Just what Hollywood needed: an antithesis to 'Assembly-Line' franchise movies.

Rating: 10/10 (20 August 2019)

***Secondary Spoiler Warning***
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a bold and controversial take on 1969 Hollywood, and it's one of the year's strongest films and easily the bravest one of 2019. It's part crime-comedy-caper, part-alternate-history, all-pure-Tarantino-cinema. It's not afraid to take on the Tate Murders, Bruce Lee and Charles Manson in VERY different lights to actual history, and this self-contained piece of cinema is supposed to be a meta love letter to Los Angeles; it was never meant to be taken as a LITERAL parallel to what happened back in the time period.
This film's upset some people because of how Bruce Lee was portrayed in the movie and how its ending rewrites one of Hollywood's most senseless tragedies and takes on an alternate future where things are certainly brighter for Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski. Kudos to Tarantino for making a movie that shows we aren't always bound by what happened in the past and that deviating futures can make for some rather witty cinema that isn't afraid to flip the bird to history for the sake of a love-letter film script that shows optimism can still exist in the dog-eat-dog world of Hollywood.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is visceral cinema that takes advantage of the alternate history deal and Tarantino will not pull his creative punches even in more modern contexts. It honours history yet it uses it to give the audience some new perspective that isn't anywhere near tasteless as some might think; it's capsule-cinema that makes its points quite clear and this film succeeds on those fronts tenfold.
This film gets 5/5 stars.