiety into his love letter to a bygone era. The movie’s nostalgia is wrapped up in Rick’s midlife crisis, a fear of obsolescence which the director would appear to share.
A tender, rapturous film, both joyous and melancholy, a reverie for a lost past and a door that opens to myriad imagined possibilities.
Stephanie Zacharek, Time
Distinctly elegiac and unexpectedly emotional.
Kenneth Turan, LA Times
Quentin Tarantino
Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Margot Robbie, Margaret Qualley, Dakota Fanning, Aaron Butler
USA
2019
English
Indigenous & Community Access
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Credits
Screenwriter
Quentin Tarantino
Cinematography
Robert Richardson
Editor
Fred Raskin
Production Design
Barbara Ling
Also in This Series
These movies speak to our times and push the boundaries of the art form — the true modern classics we’re confident will withstand the test of time.
In the Mood for Love
Wong Kar-wai's most acclaimed and popular film is a love story about two neighbours (Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung) who are drawn together by the long absences of their respective spouses + a newly released short companion piece from 2001.
Oldboy
The second movie in Park's Vengeance Trilogy. Choi Min-sik stars as Dae Su, inexplicably held captive by he-knows-not-who for 15 years, and then, just as inexplicably, released. Not surprisingly, after all this time, he has only one thing on his mind...
Children of Men
2027: 18 years since the last baby was born, disillusioned Englishman Theo (Clive Owen) becomes an unlikely champion of the human race when he is asked by his former lover (Julianne Moore) to escort a young pregnant woman out of the country.
The Headless Woman
The pictures tell the story -- and you better not blink -- when Veronica (the superb Maria Onetto) hits something on the road home. But what? She is too traumatized, or panic-stricken, to go back and look, and her fears are too terrible to acknowledge.
A Serious Man
The Coen brothers' best movie is a painfully funny existentialist comedy about a physics professor, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlberg), benumbed but bewildered by his wife's announcement that she wants a divorce. That's only the start of his troubles.
Paprika
A device capable of transmitting dreams falls into the wrong hands in this dazzling anime meta-movie from visionary filmmaker Satoshi Kon. The imagery here is never less than overwhelming; it's probably the greatest scifi movie of our times.
Under the Skin
Between Birth and the death camps of Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer gave us sex, with Scarlett Johansson, picking up and disposing with interchangeable men. It's a bleakly unforgettable movie, with a mesmeric Mica Levi score.
It's Not Me
“Where are you at, Leos Carax?” To this question, the French filmmaker assembles an unpredictable essay-film made in the spirit of the late Jean-Luc Godard — an endlessly inventive self-portrait of an artist reflecting on his place in cinema history.
Holy Motors
Carax's film a dazzler, a requiem for cinema that somehow breathes new life and new hope into the form. Denis Lavant (Beau Travail) plays 11 roles and the accordion. Absurdist, surreal, poignant and unforgettable, this is truly one of a kind.
Enter the Void
Venturing where angels fear to tread, virtuoso filmmaker Gaspar Noé (Vortex) creates a dazzling journey into the Tokyo night, a mind-bending exploration of the outer reaches of human experience inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Margaret
Seventeen-year-old Lisa is rocked with guilt after a woman is killed in a traffic accident. But that’s only one thread in a teeming social tapestry this intense, passionate teen must negotiate as she comes of age in a time of contradiction and confusion.
Certain Women
Spare, incisive portraits of four Montana women (Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart and Lily Gladstone) brushing up against the everyday wears and tears of difficult men, their own circumstances, and the desire for something better.
Moonlight
Moonlight is many things -- a portrait of a young black man coming of age in Miami in the 1980s, a film about fathers and sons, about mentorship and about the scourge of drugs -- but it is also one of the most piercing movie romances of the last decade.
Lady Bird
Greta Gerwig's first film as writer-director is a delightful, painful comedy about "Lady Bird" McPherson (Saoirse Ronan), a Sacramento teen on the point of swapping high school for college, and her hard-working mom, Marion (Laurie Metcalf).
Silence
This sober, probing examination of faith, ego, cruelty and compassion is the most underrated film from the often under-valued latter half of Martin Scorsese's brilliant career; a passion project, about Catholic missionaries in 17th Century Japan.
Synecdoche, New York
Charlie Kaufman wrote Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind -- all great, all successful -- then turned director with Synecdoche, which is a masterpiece and which basically went unseen. It's overdue rediscovery.