Tarantino takes over Cannes
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood wows critics, but some not convinced it's iconic director's best work
CANNES : Quentin Tarantino stormed into Cannes on Tuesday with Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, which critics at the world's biggest film festival hailed as his best movie in years.
They heaped praise on the dark Tinseltown fairy tale set in the Los Angeles of 1969, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a television Western star on the slide and Brad Pitt as his stunt double.
Twenty-five years after the iconic US director won Cannes' top Palme d'Or prize for Pulp Fiction, he got some of his best reviews since Jackie Brown in 1997.
Peter Howell of the Toronto Star said that Tarantino wanted "to tell us a story about Hollywood life at the time of the Manson family slayings... and man, does he ever..".
The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw was equally euphoric, calling the film a "brilliant exploitation black comedy" which "finds a pulp-fictionally redemptive take on the Manson nightmare: Shocking, gripping, dazzlingly shot in the celluloid-primary colours of sky blue and sunset gold".
Critics clapped at the end having laughed throughout, but there were none of the standing ovations at the press preview that sometimes greet films at Cannes.
Mr Tim Grierson of the industry journal Screen tweeted that "like a lot of recent Tarantino, this is baggy, self-indulgent, fascinatingly its own thing and ambitiously conceived".
There was much more emotion at the gala screening, with Tarantino doing John Travolta's two-fingered dance move from Pulp Fiction to acknowledge the prolonged standing ovation given by the VIP audience.
British actress Tilda Swinton, one of the stars of The Dead Don't Die, the satirical zombie movie that opened the festival, wiped away tears as she shook his hand to congratulate him.
Earlier, as he walked the red carpet for the premiere, Tarantino compared his film to Alfonso Cuaron's Oscar-winning Roma, saying it is "a memory piece, the way Roma was a memory piece... In 1969, Los Angeles was like that".
He admitted that "Cannes changed my life" after he took his first feature Reservoir Dogs there in 1992.
"I came here a small independent film-maker and I left here known by all the critics... and made myself a name as an international film-maker.
"And then two years later, my life changed all over again," he said, referring to his Palme d'Or win.- AFP
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