Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019)

A faded television actor and his stunt double strive to achieve fame and success in the film industry during the final years of Hollywood's Golden Age in 1969 Los Angeles.

This Tarantino movie shows all the panache, high production quality, good set pieces, cinematic allusions and top performances and cameos, for which the director is generally celebrated, - so there's lots to be found here to please the senses - but it's essentially without a plot and therefore outstays its welcome; it's very superficial and mainly a buddy movie with outstanding DiCaprio and Pitt chemistry combined with a heavy streak of nostalgia for a bygone Hollywood era - and the Manson family (plus Sharon Tate) angle is cynically pitched in as a stilted plot device.

The Movies I Watched in September

Abduction 2011  5
Asthma 2014  6
Auf einmal 2016  6
Blonde Ice 1948  5
Bullet 2015  5
The Butterfly Effect 2004  7

Chernobyl 2019 (TV)  7

The Circle 2017  5
Convict's Code 1939  5
Deadly Species 2002  3
A Fantastic Woman 2017  6
Fear in the Night 1947  6
The 5th Wave 2016  5
First Knight 1995  6
Gangster Story 1959  5
The Hoodlum 1951  6
The Ides of March 2011  7

Island of Doomed Men 1940  6
The Jungle Book 2016  8

Lady Bird 2017  7

The Lobster 2015  6
The Man Who Cheated Himself 1950  6
Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood 2019  7

The Sadist 1963  7

Shed No Tears 1948  6
Still Alice 2014  6
Sunshine Cleaning 2008  6
Three Ages 1923  6
Tiger House 2015  6
Zootopia 2016  7

The Hateful Eight (2015)

In the dead of a Wyoming winter, a bounty hunter and his prisoner find shelter in a cabin currently inhabited by a collection of nefarious characters.

 More closed-room mystery drama than a Western, this movie is slow-paced, talkative and very violent, but as usual Tarantino keeps the tension throughout helped by a great cast, excellent cinematography and a score by Ennio Morricone.

New Stuff: The Hateful Eight

Pulp Fiction (1994)

The lives of two mob hit men, a boxer, a gangster's wife, and a pair of diner bandits intertwine in four tales of violence and redemption.

Arguably Quentin Tarantino's best movie, a stroke of genius concerning several intertwined plots swinging back and forth in time, a treasure trove of cinematic allusions, tongue-in-cheek humour and a very carefully and accurately selected cast; all his subsequent movies have been more or less variations of what you can find here. 

Halliwell***: "Clever, witty, violent celebration of junk culture, drawing rather too heavily on past thrillers but blessed with some excellent performances which crackle with menace."

Maltin***1/2: "Audacious, outrageous look at honors among lowlifes, told in a soemwhat radical style overlapping a handful of separate stories. Jackson and Travolta are magnetic as a pair of  hit men who have philosophical debates on a regular basis; Willis is compelling as a crooked boxer whose plan to take it on the lam hits a few detours. (In fact, there are no slackersin this cast.) This voluble, violent, pumped-up movie isn't for every taste - certainly not for the squeamish - but it's got morevitality than almost any other film of 1994."

New Stuff: Django Unchained

Admittedly, I haven't watched it yet...

New Stuff: Inglourious Basterds