| Columbia Pictures | Release Date: July 26, 2019 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
56
Mixed:
6
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Jul 25, 2019
Jul 25, 2019
Throughout the film, Pitt exudes charm and a philosophical nature, but also the possibility of explosiveness. He doesn’t show you everything. What do you say about a performance like this? Scene by scene, Pitt seems to know what to do, all the time — and he never makes it look like work.
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Jul 25, 2019
As one might expect from Mr. Tarantino’s previous films, his new one is violent — extravagant violence is visited on men and women alike at several points — as well as tender, plus terrifically funny. Yet this virtuoso piece of storytelling also offers intricate instruction on the pervasiveness of violence in popular culture.
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May 21, 2019
That drifting, elegiac quality (which at times may recall his once-neglected, now-classic Jackie Brown) is the film’s great strength. There are several major set-pieces — some hilarious, some creepy, one absurdly violent — that will get people talking, but perhaps the most powerful is a lengthy, seemingly aimless one that comes smack dab in the middle.
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May 21, 2019
It sits at the mature end of Tarantino’s work, bringing his tongue-in-cheek storytelling together with exquisite craft and killer lead performances from Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. And yet, it’s still very much a Tarantino film, trading in genuine emotion one minute, unapolegetically silly the next.
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Jul 23, 2019
It’s shaggy and self-indulgent and almost scandalously long; and in nearly every moment, pretty glorious. Once also has the good luck of being anchored by what might be two of the last true movie stars: Leonardo DiCaprio as Rick Dalton, a boozy, anxious actor staring down the bell curve of a never-quite-stellar career, and Brad Pitt as Cliff Booth, his taciturn stuntman turned trusty sidekick and consigliere.
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Jul 25, 2019
It’s a western, for Pete’s sake. Politics are wound into its DNA, and Tarantino knows the genome better than anyone else. Which is just to say that like other classics of the genre, “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” is not going anywhere. It will stand as a source of debate — and delight — for as long as we care about movies. And it wants us to care.
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May 21, 2019
Jan 2, 2020
Once Upon A Time may be a more languid journey than usual, but it gets to a familiar place eventually. In a way Tarantino has turned himself into the kind of Spaghetti Western anti-hero that’s always obsessed him — flawed but ultimately triumphant. I’m still happy to be along for the ride.
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Jul 24, 2019
This is Tarantino’s Eden, the unspoiled garden when the things he loves don’t have to be sought out or championed because they permeate every aspect of life. The sense of blissful immersion extends to the film’s costuming and production design, both of which are as meticulous as one might expect.
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Jul 29, 2019
Cars and songs. To be exact: the sight of a car bowling along, at speed, while a song cries out on the soundtrack. That, in the end, is what Quentin Tarantino loves more than anything; more than crappy old TV shows, more than boxes of cereal, more than violence so rabid that it practically foams, and more, if you can believe it,than the joys of logorrhea. His latest work, Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood, is a declaration of that love.
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Jul 24, 2019
Tarantino was a boy of 6 in 1969, living far from the center of Los Angeles, and in a sense what he’s done here is re-create the world he’s imagined the adults were living in at the time. If it plays like a fairy tale, and it does, don’t forget the first words in the title are “Once Upon a Time.”
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Jul 27, 2019
The paradox of Tarantino’s oeuvre is that it is highly derivative of other movies, mostly genre pulp, and yet the films seem distinctly his. He is the most influential director of his generation because he ranges promiscuously through pop culture and brings to his borrowings an incendiary force.
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The PlaylistMay 21, 2019
Having never been entirely won over by the clever-clever period genre revisionism that has been Tarantino’s mainstay since Bill was killed, I was delighted — after all the lurid what-if speculation over the film’s relationship to the Charles Manson story — to find that his latest is, in such large part, a kind of gorgeously lacquered megabudget hangout movie.
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IndieWireMay 21, 2019
Tarantino’s desire to salute the creative thrill of storytelling is an inviting, welcome presence in American cinema, and his ninth feature suggests he really ought to work more often. But all the vivid callbacks to antiquated TV westerns and the forgotten characters in their orbit fall short of coalescing into much more than that.
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Jul 25, 2019
For those well-versed in the writer-director's work, it's a credible and intriguing addition to his filmography. Yet at 2 hours and 41 minutes, it also feels too leisurely in connecting its threads, especially compared to the crispness of something like the World War II epic "Inglourious Basterds."
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May 23, 2019
Tarantino, famously obsessed with the history of cinema and its preservation, has recreated a world he wishes he could have worked in with such care and skill and love that, for the most part, it feels like his most personal film. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is lots of fun, but it’s also strangely, hauntingly sad.
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Jul 24, 2019
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is often diverting to watch, and it’s been shot on 35mm film with lovingly expressive care by Robert Richardson. But true to its title, it plays like a bedtime story concocted by a petulant child who insists on getting his own back from the people who poisoned his most honeyed dreams.
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Jul 25, 2019
It’s fine to walk out of this movie not quite sure what Tarantino was using his story’s proximity to this real-life tragedy to say; that’s part of the ambiguity inherent in making art. But it’s dispiriting to suspect that part of why he wanted to stage a Manson-adjacent story was because the accoutrements — the period cars and costumes and neon signs, the glowering barefoot hippie girls, the acid-laced cigarettes and glowing movie marquees — were just so cool.
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Movie NationJul 25, 2019
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