Why you can trust GamesRadar+ Our experts review games, movies and tech over countless hours, so you can choose the best for you. ę¾³ę“²å¹øčæ5å¼å„å·ē åå²ę„čÆ¢:Fą± ind out more aš °bout our reviews policy.
The ninth and, if a long-held pledge is to be believed, penultimate film from Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood has been shrouded in great secrecy. So what is it? A love letter to late-’60s Tinseltown? The story of a fading actor aź¦nd his stuntman? A restaging of the Manson Family murders? The answer is all of the aź§bove – dream territory for moviedom’s most cine-obsessed storyteller.
Our way into the pre-Manson world of 1969 California is via has-been actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), and his stuntman/only friend Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). Dalton was the star of a successful, Rawhide-esque TV show called Bounty Law, but left to pursue a career in movies that never panned out. Forced to return to TV, he’s typecast as bad guys and contemplates a stint shooting spaghetti westerns to restore his status as a leading maān. ź¦Cliff, meanwhile – out of work as an actual stuntman owing to his sketchy past – serenely motors around the city, repairing Dalton’s TV aerial, popping home to feed scene-stealing pup Brandy and occasionally exchanging glances with one of Charles Manson’s eye-catching acolytes, Pussycat (Margaret Qualley).
The connection between Dalton and Manson is, initially at least, simply geographical. Dalton’s home on Cielo Drive is next to the one owned by Romaź¦¦n Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha), hot off the success of Rosemary’s Baby and engaged to up-and-coming actress Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), whom the Manson Family brutally murdered in August 1969. Any direct restaging of that night’s events would no doubt have been in bad taste, but Tarantino more or less dodges any such accusations by doing for the Manson murders wšhat he did for Nazi Germany in Inglourious Basterds; putting his own wildly entertaining, cartoonishly violent spin on history through the fictional characters he’s inserted into a real-life tragedy.
All the QT hallmarks are here – the jet-black humour, precision-engineered dialogue, jukebox soundtrack aš„nd, of course, bare feet. But there’s a sincere lament for the death of ‘old’ Hollywood, and the worlšd that could have been, which marks this out as Tarantino’s most heartfelt and emotionally mature work since Jackie Brown.
I'm the Managing Editor, Entertainment here at GamesRadar+, overseeš ing the site's film and TV coverage. In a previous life as a print dinosaur, I was the Deputy Editor of Total Film magazine, and the news editor at SFX magazine. Fun fact: two of myā favourite films released on the same day - Blade Runner and The Thing.
