Once Upon a Time in Hollywood review: Tarantino springs another surprise

Tarantino's ninth out of a promised 10 films is high-quality meta cinema, featuring pure beauty, acute violence and shocking hilarity

This feels like a Quentin Tarantino film for about 10 minutes. But those 10 minutes constitute, without a doubt, the most stupendously provocative cinema you are likely to see all year. Tarantino delivers an astounding denouement in his inimitable soft-rock-purring, blood-splashing postmodernist shtick that also sees Brad Pitt pull off the greatest drunken laugh in the history of Hollywood. It’s maddening, bewildering, dazzling all at once.

In other parts, this is an anti-Tarantino film steered by an anti-hero, Rick Dalton, essayed immaculately by Leonardo DiCaprio. Set in 1969, with the golden age of Hollywood drawing to its inevitable end, Once