Quentin Tarantino's made a lot of great movies, but which one ranks as the very best?
Let's take a look back through his entire filmography and find out which classic reigns
supreme.
If you ever want to learn everything you need to know about independent filmmaking in the
'90s, but you only have two hours to do it, watch 1995's "Four Rooms."
It's a bizarre little artifact of the era, an anthology involving four up-and-coming
directors, with each segment set in a different room of the same hotel, all united by a single
character: Ted the Bellhop, a hapless, high strung bellhop played by '90s indie mainstay
Tim Roth.
"A coven of witches!
Not an oven!
Well, one witch in particular."
Tarantino was the biggest filmmaker involved, having just come off the massive mainstream
success of "Pulp Fiction," and as a result, he got the prime spot as the writer and director
of the movie's final segment, "The Man From Hollywood."
It's not bad, either, with Tarantino loosely adapting Roald Dahl's "Man From the South"
— once used as one of the better episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" — as a fast-talking
farce that skips out on the chills of the original in favor of a snappy punchline about
Ted making the most of his increasingly surreal evening.
The problem is that it's not great, either.
It's perfectly fine, but it plays up Tarantino's tendency toward references and homages and
winds up feeling pretty slight, especially when it's compared to other segments in the
film.
"Natural Born Killers" is really only a Tarantino film on a technicality.
He wrote the original screenplay, but by the time Oliver Stone finished his version of
the hyperviolent satire of mass media and mass murder, so much had been changed that
Tarantino only received a story credit, and barely acknowledges it as one of his movies..
At the end of the day, Stone found himself far more interested in the way that media
sensationalized murder and violence in real-life stories than the straightforward crime story
Tarantino wrote.
As a result, the movie was rebuilt as a full-on satire.
Tarantino's love of over-the-top violence is still there, as is a lot of the dialogue,
but thematically it's a very different beast.
The end result is a film that's well-made and extremely compelling, but that's also
not really a Tarantino movie in any way that really matters.
For a movie that's meant to be about fast cars crashing into each other, "Death Proof"
is extremely slow.
There are seemingly endless, fairly pointless conversations that pad out the movie between
the two big car chases, and they make the film feel longer than it is.
For a movie released in 2007, it seems to bounce back and forth between ponderous narrative
and lurid high concept, but for good or ill, that's all on purpose.
When Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez set out to pay tribute to the grindhouse double features
of the '70s with "Grindhouse," Tarantino's half was a note-perfect recreation of those
movies, warts and all.
It's not just talky and violent.
It's talky and slow in the same way that films like "Two Lane Blacktop" and "Vanishing Point"
were talky and slow.
And that twist ending, where the horror movie suddenly becomes a hilarious slapstick revenge
movie?
That's pure Tarantino having a ton of fun.
Sadly, it's just not quite as fun for the audience as we'd like it to be.
"The Hateful Eight" should be amazing.
It has an incredible cast that reunites Tarantino with some of the all-stars he'd worked with
previously, while also throwing newcomers, like Channing Tatum, into the mix for good
measure.
"Bringin' desperate men in alive is a good way to get yourself dead."
"Can't catch me sleepin' if I don't close my eyes."
The stage was set for an incredibly tense thriller that would inevitably build to Tarantino's
signature brutal violence, complete with a third-act twist that blew the locked-room
mystery element wide open and changed everything.
In practice, however, "The Hateful Eight" was disappointing.
Despite featuring some of the most charismatic actors in the business, the paper-thin characters
outlived their welcome far before the movie stumbled to the end of its three-hour runtime.
The tension that's baked into the story, by bottling up a bunch of suspicious characters,
wound up collapsing under its own weight and evaporating, turning "The Hateful Eight" into
a thriller that just didn't have many thrills.
"Jackie Brown" is unquestionably Tarantino's most underrated film, and to be honest, it's
pretty easy to see why.
For one thing, it had to follow "Pulp Fiction," and for another, it's so different from his
other films that it can't help but seem like the one that doesn't quite fit.
