Entertaining throughout

Rating: 8/10 (6 August 2019)

Highlights:

Tarantino's impeccable attention to detail for the period is everywhere.
Beautifully shot as always, with a highlight being the tracking shots alongside car and horse rides.
Character development took a precedence over excess action and violence as the story built up.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt are fantastic.
10-year-old Julia Butters as the precocious child actor is pretty great too.
Margaret Qualley leads a good cast for the Manson family; the scene on the ranch is suitably creepy.
Evokes the glamor of Hollywood but also the pathos of those on the edge, e.g. aging and B-actors.
Entertaining throughout a long run time, 161 minutes.

Lowlights:

Oddly constructed story, with the Manson murder aspect somewhat appended on.
Along these lines, not nearly enough Margot Robbie / Sharon Tate.
What was up with the diss of Bruce Lee? Not a fan of that scene.
Revenge fantasy via alternate versions of history seems a little overdone by QT at this point.
Gruesome violence in the end scene. It felt a little like Tarantino feeding red meat to his base, and it was kinda tough to hear these scenes cheered when we're living in such a climate of violence. It's as if Tarantino is showing us what he would like to do to those who would link on-screen violence to real-life violence, which has been a touchy issue for him over his career. One of the brainwashed Manson women (Mikey Madison) says "My idea is to kill the people who taught us to kill!" and then, well, we see what happens to her.