For his ninth (and possibly penultimate) film, Quentin Tarantino takes audiences back to the summer of 1969, where Hollywood was swinging and hippies seemed a harmless subculture. That is until the Manson Family murdered Sharon Tate and her friends in her mansion on Cielo Drive. Blending fact with lots of fiction, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood re-imagines this time as the fairytale its title suggests. But instead of white knights and princes, Tarantino offers stuntmen and TV cowboys. Instead of castles and lavish balls, he presents a celebrity-stuffed party at the Playboy mansion. Instead of an evil sorcerer or monster horde, there’s Charles Manson and his minions. And instead of a princess as a damsel in distress, Tarantino presents an enchanting ingénue who was killed in her prime. [Read more…]
Bone Tomahawk
Reviewed by Jeannette Catsoulis
In Bone Tomahawk (2015), an old-timer, an invalid and a gunslinger set out across the blistering desert to rescue three innocents from a band of savage cannibals. Their mission seems beyond futile, but don’t count them out too soon: Their leader is Kurt Russell.
Yet Mr. Russell is far from the only reason to see this unexpected low-budget treat, a witty fusion of western, horror and comedy that gallops to its own beat. That rhythm is dictated entirely by the writer and director, S. Craig Zahler, a novelist and musician who flips genre conventions upside-down and cares more about character than body count. As a result, he has given us a horror movie whose monsters are withheld until the tail end of its 132 minutes, and an action movie whose longest section involves mostly walking and talking. [Read more…]