Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Review

Tarantino's ninth film is his most relaxed and his most melancholy, a hangout picture about obsolescence that spends two and a half hours letting people drive, watch television and do their jobs. Leonardo DiCaprio's Rick Dalton is a wreck of vanity and professional pride, and the trailer scene where he abuses himself in a mirror after fluffing his lines is the most honest thing Tarantino has written about work. Brad Pitt's Cliff Booth is pure movement, and the Spahn Ranch sequence, all squinting menace and nothing supernatural, is the finest suspense set piece of its decade.

Robert Richardson shoots 1969 Los Angeles in golden neon and bleached asphalt, and the sound design, which hands most of the exposition to car radios, is a real formal idea. Margot Robbie's Sharon Tate is given presence rather than lines, watching an audience laugh at her from a theatre seat, which we found far more affecting than a monologue would have been. The ending is an act of authorial wish fulfilment that some viewers will find obscene and we found unbearably sad. The film knows precisely what it is refusing to show us.