*This article contains spoilers.

Once upon a time, somewhere far from Hollywood, critics decided that movies for grownups should not be fun, and that the filmmakers who make them should be punished. For publications like The Guardian, the latest unacceptable pusher of a good time is Quentin Tarantino, with his long-anticipated Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.

“Whatever the merits of his new film, Tarantino’s films have revelled in extreme violence against female characters,” says the piece, entitled “End of the affair: why it’s time to cancel Quentin Tarantino.” Time Magazine went so far as to count “every line in every Quentin Tarantino film to see how often women talk,” tallying the results in data charts.

This nakedly ideological ire against not just the movie, but Tarantino himself, extends even to The New Yorker—the same New Yorker where Pauline Kael, a decidedly non-ideological film critic, presided for a generation. “Tarantino’s love letter to a lost cinematic age is one that, seemingly without awareness, celebrates white-male stardom (and behind-the scenes command) at the expense of everyone else,” writes Richard Brody.

Once Upon A Time…in Hollywood is a rollicking cinematic collage assembled around three main characters: a washed up B-movie actor, Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) who pines for the A-list glamour of his next door neighbor, Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). Dalton, along with his stunt double and loyal friend Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), watch longingly as Tate and her husband, Oscar-winner Roman Polanski, pull out of their next door driveway. The couple then speed away in their breezy convertible—young, fiercely beautiful, and in love.

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For Brody such scenes are exploitative, devoid of social concern. But Tarantino just wants us to go along for the ride. Here, the influence of the legendary B-movie director, Joseph H. Lewis, is unmistakable. The driving scenes are shot from the back seat, the way Lewis had filmed John Dall and Peggy Cummins in Gun Crazy—two actors playing bank robbers who, at one point, pretend to be actors. Only Polanski and Tate are not about to rob a bank. They are off to a party at the Playboy Mansion. They carve the Hollywood canyons to the rock ’n’ roll. All they want to do is dance. Drama is replaced with romance.

Margot Robbie is Tate incarnate. The real Sharon Tate, only 26 and two weeks from giving birth, would soon be brutally murdered by members of the “Manson Family.” (Manson himself makes a brief appearance, played by actor Damon Herriman). She and her unborn son were stabbed sixteen times. Roman Polanski, the wunderkind filmmaker from Poland who, at the age of 6, watched his parents taken away to Mauthausen and Auschwitz, would never recover. But for now, filmed in shallow focus, the world around them is a blur, defused, its brutality still distant. There is no moral telos in these extended scenes of driving and dancing. But thanks to Tarantino, we get to see Tate and Polanski, just a few beats longer, in their tragically brief innocence.

This isn’t to say that Tarantino’s style is above aesthetic critique. His films are tenuously stitched, meandering, overly referential, and perhaps too low on story for more traditional cinephiles (and of course there is the perennial foot fetish). Informed in part by Italian neo-realists, Tarantino’s loose ends don’t always play back into his plotlines. But cinematic tangents like Uma Thurman twist-dancing with John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, or Jules, a hitman played by Samuel L. Jackson reciting Bible verses before executing somebody, have become iconic. Brody insists that “Tarantino’s nostalgia is his film’s guiding principle, its entire ideology.”

To impugn ideological motives on filmmakers is nothing new for critics who want to see their own world views enacted on screen. And yet, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood had the biggest opening of any Tarantino project to dateand has since crossed the $100 million mark—not bad for a movie whose characters aren’t adopted from comic books. The reason is that there is no ideology. Detached from these audiences, Brody serves up his doctrinal reviews under the misconception that people who go to the movies want lessons. But what they really want is to bask in 1960s Hollywood sun, to see Margot Robbie’ Tate dancing or Brad Pitt’s Booth shirtless, on the roof, fixing Dalton’s broken antenna.

They want to experience that first flirtation between Booth and Pussycat (Margaret Qualley), a teenage hippy girl hitchhiking her way across Los Angeles. She sees Booth driving and flings him a peace sign. The “V” is returned, two fingers raised over a steering wheel with nothing more than Brad Pitt’s impish smile. The scene is slow and tracking, filmed from the point of view of a pedestrian caught in the crossfire of this bright, erotic exchange.

Tarantino buffs will surely pick it apart: Booth is a war hero, The Moviegoer’s Binx Bolling with Elmore Leonard’s wit, and Pussycat a flower girl based loosely on the Manson Family’s Kathryn “Kitty” Lutesinger—their encounter a brief ironic truce between generations. Pussycat will eventually get in the car and take Booth to the infamous Spahn Movie Ranch. Otherwise, it’s yet another tangent, one that will endure in movie history for its romantic change and visual beauty.

Perhaps Brody’s real grievance is that Tarantino’s way of seeing his female muses is unlike that of Jean-Luc Godard. In Breathless, a new wave breakout, the French auteur had filmed Jean Seberg in quick cuts, sparsely, under low light. Godard was a Marxist, his vision of female mystique black and white, like a documentary. But Tarantino is quintessentially American. He lets us linger and watch Tate in all her Technicolor radiance. He lets us love her. What’s more, he lets her watch and love herself. We follow Sharon Tate as she struts about Los Angeles. Finally, she stops in front of a matinee poster of The Wrecking Crew in which she plays opposite Dean Martin. She buys a ticket, takes a seat in the dark among strangers, and cheers along with the audience when she sees herself up on screen as the “klutzy girl,” Freya Carlson.

“The justice critics, the ones who want to count up every movie’s sins against approved sensibilities, say that the film is nostalgic, a term intended to damage it,” wrote Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic. “The justice critics aren’t interested in fictions that feel like memories. They want movies that adhere to their vision of the way the world should be.”

Wary of this new breed of cina-sseurs, “evolving into a sophisticated body in spite of themselves,” screenwriters David Newman and Robert Benton had diagnosed this problem as early as 1968 in their piece for Esquire: