Once Upon A Time In... Hollywood
Rating:
Any new movie by Quentin Tarantino is a cinematic event, but when it is as festooned with stars as Once Upon A Time In... Hollywood, with its writer-director turning his idiosyncratic eye on his own industry, no wonder there was such a buzz leading up to its world premiere at the Cannes film festival last night.
But at the end of a Cannes buzz, there is often an anti-climax. Not last night. With this wildly enjoyable black comedy, Tarantino really delivers.
For me, his masterpiece will always be 1994's Pulp Fiction, but this isn't far behind, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt both on thumpingly fine form.
Brad Pitt plays a stunt double in Quentin Tarantino's new movie and is on thumpingly fine form
DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, a self-pitying TV actor, worried that his career is on the slide and aware that his excessive drinking might be accelerating his decline, but unable to stop.
Pitt is Cliff Booth, Rick's touchingly loyal friend and stunt double.
The story is set in 1969 and although it unfolds episodically, with a series of absorbing and sometimes very funny set-pieces that don't particularly connect with each other, the narrative is driven by one simple, compelling, ominous fact – Rick's new next-door neighbours in the swanky Benedict Canyon area of Los Angeles are the film director Roman Polanski and his young actress wife Sharon Tate, played here very sweetly by Margot Robbie.
In August it will be 50 years since the heavily-pregnant Tate and four others were brutally murdered in her home by indoctrinated members of Charles Manson's so-called 'family'.
The film takes us on a journey towards that terrible night, but on the way Tarantino is in incorrigibly playful mood and has enormous fun depicting certain fixtures of 60s Hollywood.
Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a self-pitying TV actor in Tarantino's new movie, which takes viewers back to