There's no over-the-top violence, and it lacks the nonlinear storytelling he'd become known
for at that point.
And, perhaps most unusual for Tarantino, it stands as the only time that he's adapted
a novel, Elmore Leonard's "Rum Punch," for the screen.
But that's also what's great about it.
With "Jackie Brown," Tarantino showed that he could tell a slightly more focused, smaller
crime story that didn't necessarily have to sprawl out into a nonlinear epic.
As much as it might not seem like it goes with the others, there's a good reason that
it's Leonard's favorite adaptation of his own work.
When they get it right, Quentin Tarantino and his friend Robert Rodriguez can mesh their
styles into action movie perfection, and nowhere is that better illustrated than in "From Dusk
Till Dawn."
Directed by Rodriguez with a script by Tarantino, who also stars alongside George Clooney and
Juliette Lewis, it follows a pair of bank robbers who hijack a faithless pastor and
his family in an effort to get across the border to Mexico.
Then they wind up at a strip club staffed entirely by vampires.
As you might've guessed from that setup, it's ridiculously over the top, even by Tarantino
standards.
In other words, it's fun.
Even better, it manages to showcase some of the best of what both filmmakers had to offer,
with Rodriguez's spectacular visual sensibilities taking center stage alongside Tarantino's
compelling characters and memorable dialogue.
Even though he didn't direct it, "True Romance" couldn't feel more like an early Tarantino
film, with all the signature moves that you'd expect to see.
There's the way that the story follows two hapless, lovestruck criminals as they wind
up involved in a crime that goes way over their heads.
There's a cast of engaging supporting characters who feel like they could have an entire movie
all to themselves.
It's even got a truly brutal climactic fight scene between Patricia Arquette and James
Gandolfini that feels like the prototype for what you'd see later in "Kill Bill."
And just in case all that wasn't Tarantino enough for you, there's also a scene where
the two main characters talk about how great Sonny Chiba is.
That said, director Tony Scott did convince Tarantino to change the ending to something
a little happier, something that almost led the writer to take his name off the film.
So, while it's full of Tarantino ideas, it's not quite pure Tarantino.
Looking at it on paper, "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" seemed like a pretty dicey proposition
from pretty much every angle.
It was a movie about movies, and while you could say that about every Tarantino flick
on some level, this one stripped away the layer of being inspired by '60s cinema and
just made that the whole focus of the film.
It also dealt directly with The Manson Family murders, and tackling a well-known, horrifying,
and relatively recent tragedy as an action-comedy with Tarantino's tendency towards historical
revisionism seemed like a surefire way to make everyone mad.
"Uh…can I help you?"
But if Tarantino's work has shown us anything, it's that you can't really predict what it's
going to be like when it hits the screen.
And it turned out that asking what would've happened if a washed up actor and his stuntman
buddy fought the Manson Family with a flamethrower — a question none of us had ever thought
to ask — made for a wildly entertaining film.
To say that Tarantino has always worn his cinematic influences on his sleeve is understating
things quite a bit, but that's never been more apparent than in the first volume of
"Kill Bill."
"Kill Bill" is a synthesis of everything that Tarantino loves about Hong Kong martial arts
films, revenge epics, and Sonny Chiba's "Street Fighter" saga, to the point of actually casting
Chiba himself in a major role as Hattori Hanzo.
What's really amazing, though, is how well this first part stands on its own without
feeling like the first chapter of a single movie.
It has some of Tarantino's best sequences, including the delightfully brutal showdown
with the Crazy 88 at the House of Blue Leaves.
It's a film that goes well beyond simple homage and becomes something far better than the
sum of its parts.
"Reservoir Dogs" isn't just a phenomenal directorial debut.
It's also the prototype for virtually everything that Quentin Tarantino would be doing for
the next 25 years.
It's all here, from the blood-soaked suspense to the nonlinear storytelling to the characters
having hyper-obsessive conversations about pop culture shortly before getting into deadly
situations.
