Look to the title. It is meant to be evocative.

Rating: 7/10 (26 July 2019)

"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" builds slowly, but there is fun in the journey.
It has all the elements we expect from a Quentin Tarantino movie, including the violence. There are multiple storylines, goofy characters passing through, multiple timelines, it even plays as different kinds of movies, including a quasi-documentary that keeps intruding...and tilting the movie off-balance with its voice-over narration that seems so out of place, it caused me to think it was inserted so as to eliminate an additional hour of movie.
What Tarantino does in the telling of this story has been done in other movies. But I've never seen it done with THIS story, and though I've seen all of Quentin Tarantino's movies, I've never before seen it done by him.
"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" is uneven. It has great set-pieces, brilliant scenes featuring bravura performances, and then it has sequences that fall flat, causing the movie to deflate a bit. But over its length it builds towards a climax that comes as a true surprise, and along the way Tarantino gets great performances out of his three leads: Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Margot Robbie.
"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" is a tribute to the paradigm-changing power of storytelling. It is sweet and sentimental, but in ways that are uniquely Tarantino's.