"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."

"... Tarantino delivers a ridiculously white movie, complete with a nasty dose of white resentment.... 'Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood' is a tribute to the people behind the scenes and below the line, the ones who secretly infuse movies with their practical knowledge, life experience, and athletic feats..... Cliff’s unhappy marriage isn’t depicted as a site of conflict but as his endurance of the shrill and belittling rage of a shrew.... The movie’s most prominent female character, Sharon Tate (Robbie), is given even less substance; she is depicted as an ingenuous Barbie doll who ditzily admires herself onscreen.... There’s a peculiar sidebar, when Cliff picks up a teen-age hitchhiker who calls herself Pussycat (Margaret Qualley), who’s actually a member of the Manson Family, and...  when she offers Cliff a blow job—and Cliff distinguishes himself from Hollywood predators by asking her age, demanding to see proof of it on her driver’s license, and gallantly declaring that he doesn’t intend to go to prison for 'poontang.'"

From "Review: Quentin Tarantino’s Obscenely Regressive Vision of the Sixties in 'Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood" by Richard Brody (in The New Yorker).

I haven't seen the movie (yet), but I can't understand the assertion that the director's vision is regressive. Characters do all sorts of things in movies. How do you decide to attribute their failings to the moviemaker? Also, when does a regressive vision become obscene? I guess — as Justice Stewart said about pornography — Richard Brody knows it when he sees it.

Hey! "I know it when I see it" has its own Wikipedia article.

The phrase "I know it when I see it" is a colloquial expression by which a speaker attempts to categorize an observable fact or event, although the category is subjective or lacks clearly defined parameters. The phrase was used in 1964 by United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to describe his threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio. In explaining why the material at issue in the case was not obscene under the Roth test, and therefore was protected speech that could not be censored, Stewart wrote:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

I like the "see also" list there. It includes "Duck test":

The duck test is a form of abductive reasoning. This is its usual expression:

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck...

Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916) may have coined the phrase when he wrote:

When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.

A common variation of the wording of the phrase may have originated much later with Emil Mazey, secretary-treasurer of the United Auto Workers, at a labor meeting in 1946 accusing a person of being a communist:

I can't prove you are a Communist. But when I see a bird that quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, has feathers and webbed feet and associates with ducks—I'm certainly going to assume that he is a duck.

The term was later popularized in the United States by Richard Cunningham Patterson Jr., United States ambassador to Guatemala in 1950 during the Cold War, who used the phrase when he accused the Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán government of being Communist. Patterson explained his reasoning as follows:

Suppose you see a bird walking around in a farm yard. This bird has no label that says 'duck'. But the bird certainly looks like a duck. Also, he goes to the pond and you notice that he swims like a duck. Then he opens his beak and quacks like a duck. Well, by this time you have probably reached the conclusion that the bird is a duck, whether he's wearing a label or not....

Douglas Adams parodied this test in his book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency:

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands....

The Liskov Substitution Principle in computer science is sometimes expressed as a counter-example to the duck test:

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck but it needs batteries, you probably have the wrong abstraction....