Quentin Tarantino Archives

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: To LA, with Love

August 2, 2019October 21, 2022 Jeremy BeckReviews

Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt in Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"

During one of the many enjoyably languorous stretches in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a woman buys a ticket to a movie. Told that the price is 75 cents—one of a million quaint signifiers that this film takes place in 1969—she haggles with the ticket taker, asking if she might receive a discount on account of being in the movie. After proving that she is indeed the picture’s third-billed actor—and after posing for a photo next to its poster—she gains free admittance to the theater, where she skittishly sinks into her seat and dons a pair of giant hoop glasses, eyes darting around the crowd in the sweet, vaguely desperate hope that her fellow patrons might appreciate her performance.

The woman is Sharon Tate, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the bold and beautiful and surprisingly moving new film from Quentin Tarantino, is in some ways about her grisly murder at the hands of the Manson Family. But it is also very much not about that. It is, more principally, a movie about its maker’s love of movies. And while, physically speaking, few would confuse Tarantino with Margot Robbie—the actress who here plays Tate with fizzy, wistful adorability—it’s possible to view Tate as a surrogate for the director, a man who takes immense pride in his work and who also craves validation for his craft. Read More

The Hateful Eight: Fun and Fury in the Old West

January 6, 2016April 28, 2021 Jeremy BeckReviews

Kurt Russell and Samuel L. Jackson in Quentin Tarantino's "The Hateful Eight"

The Hateful Eight is silly, self-indulgent, overlong, and obscenely ostentatious. It is also funny, bracing, suspenseful, and supremely entertaining. It is, in other words, a film by Quentin Tarantino, cinema’s poet laureate of grisly violence and savory dialogue. This is the kind of happily ridiculous movie where the no-good woman spends the entire second half with her face covered in blood, and where the manly men seem to have engaged in a mustache-growing contest. As a writerly work of fiction, The Hateful Eight is difficult to take seriously. As a thrilling piece of pulp art, it is impossible to dismiss.

That is especially true for cinephiles. The world’s most celebrated former video-store clerk, Tarantino can be exasperating in his nerdy superiority, his compulsion to constantly remind you of the scope of his encyclopedic knowledge of film’s annals. But he possesses real love for the movies, and The Hateful Eight—which, as the opening title card gratuitously announces, is the eighth picture of his career—is his most pronounced valentine to the form yet. Shot in the fossilized format of 65-millimeter film, its languorous opening scenes—featuring painterly images of a stagecoach striving against the snow of a Wyoming blizzard (shooting took place in Colorado), and of a cloaked man with his head bowed against the cold—beautifully capture the visual majesty of the medium. (Most theaters with digital projectors are showing The Hateful Eight in a slightly truncated version, but a “traveling roadshow” is exhibiting the film in select areas in 70mm, complete with an overture, intermission, and a few extended scenes.) Tarantino’s screenplays may go overboard with their insouciant humor, but in these striking early scenes (shot by Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Richardson), he makes clear that his craft is not a joke. To him, movies still matter. Read More