It feels like we’ve been spoiled by space. Ever since Gravity seemingly changed the game, science-fiction has had to work harder than ever to impress us. It’s almost like the genre’s already peaked. Picking up the space-gauntlet, director James Gray quixotically heralded Ad Astra as being “the most realistic depiction of space ever”. And fair dos, this film is beautiful: from the glistening cinematography to artfully celestial framing to the seamless visual effects (some shots use actual photos of the moon’s surface), it all looks real.

What sets it apart from recent gravity-defying films, however, is the setting. This is a future that feels recognisably familiar and deeply plausible, a world in which space travel has become commercialised, normalised, and blighted by the same overpriced pillows as the budget airline. The wonder of space has been replaced by the mundanities and conflicts of Earth; the moon is a gaudy tourist trap and disputed territory, not unlike an episode of Futurama. Throughout, we’re drip-fed morsels of information about the new inter-planetary infrastructure and each new revelation is a delicious bit of speculative world-building, ‘sci-future-fact’ rather than sci-fi.

It’s a setting that also causes our nominal hero, Roy (Pitt), some serious melancholy. Outwardly, Roy is cold and uncaring, his pulse never skipping a beat, his focus always on the mission. But his pessimistic voiceover laments the deterioration of the space era and hints at some familial yearning for his estranged father, who may be behind the catastrophic electrical surges that are suddenly plaguing Earth. Truly, you don’t know abandonment issues until your dad is floating beyond Neptune.

Roy’s narration sometimes sounds like a maudlin teenage diary (“I’ve let so many people down,” he whines at one point), but he’s a fascinatingly flawed hero, as incapable of emotions as he is a capable astronaut. His odyssey through the inconceivable vastness of the solar system has something of Willard sailing up the river in Apocalypse Now: confronted by loneliness in an unforgiving environment, the indifference of death stalking at every corner.

For such an ambitious film, it’s remarkably meditative; set across billions of miles, it is always only interested in Roy’s interior life, the camera trained in heavy close-up on his tired-looking face. (Spare a thought for poor Liv Tyler, playing Roy’s wife, who is often not even in focus, making her similar role in Armageddon look positively generous.)

But despite a dip in pace towards the end, it’s also a fantastically well-staged adventure. There’s a (literally) head-spinning opening sequence at the ‘International Space Antenna’, an encounter with an unexpected space-primate, and a moon-buggy chase which offers a thrilling preview of what ‘Fast & Furious In Space’ might look like. It has fun, even if its leading man doesn’t.

Through all this, it manages to ponder the existential questions facing humanity, and brings it back to the humanity we need to face. That, above the realistic depictions of space, is probably its real achievement.

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For the last few years, the Oscar-winning filmmaker has said that he has plans to take back from directing movies once he releases his 10^th film. This new movie called “Once upon a time in Hollywood” is his 9^th, and according to The Hollywood Reporter, this movie is “Critics highly praise Tarantino’s love letter to ’60s L.A.” and the movie all over the world. In this film, Tarantino shows us why he fell in love with the cinema as a kid. It’s stunning, and the cast is impeccable.

With top-rated performances as Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Margot Robbie, and many others, this comedy-drama film sets in Hollywood 1969, where Rick Dalton and his stunt double and best friend Cliff Booth (DiCaprio and Pitt), make their way around the final years of Hollywood’s Golden Age.  Margot Robbie plays Sharon Tate a rising star among in Hollywood.

Let’s remember that 1969 was the year when the Manson Family committed their murders, and in the movie, we can take a look at Charles’ and his cult. Though the movie is not focused on these murderers, they play an important role in the film.

Once upon a time in Hollywood is perfectly enjoyable, and it has Tarantino’s distinctive clever and a little dark humor. Glamorous, marvelous, and exquisite is how critics have described this Tarantino’s 9^th film. Quentin has a unique talent to choose wisely the actors that’ll play on his movies, and that is why this movie is excellent in any way you see it. It may not be Tarantino’s best movie, but it will surely become one of them. 

Tarantino is the best example that it doesn’t matter where you come from; you can make your way to the top. Even if some fans are not happy with Tarantino’s choice of retiring after his 10^th movie, we all want to see what he can do next, because every film he makes is a masterpiece of its own.

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