The dazzling new movie Last Night in Soho is a bizarro-world version of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. Both movies are about the power of nostalgia. Tarantino's wonderful picture took one of modern history's most disturbing real-life horror stories—the Manson family murders—and transmuted it into crazy comedy. It was a deliberate sanitization of the truth about 1960s Los Angeles, a conscious study of the power movies have when it comes to romanticizing the past.
Last Night in Soho, from the singularly gifted writer-director Edgar Wright, does exactly the opposite. It's the story of Ellie, a young British would-be fashion designer, who hungers so deeply for the culture and glamour of 1960s London that she begins to time-travel there in her dreams—and then must suffer as those exciting...