I liked Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood a lot, so it’s been interesting to read the commentary by various critics and viewers who hated it. Their hatred, as far as I can tell, was inspired by a range of reactions from boredom (the film’s “a $10 nap”) to contemptuous dismissal (it’s “just another white man’s nostalgia film”) to righteous fury (it’s an “obscenely regressive” outrage).

Regarding the boredom factor, I guess it’s fair to say this isn’t the movie for you if you’re not into lingering over the relationship of film to culture at a particularly fraught point in American history fifty years ago. Lingering for two hours and thirty-nine minutes, to be exact. Me, I could linger there for ten hours and feel refreshed, especially if the director tends to create the dynamic, humorous, and challenging effects that writer-director Quentin Tarantino does. He’s a jackass provocateur in many ways, always has been — but he knows film, and he actually has something to say about its powers and possibilities.

Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood is about 1969 as the memorable year when America’s growing post-WWII sociopolitical turmoil reached peak instability in the nation in general and in the film industry in particular. The representative figure of the collapse of the once-mighty studio system, Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), a film star of 1950s Westerns and combat films, finds himself in steep professional decline. Rick is reduced to playing one-shot villain roles on various Western TV shows, and scorns the only movie work he’s offered, Spaghetti Westerns made in Italy by the “foreigners” he despises.