ONCE UPON A TIME ... IN HOLLYWOOD

R, 161 minutes. Starts Friday at Niantic. Starts tonight at Madison Art Cinemas, Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. It’s shocking to say that Quentin Tarantino’s Manson murders film is perhaps his most sedate and self-reflective yet. But maybe that’s because it’s not a Manson murders film. It’s not even a revenge picture. Rather, “Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood” is a rumination on stardom and myth-making, a memo on the cult of celebrity and the narratives we use to process the world around us. Can’t movie magic change these stories? The reality we live in? The film is a bit rueful, sentimental even, which is a new mode for the enfant terrible auteur, and it even casts his most operatic historical fantasy revenge pictures in a new light. “Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood” is still very much a Tarantino film, chockablock with his obsessions and peccadilloes. His fetishes and fixations are front and center, from the macro (flashbacks nested inside of flashbacks, random voice-over narration) to the micro (lots of bare female feet). Tarantino’s camera obsessively points out every detail of the period-specific production design, whole swaths of Los Angeles dressed to the nines in its very best 1969 duds. He wants to show it off, each poster, tchotchke and perfectly designed beer can. The nearly three-hour film has a lively (enough) pace because Tarantino can’t stop showing off each detail, the radio and records crackling, the TV blaring, offering a constant blanket of background white noise. We are in Hollywood after all, where it all happens, where the movie stars are your neighbors. Early in the film one of our protagonists, Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio in fine and funny form), a movie star teetering on oblivion, has a heart-to-heart with producer Marvin Schwarzs (Al Pacino) about what it means to be a hero or a heavy. Rick used to be a hero, the star of a TV Western, “Bounty Law.” But now he’s a TV heavy, chauffeured to set by his best and only friend and stunt double, Cliff Booth (a soulful Brad Pitt). Marvin urges Rick to think about how that will make audiences see him. Isn’t it time to go to Rome and make a few spaghetti Westerns where he can be a hero again? While Rick plays one on TV, Cliff is the real hero in the film, but there’s a conflict. He’s a heavy simultaneously. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

THE ART OF SELF-DEFENSE

R, 104 minutes. Starts Friday at Westbrook. In writer/director Riley Stearns’ “The Art of Self-Defense,” a beta male gets in touch with his alpha by way of a strip mall karate school. It’s a curious and intoxicating new experience for the fearful and timid accountant Casey (Jesse Eisenberg), who finds his sensei (Alessandro Nivola) in a trauma haze after a near-fatal mugging. But what happens when you become the thing you hate and fear? What do you find in the darkest depths of yourself? Stearns grapples with notions of gender, violence and identity. But in this mannered, ironic take, his punches don’t land hard enough to leave a mark. “The Art of Self-Defense” is “The Foot Fist Way” by way of Jim Hosking’s profane absurdity, with shades of Wes Anderson lurking around the curated aesthetic and thoughtfully composed frames. Taken with Stearns’ 2015 debut, the cult-deprogramming film “Faults,” it’s clear he’s developed a specific style: a palette of beiges and browns, performances that are mannered and precise almost to a fault and stories about the dark side of mind control. When Casey finds Sensei and his karate school, he’s given something to live for in the wake of his neardeath experience. He has purpose, discipline and a goal; the classes offer a lusty, embodied experience of blood, sweat and kicks to the solar plexus. His charismatic sensei doles out praise and condemnation in equal measure, like any great cult leader, leaving his students addicted and grasping for kernels and crumbs of his validation. But as Casey plunges deeper into Sensei’s world, attending the exclusive night class, working part time on accounting, his reality becomes surreal, twisted and darker than he ever could have expected. The film feels at once painfully personal, an exploration of getting in touch with your own rage, trying on the performance of toxic, entitled, aggressive masculinity and seeing how it feels. When Casey fully steps into his alpha self, robotically demanding respect and power, throat punching his boss, objectifying women, demeaning his own dog, it’s sickening (and it does have consequences). — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO

R, 121 minutes. Starts Friday at Mystic Luxury Cinemas Jimmie Fails plays a fictionalized version of himself in director Joe Talbot’s Sundance prize-winning debut feature, which tells a personal story of friendship, community and the yearning for home. Also stars Danny Glover, Tichina Arnold and Mike Epps. A review wasn’t available by deadline.