Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood

Columbia Pictures | Release Date: July 26, 2019

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

88	METASCORE Universal acclaim based on 18 Critics

Positive:

Mixed:

Negative:

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

100

Slant MagazineSam C. MacMay 24, 2019

The film is Quentin Tarantino’s magnum opus—a sweeping statement on an entire generation of American popular culture and an almost expressionistic rendering of the counterculture forming at its margins, gradually growing in influence. Read full review

100

TimeStephanie ZacharekMay 22, 2019

This is a tender, rapturous film, both joyous and melancholy, a reverie for a lost past and a door that opens to myriad imagined possibilities. Read full review

100

Time OutDave CalhounMay 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. Read full review

100

CineVueJohn BleasdaleMay 21, 2019

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is bold, beautiful and brutal. It’s Tarantino’s best film since Kill Bill, perhaps even since Pulp Fiction. Read full review

100

The TelegraphRobbie CollinMay 21, 2019

There’s a gleeful toxicity here that will launch a thousand think-pieces – Pitt’s character is capital-P problematic, absolutely by design – but the transgressive thrill is undeniable, and the artistry mesmerisingly assured. Read full review

100

The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 21, 2019

Quite simply, I just defy anyone with red blood in their veins not to respond to the crazy bravura of Tarantino’s film-making, not to be bounced around the auditorium at the moment-by-moment enjoyment that this movie delivers. Read full review

New York Magazine (Vulture)Bilge EbiriMay 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. Read full review

Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangMay 21, 2019

The final act of Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is funny, scary, troubling and exhilarating by turns; the meandering structure clicks into place as it becomes clear where Tarantino has been taking this story and, given his track record, perhaps could only have taken this story. Read full review

Screen InternationalFionnuala HalliganMay 21, 2019

Once Upon A Time….in Hollywood is beautifully made. Beyond all the ‘Tarantino-esque’ touches of the action, the banter, the violence, the constant movie references, there’s a real craft at play here. Read full review

TheWrapSteve PondMay 22, 2019

Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is big, brash, ridiculous, too long, and in the end, invigorating. Read full review

The Film StageRory O'ConnorMay 22, 2019

They don’t make ’em like they used to, Tarantino’s film seems to say, but nobody makes ’em like this, either. Read full review

The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd May 22, 2019

It’s an elegy for a certain age of American pop-culture that may really be about the writer-director grappling with his own inevitable obsolescence. Read full review

VarietyOwen GleibermanMay 21, 2019

DiCaprio and Pitt fill out their roles with such rawhide movie-star conviction that we’re happy to settle back and watch Tarantino unfurl this tale in any direction he wants. Read full review

The PlaylistGuy LodgeMay 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. Read full review

IndieWireEric KohnMay 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. Read full review

Vanity FairRichard LawsonMay 21, 2019

This curious fairy tale may not be the truth, and it may prattle on too long. But when its stars align, and they let loose with their unmistakable shine, Hollywood movies do seem truly special again. And, sure, maybe TV does too. Read full review

VoxAlissa WilkinsonMay 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. Read full review

The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyMay 21, 2019

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is uneven, unwieldy in its structure and not without its flat patches. But it's also a disarming and characteristically subversive love letter to its inspiration. Read full review