Thanks to Eileen Jones for her insightful, erudite, and oddly brave review of Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time  . . .  in Hollywood.

With the world all but tearing apart at the seams right now, you’d think that a popcorn flick like Tarantino’s would prove less controversial. And yet liberal reviewer after reviewer are lining up to offer the most pearl-clutching dismissals of Tarantino’s rude, brilliant, imperfect film that miss nearly all of its complexities and ambiguities. Sadly, the Victorian tendency to confuse bad morals with bad manners is still alive and well among progressives.

Happily, Jones appears above this elitism and her analysis helps to tidy up the film’s rich, messy ideas while so many other reviewers have only made a greater muck of things. All told, I don’t know that the film is quite so open to “radical possibilities”as Jones suggests. But even if Tarantino — who, incidentally, has devoted three films in the past decade to shooting up white supremacists — is every bit as regressive as his critics accuse, I don’t know why this should disqualify his film from our appreciation. Pure formalism in art criticism may be a dead end, but absent or bad morals don’t necessarily inspire bad movies.