May 22nd, 2019 | Updated on January 17th, 2024
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood premiered on May 21 at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival.
It is one of 21 titles competing for the prestigious Palme d’Or. Star casts of the film include Brad Pitt (as Cliff Booth), Leonardo DiCaprio (as Rick Dalton), Margot Robbie (as Sharon Tate), Al Pacino (as Marvin Schwarz).
With Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt playing a TV actor and stuntman who cross paths with the Manson cult, it is Quentin Tarantino’s ninth and also rumored to be the penultimate film.
You must be interested in how Rotten Tomatoes has ranked all Quentin Tarantino’s film. Click here to find the ranking.
25 years ago, at the Cannes Film Festival, Tarantino ushered in a cinema revolution with “Pulp Fiction“.
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 basically become his gofer and driver.
Time will tell whether this is Tarantino’s greatest work, but it incorporates so much of what made this brash filmmaker provocative, great, obnoxious and brilliant.
A mixture of genres and references of all kinds that the cultists of Tarantino cinema will appreciate and enjoy.
What keep the film interesting are Tarantino’s infectious fascination with period detail and his gift for cinematic texture.
Watch Trailer Of Movie Once Upon A Time In Hollywood Here
Movie Reviews “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood“
Review: The Guardian
It’s shocking, gripping, dazzlingly shot in the celluloid-primary colours of sky blue and sunset gold.
The Los Angeles of 1969 is recovered with all Tarantino’s habitual intensity and delirious, hysterical connoisseurship of pop culture detail.
Our first non-hero is Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, a failing cowboy actor and alcoholic going to seed in the autumn of his career and in moments of bad temper beginning to resemble Jack Black.
His best friend – pathetically, his only friend – is Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt. Things head south for Rick and Cliff’s careers when Rick’s western TV show Bounty Law is cancelled.
Review: Variety
The first half of “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood,” which is the superior half, is set in February ’69, and Tarantino views the two characters played by DiCaprio and Pitt, with a straight-up macho humanity that is gratifyingly unironic.
DiCaprio and Pitt fill out their roles with such rawhide movie-star conviction that we’re happy to settle back and watch Tarantino unfurl this tale in any direction he wants.
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.
Review: Los Angeles Times
Twenty-five years after “Pulp Fiction” won the Palme d’Or at this festival, Tarantino’s movies may no longer have quite the same audacity or revelatory power, but the ability to shock — and, if you’re lucky, to make you think — remains an important tool in his kit.
This turns out to be the case even when he’s dealing with real-life subjects such as Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski and members of the Charles Manson cult, whose well-documented stories would, by now, seem beyond spoiling.
Like Tarantino’s 2009 picture, “Inglourious Basterds,” “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood” is both a luxuriant, sometimes lumbering ode to a bygone era of moviemaking.
This is the first screen pairing between DiCaprio and Brad Pitt.
For most of its 159-minute running time, “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood” both does and doesn’t behave the way you might expect a Quentin Tarantino picture to behave. The storytelling is entirely linear.
