What Tarantino does in Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood is threefold. First, he’s there to set the mood of what Hollywood was like in 1969, from the perspective of two kind-of-washed-up has-beens.

The beating heart of Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood is a neophyte movie star who was murdered almost before anyone could get to know her name: Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of Roman Polanski ...