YESTERDAY AND TOMORROW
We often pine for the “good ol’ days” without considering how good they actually were. Take Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, in which director Quentin Tarantino channels a Tinseltown in transition from Hollywood’s golden age to the innovation of the auteur-driven New Hollywood. The shift is bad news for a fading TV Western star (Leonardo DiCaprio), who attempts a jump to the big screen with his stuntman (Brad Pitt). He also moves next door to actress Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) – wife of rising New Hollywood director Roman Polanski – and finds himself entangled in a murderous Manson Family plot.
Then there’s singer-songwriter Jack Malik (Himesh Patel), who languishes in musical mediocrity until he’s hit by a bus and wakes up to a world in which the Beatles never existed in Yesterday, directed by Danny Boyle ( Slumdog Millionaire). Jack leverages his lone knowledge of Beatles tunes to pass them off as his own, achieving superstardom while proving that, despite the successes of Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman, it is possible to craft a jukebox musical without depicting the band.
The documentary Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love offers a look at the relationship between Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen of “So Long, Marianne” fame – a love that spanned the ’50s when they lived on the Greek island of Hydra, through the ’60s when they went their separate ways to 2016, when Cohen wrote his ill muse, “Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.”