ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD ****

It was inevitable that, sooner or later, QT would get around to a film focusing entirely on the film-making process and the town he loves so well. The only question was, when? Well, at last he's done it, one film away from what he says will be his final film and as the title attests "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood" is set in the past but again, typical of its director, he sets it at a very specific time, 1969, and around a very specific event. the murder of Sharon Tate and four of her friends by the Manson Family, and this just might be his masterpiece.

Knowing the subject in advance, of course, might lead us to suppose that Tarantino could still go down the road of earlier pictures like "Django Unchained" and "Inglorious Basterds", brilliant but mostly tasteless and jokey explorations of violence like an A-Movie version of a B-Movie aesthetic...but he doesn't. This is a love-letter to Hollywood, to the movies and to actors. Yes, the final half hour or so is dark and deeply disturbing, (yet it's also Tarantino funny and black as hell), and it might be too dark for the Academy but the rest is glorious; highly intelligent talk and often, (surprise, surprise), very moving.

There are three main characters, two fictitious and one real. The fictitious characters are actor Rick Dalton and his stunt double, Cliff Booth; the real character is Sharon Tate who, with her husband Roman Polanski, happens to be Dalton's next door neighbour. The film covers a period of three days, two in February and one in August. Dalton is an actor past his sell-by date, reduced to playing villains on TV and advised, (by a magnificent Al Pacino), to go to Italy and play the hero in Italian westerns. His stunt double and best friend has also seen better days. They are played superbly by a hardly ever better Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt. Indeed I think DiCaprio has only topped this performance once before when he played Jordan Belfort in "The Wolf of Wall Street".

It's a film full of set-pieces and both DiCaprio and Pitt have their fair share; Leonardo most memorably in one of those television westerns where is acting is Emmy-worthy until … (Tarantino even manages to cleverly put him into "The Great Escape" in the part actually played by Steve McQueen, very nicely reincarnated here by Damian Lewis), while Pitt has a scene of superb menace at the Manson ranch, one of several scenes where Tarantino pulls the rug out from under us with a punch-line that isn't what you were expecting.

Elsewhere, the real-life Sharon Tate, (a terrific Margot Robbie), is enjoying the fruits of her celebrity and also gets her set-piece when she visits a cinema showing "The Wrecking Crew", relishing her performance up on the screen. While hardly a downer on the film in general I did think Tarantino treated Miss Tate rather cruelly. Was she really this much of an air-head? Surely not or is he suggesting she only made it through the casting couch? Someone else he takes down a peg or three is Bruce Lee, (an excellent Mike Moh), in a very funny scene with Brad Pitt. In fact, his treatment of Lee has already lead to a few complaints from his friends and family. To that, all I can say is 'it's only a film'. And it's a great film. At two hours and forty minutes it isn't overlong even if the heart of darkness he finally uncovers did leave me feeling a little queasy. It's also full of great supporting performances and it blends fact and fiction seamlessly. His masterpiece? Probably.