"Like a Virgin's not about some sensitive girl who meets a nice fella.
That's what True Blue's about.
No, granted, no argument about that."
It's even got Tim Roth and Michael Madsen, who would go on to be two of Tarantino's go-to
casting choices.
And that soundtrack?
Madsen grooving to '70s classics while slicing off a man's ear is still one of the most iconic
moments of Tarantino's career.
That said, prototypes, even great ones, are still meant to be improved upon.
"Reservoir Dogs" laid down the foundation and made Tarantino an instant favorite for
critics and audiences alike, but later films would find Tarantino refining his approach
and building on what he'd already done.
There's a pretty compelling argument to be made that "Django Unchained" is Quentin Tarantino's
best movie.
It certainly has some of the best performances, including Leonardo DiCaprio's turn as the
truly despicable Calvin Candie.
The really amazing thing, though, is that "Django" ends up balancing every aspect of
a story that, in lesser hands, would feel disjointed and full of tonal whiplash.
It's a comedy where the gags, like Don Johnson as the idiot leader of an equally stupid gang
of Klansmen who get blown up with dynamite, are genuinely funny, largely thanks to Jamie
Foxx's endlessly charming performance in the lead role.
It's a revenge movie where the bad guys are infinitely easy to hate.
It's a story of love and friendship conquering all where the romance is genuinely stirring,
and where Christoph Waltz is able to earn some sympathy by playing the exact opposite
of his character in "Inglourious Basterds."
In short, it's amazing, but it's not quite the best.
The opening scene of "Inglourious Basterds," where Christoph Waltz's charming, horrifying
Nazi investigator sits across the table from a farmer offering up a torturously slow revelation
and an impossible choice, is one of the most tense, thrilling, and horrifying scenes of
the past few decades.
But even that's not the best thing about this movie.
The scenes where Brad Pitt as the leader of the Basterds demands a hundred Nazi scalps,
and Donnie the Bear Jew goes wild with a baseball bat are amazing, but they're not the best
thing either.
The slow burn reveal with Daniel Bruhl as a decorated sniper who reveals that even a
polite Nazi is still a Nazi is a brutal punch to the gut, but ... that's still not the best
thing.
No, the best thing about "Basterds" is that it's a World War II movie that manages to
subvert the one incontrovertible truth about World War II movies: we know how they end.
In this movie, though, it's not a self-inflicted gunshot in a bunker that takes out Hitler,
it's a handful of Jewish soldiers unloading machine guns in a burning movie theater in
one hell of a great ending.
Everything that we already said about "Kill Bill: Vol. 1" still applies to the sequel,
but there's one thing that puts the second volume ahead of the first: an emotional core
that underscores the action.
If the first movie's focus is on the horrific suffering that leads the Bride on her rampage
of revenge, the second is about how she chooses to overcome it, literally and figuratively
digging herself out of the grave that Bill put her into.
And when she actually confronts Bill, their conversation — and his crucial, completely
appropriate misunderstanding of how Superman works — gives the characters far more depth
than any blood-drenched step-by-step revenge movie could.
Not that "Kill Bill: Vol. 2" is lacking in blood, of course, but it backs it up with
some incredible emotion.
"Pulp Fiction" isn't just Tarantino's breakthrough hit, and it's not just the movie that defined
his career.
It was—and is—a pop culture phenomenon with an influence that's still being felt
over two decades after its release.
On its own, it's the movie that made Samuel L. Jackson a household name, resurrected John
Travolta's career, and proved that a complicated crime story with a mysterious McGuffin, told
out of order, could be a massive mainstream success.
Think about how many times you've seen someone recreate Uma Thurman's twist contest moves
on the dance floor, or heard Tarantino's version of Ezekiel 25:17 quoted in place of the actual,
much shorter Bible verse.
It's a movie that changed pop culture forever, and still holds up as a justified classic.
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