Freeze Frame: “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” (R)

For his ninth feature film, writer/director Quentin Tarantino presents a very dark Valentine to the town and the art form he grew up loving and copying. “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” is about the movie business and the folks who attempt to survive the dramatic changes Tinseltown underwent in the late 1960s.

Leonardo DiCaprio hits all the right notes as Rick, loosely based on Steve McQueen, a TV actor who once starred in a popular Western. Overly sensitive and self-absorbed, Rick battles booze and insecurities. His best pal is his stunt double Cliff, played by Brad Pitt, a character inspired by Burt Reynolds’ buddy, Hal Needham. Tarantino’s story is purely fictional, imagining a relationship that these men might have had with actress Sharon Tate, played by Margot Robbie, and the notorious Manson family.

The who’s-who cast also includes Emile Hirsch, Dakota Fanning, Kurt Russell. Bruce Dern and Al Pacino, who has a brief but impressive turn as DiCaprio’s agent.

As always, Tarantino’s dialogue is terrific and he certainly knows this era like the back of his hand. “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” does a great job of capturing the feel of the time and place, a period after Hollywood’s golden age and before the blockbuster era. There are a lot of inside jokes for movie buffs and, as you might guess with a Tarantino movie, some bloody violence played mostly for laughs.

While there’s much to like in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” the movie is also overlong, episodic and self-indulgent. Still, perfectly captures the zeitgeist of the late 1960s.

Also opening this week, “Luz” is an unrated horror movie that experiments with film techniques and plot chronology. It’s a tale about a cab driver who flees a demonically possessed woman.

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