It was to be Quentin Tarantino’s ninth movie. Better than his Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, his Citizen Kane, his magnum opus, a love letter to the LA of the late 1960s. Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood (2019) was Tarantino’s biggest box office success.

‘I literally can’t remember when movies were not my thing,’ he once said and OUATIH has been called everything from ‘beautifully shot, with a litany of gratifying period references’ to ‘the most expensive B-movie ever made’. Many critics called it over-long and self-indulgent; others loved it and put it in the top twenty films of all time. Tarantino spent inordinate time and money recreating Hollywood street scenes – the cars, the neon signs, the restaurant interiors. The film had big stars in Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, and a rock soundtrack to die for. The hype that surrounded the film’s release was deafening.

Now a huge coffee-table book on its making by Jay Glennie (Titan, £60) celebrates the blockbuster. The movie is a marvellous mash-up of real events and fictionalised storylines and like many a cult movie it’s chock-full of ‘Easter eggs’ (sly references and in-jokes that only wised-up aficionados will get).

Hollywood no longer produces stars of the magnitude of Joan Crawford (1908-77) the subject of a new biography Joan Crawford: A Woman’s Face (Simon and Schuster, £22) by Scott Eyman. The star’s real-life story frequently had an echo in the films she made. Often cast as an ambitious secretary or shopgirl who makes good, Crawford started in the 1920s playing a dance-mad jazz flapper and upstaged Garbo, the biggest star at the time, in Grand Hotel (1932). Although Joan’s acting range was limited, even in bad movies she was always worth watching. She won the Oscar for the classic noir melodrama Mildred Pierce (1945).

Failed marriages, a declining career and claims by her adopted daughter that she had been abusive did not seem to diminish Miss Crawford. Throughout her life she boldly chased her own demons and, as her career as a glamour queen waned, she found a new lease of life, of sorts, in a series of ‘psycho biddy’ roles that started with scary/funny Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962).

Just as Mildred Pierce battled her emotions (the love and loss of her daughter and the unreliable men in her life) so does another Joan, Joan Webster, the character at the heart of the classic British movie I know Where I’m Going! (1945). Played by Wendy Hiller this Joan is heading north on the Scotch Express out of London to meet her husband-to-be and start a new life. Made by the filmmaking duo Powell and Pressburger, the film (just rereleased on Blu-ray by Criterion) may be a little ‘Celtic twilight’ for some tastes but it has a magical power. Martin Scorcese raves about it.

This lyrical story set in the Highlands tells of a confident young Englishwoman whose heart (and the weather) get in the way of her marriage plans. It’s all wonderfully evocative of a Britain coming out of the war. The film defies neat categorisation – a romantic thriller with a touch of the supernatural. Much of it was filmed in Scotland on the island of Mull. Like the Tarantino film it’s full of symbols (and Easter eggs) like the bridal gown swaying on the coat hanger like a knowing reproach, the Corrievrechan whirlpool that threatens to swallow everyone up, a cryptic curse inscribed on the castle wall, and a precocious local girl (wise beyond her years) who went on to become pop songstress Petula Clark.

Mull also features in the life of Jessica ‘Decca’ Mitford, one of the celebrated, wealthy and glamourous sisters and whose aristocratic family owned the island of Inch Kenneth off Mull. When her parents died Decca bought her sisters’ share and owned the island outright. By this time Decca was an ardent communist who joked that she’d gift the island to Russia as a submarine base.

As a young woman she eloped to the US and became a brilliant and prolific journalist and author, active in Black civil rights. Decca’s life – told in a magnificent new biography Troublemaker by Carla Kaplan (Hurst, £27.50) – was full of surprises. She was disinherited by her father, was watched by the FBI and palled around with Maya Angelou. Kaplan describes her as ‘irreverent, passionate, obstinate, iconoclastic, and hilarious’.

And fearless – just the sort of hero we need today.