Three films about…California dreaming: Steve Jobs (2015), Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Why am I writing about these movies now?

Well, I’m moving my back catalogue of movie (and occasionally TV) reviews from another site to Medium — covering many of the best-known releases of the last decade, as well as more obscure fare. To make it a bit more fun, I’ll be grouping them thematically (as here), but unless I spot actual errors I’m not doing any editing…so my opinion may have changed since I first wrote them!

My reviews of new cinema, streaming and disc releases, as well as retrospectives on old (and not-so-old) classics, will mostly continue to appear on the Medium publication Frame Rated.

Anyway, here goes. Enjoy…

Steve Jobs

It’s not uncommon to describe a film as theatrical, but Steve Jobs really could be a play on the stage, or very nearly: it is compressed very formally into three acts and set, almost entirely, in a few dressing rooms and other behind-the-scenes spaces at the venues where Apple co-founder Jobs launched three products — the original Mac, the NeXT, and the iMac — in the 1980s and 1990s.

It confines itself strictly to the few hours preceding each of those launches, examining how Jobs…