I don’t really know if Quentin Tarantino’s new movie “Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood” is a masterpiece or not, I’m not even sure what the term means. I can tell you that is a great movie, not like any other movie I can recall.

It’s a mesmerizing, amazing film, a redemption and remembrance story about the Golden Age of Hollywood as set against the backdrop of the Sharon Tate/Mansion nightmare. The Mansion Murders, as they are known,  are considered by many to be the poignant and tragic end of an era, both in  LA and Hollywood, as we had come to know it.

The film is worth seeing alone for Tarantino’s amazing use of visuals, music, color and true-to-life street scenes of LA before it’s great gentrification, and before the Internet and the age of streaming brought even more unimaginable change and disruption.

The B westerns were over, as were so many careers and rituals.

The film has one of the great surprise and creative endings of all time, but I won’t talk about that here, the movie just came out.

The movie is crack candy for the film and TV buffs of the world, laced with period music, insider references, in-jokes, and 60’s language, dress, street scenes, cars, and language. All of these come flying at the audience like silver balls in a pinball game.

It’s not a movie that anybody will doze off during, not if there is much blood running through their veins.

The words that come to mind are dazzling, sometimes wandering, with all the crazy, cultish bravura of a Tarantino movie.

He is fearless in his film-making,  without question a genius when it comes to making movies. He can even make the most grotesque, even zany violence seem like a tolerable Superhero comic or a zombie movie,  as he did in Pulp Fiction.

He evokes zombi movies more than once in the film.

It’s really an amazing movie, although I found it dawdly and self-indulgent at times. Tarantino is nothing if not a show-off, and sometimes he just can’t stop showing off. Sometimes, I got restless. But he always gets back on track, and it’s quite a ride.

You really have to know your movies and TV shows to get it all, and I love movies and TV shows, but not enough to memorize their details decades later. I think a lot of people will see this movie two or three times to catch them all. I might see it once more.

I felt at times that Tarantino was just hitting me over the head with his almost hallucinatory and awesome tribute to the cheesy productions of the time, movie and TV. I got it the first dozen times.

But the use of the Mansion horrors – four people were killed that night –  as a metaphor to create almost hypnotic suspense and drama was nothing less than brilliant.

Brad Pitt and Leonardo Caprio are the stars, as you all know, both of them non-heroes in their own way.

DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, a failing cowboy star of the Golden Era, and an alcoholic falling apart as his career fades. His best friend and only friend is Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt in his Dean Martin mode of competence, muscle, and imperturbability.

It is great to see these two very male actors (it is a very male film, except for Sharon Tate’s character, played wonderfully by Margot Robie) strut and preen for one another.

Cliff is Rick’s stunt double and carries around an awful secret, everyone believes he murdered his wife, and we are coyly led by Tarantino to believe he just might have.

Chris has to drive Rick everywhere because he lost his license, he also has to talk Rick down when he lapses into his boozy tears of self-pity and lament.

There is perhaps nothing in the world of culture that is sadder than a famous movie star on the way down, and Di Caprio does a masterful job of playing a role that is the literal opposite of him, a huge star at the peak of his career. That is acting.

Pitt, on the other hand, seems to always play himself. He has always seemed a bit one dimensional to me, and that’s how he seemed in the film – predictably cool and wry, nothing can rattle him, even bloody mayhem.

I kept thinking of Dean Martin. I don’t know if he has other dimensions or not, DiCaprio sure does.

I loved the movie, it’s a wonder, but I did think the Pitt-DiCaprio byplay just was too much and too long, this is yet another movie that is a half-hour too long. Tarantino made sure to show us Pitt’s bare chest once or twice in the film, he is no marketing slouch.

The 60’s details were painstaking and sometimes beautiful, I caught about 20 percent of the references and sometimes felt I was standing outside the gates of the Playboy Mansion (there was such a scene in the movie) watching everybody dance inside.

The most haunting and powerful elements of the movie were the parallel story of Sharon Tate, slaughtered brutally in her home two weeks before her baby was due, she was  seen then as one of the most promising young actors in Hollywood.  Her husband, the director Roman Polanski was out of the country at the time of the killings.

The murders were and are inexplicable, but they captured a sense that the ’60s were tearing the country apart, even more so than now.

The story of these shocking murders was brutal and tragic, and so much so that it is credited with changing LA forever. Tarantino does a wondrous job of building suspense and menace into this roller coaster of a movie, so full of tricks and memorable lines.

Tarantino can be sensitive as well as outrageous.  He took care to show us what Sharon Tate was like, what was lost when she was killed. The movie didn’t just make her a famous murder victim, it made her a human that we can relate to. No one that I know of has bothered to do that before.

All  I can say about the ending is that it was surprising and pure genius.

The movie is really about myth, the yearning and potential of people who dream of being famous, the siren call of Hollywood. I have the sense none of that has been lost, just the myth perhaps that surrounded it.

Hollywood was in so many ways the creation of publicists, and the Internet has turned all of us into publicists, no one gets to hide anymore behind any kind of mask, nobody gets to look pure or noble for long.

Tarantino seeks in the movie to capture the mythical time – it was all a myth, wasn’t it –  when movies and real-life and sometimes awful nature of humans all come together in a compelling but absolutely alien world.

Al Pacino does a wonderful cameo as a slimy agent trying to get Rick to Italy to make spaghetti westerns there. At least, Pacino tells him, you won’t always be the bad guy getting shot at the end of every show.

The appearance in the film of Polaski and his wife Tate raise the stakes dramatically in the movie and kept me alert and thinking, and tense. I was waiting for the worst. I thought I knew what was coming, but of course, Tarantino is much too savvy for that.

I especially loved the funniest scene in the movie, when Clif gets a stunt-man job on The Green Hornet and is challenged to a fight by Bruce Lee in his Kato costume from Peter Sellers Pink Panther movies.

The finale is a classic display of Tarantino’s bloody, always inventive, tongue-in-cheek mayhem. It had me spinning and re-playing the movie all the way home. I recommend the film highly, the words that keep coming to mind are brilliant and absolutely unique.

Maybe outrageous too.

(oh, it is not for kids under 10 or 12, all the others can see worse online every day.)