Once upon a time... in Hollywood

Solid performance by Leonardo Di Caprio and brilliant--by Brad Pitt glosses over weariness and unsure gait of Quentin Tarantino. Rick Dalton must be his alter ego--washed up auteur compelled to repeat wonderful but aging tricks indefinitely. Whether the choice of his real life wife as a new wife of his protagonist is a Freudian slip or a conscious choice is not material. Australian bimbo in the role of British bimbo is amusing. But again, Scarlett and Keira appeared as another pretty faces and slowly but surely learned how to act.

At Eternity's Gate

If we equalize scripts with novels, Julian Schnabel is similar to Cocteau--who also dabbled as a painter--but his most lasting contribution turned out to be the movies. While Shanbel's paintings were commercial exploitation of the Post-Pop Art scene, allowing him to buy New York properties and date models, his "Diving Bell and the Butterfly" announced the arrival of a major new director. Willem Dafoe masterly plays Van Gogh but if we ignore color palette of the movie painstakingly reconstructing color palette of his masterpieces, otherwise it is flat and listless.

The movie bears some resemblance to the brilliant Polish-Canadian animation "Love, Vincent" featuring Van Gogh in the last weeks of his life whose inimitable pattern is woven by his letters to the beloved brother Teo. So I guess, Schnabel is again out of his creative ideas.