If someone could only watch one Tarantino movie, I'd probably recommend that they watch this one.

There's a kind of spirituality here, a longing for something intangible, that seems to come to us straight from deep in Tarantino's psyche, a place where the Los Angeles of 1969 is real and alive and appealing and sad. This film is broadly about Hollywood the Dreamland and Hollywood the Reality and the impossibility of reconciling the two. Or, to take a different perspective, it's about the impossibility of Tarantino reconciling himself to himself. The dissonance here isn't a bug, it's a feature.

(That said, I think I've identified the real reason I don't get along with Tarantino consistently: I don't share his sense of humor.)

Some fuller thoughts here:

thecavesofaltamira.com/2019/08/11/once-upon-a-time-in-hollywood/