Cannes 2019: Critics Call ‘Once Upon a Time’ Tarantino’s Weirdest

Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio star in the 1960s set dark comedy.

Film: Once Upon A Time in... Hollywood
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Cast: Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Margot Robbie, Al Pacino, Kurt Russel

Quentin Tarantino’s 9th feature film premiered on 21 May at Cannes and the first critics’ reviews are coming in. Read excerpts from the reviews here.

In “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood,” Tarantino does a lot that’s familiar, including toggling between laughter and mayhem. The true jolt, though, is how melancholic the story finally plays; that is partly (rightly) because of the murders, which weigh heavily on the film in obvious ways. You’re always grimly aware that these aren’t just movie characters, but figures based on real people who belonged to the same ecosystem that Tarantino would eventually join.

Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

Quite simply, I just defy anyone with red blood in their veins not to respond to the crazy bravura of Tarantino’s film-making, not to be bounced around the auditorium at the moment-by-moment enjoyment that this movie delivers – and conversely, of course, to shudder at the horror and cruelty and its hallucinatory aftermath.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

It’s a heady, engrossing, kaleidoscopic, spectacularly detailed nostalgic splatter collage of a film, an epic tale of backlot Hollywood in 1969, which allows Tarantino to pile on all his obsessions, from drive-ins to donuts, from girls with guns to men with cars and vendettas, from spaghetti Westerns to foot fetishism.

Owen Gleiberman, Variety

America’s master of zippy dialogue and high-minded pastiche consolidates those skills into a sprawling vision of the film industry in 1969, but Tarantino’s infectious love letter doesn’t have much of a plot. Instead, the filmmaker’s weirdest movie merges pre-Manson Hollywood with the looming specter of hippiedom. The result is a lopsided cultural mashup as viewed through Tarantino’s exuberant cinematic filter.

Eric Kohn, IndieWire

Throughout all that doubt, one’s allegiance to the film is consistently won back by DiCaprio and Pitt, who make easy, and disarmingly humble, platonic poetry out of this curious dynamic. (It should maybe also be noted that, at 55, Pitt looks remarkably good sans shirt.) Tarantino knows just what to do with their particular bearing, how to tease out the thing that made them icons and then send it bouncing around his movie.

Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

Source: The New York Times, The Guardian, Variety, IndieWire, Vanity Fair.