Quentin Tarantino movies have now been a part of my life for 25 years. I recently decided to take the time to rewatch and rank all nine of his movies – mainly because I wanted to see if tastes have changed and really, because why not? I’m far from a movie critic and I’m not concerned about film theory or anything like that. These are my personal rankings.
1. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)
2. Pulp Fiction (1994)
Without Pulp Fiction, I would have never known that movies existed. Of course, I was aware of movies and sometimes went to the movies. However, movies were a passing interest – something easily detachable. Pulp Fiction changed that. I had no idea that something could be so cool, original, fun, violent, hilarious – let alone a movie.
What I later learned was that Pulp Fiction was an entry to everything that made it cool, original, fun, violent and hilarious – all the little movie, TV and pop culture references that shaped Tarantino’s vision. Because of this one movie, I discovered hundreds more and all the wormholes attached – great directors, cool actors – all the influences both great and awful. I learned movie history from Anthony Cocca 49 cent general rentals and in each one, there’s some path that leads you back to Pulp Fiction.
Naturally, I’ve followed Tarantino ever since. And naturally, the movies have changed. Tarantino is still innovative, writes killer dialogue, creates visually stunning environments and is remarkably – still cool. I’ve loved all of his movies but I would always go back to Pulp Fiction as his best work. Or at least my favorite.
Maybe nostalgia informs this ranking – there’s a comfort in the characters, the soundtrack, the moments – being in the Warren Twin Cinema and for the first time experiencing a Royale with Cheese, personality going a long way or “I shot Marvin in the face!”
But then again, maybe there’s more to nostalgia.
Pulp Fiction indeed has the most memorable characters, dialogue and style of any of his movies. Jules and Vincent, Marcellus and Mia Wallace, and the Wolf are pop culture icons. Hans Landa is a brilliant creation – a Nazi detective who resents the appearance of his spectacular efficiency – and is probably Tarantino’s most well-rounded character outside of Jackie Brown. Landa also delivers the greatest scene of dialogue in any Tarantino movie.
Yet, it’s still not Pulp Fiction. The feeling isn’t there. Or at least it’s different.
The feeling when Max meets Jackie, Beatrix punches her way out of a grave, Hitler is murdered or Django and Dr. King Schultz ride through the snow just doesn’t compare.
However, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood feels different.
Tarantino’s ninth movie is clearly his most personal. It is jam packed with everything Tarantino saw and heard in his childhood – and it’s a wild reimagining of an idyllic continuation of a long past era.
Of course, Tarantino changes history by diminishing Charles Manson – which was the greatest movie swerve anyone could have pulled off in 2019 – but all of what informed a young Tarantino not only survives, but thrives into the future. Sharon Tate becomes a star while living. Washed up Rick Dalton gets a meeting with Roman Polanski.
This is a movie that Tarantino couldn’t have made 30 years ago. Naturally, he’s matured as a storyteller and director. 30 years ago, most of us wouldn’t have watched something like Once Upon a Hollywood – or at least cared about it.
This is a movie that contains a subtext about today’s movies – Tarantino knows he’s a dying breed. He’s not a washed up Rick Dalton, but he’s one of the last of his kind – a truly original thinker, writer and director in a world of comic book movies and safe corporate choices.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a fairy tale about Hollywood – but also speaks to the deep, personal connections that movies can sometimes create.
To this end, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a continuation of Pulp Fiction.
Tarantino has never created a deeper connection to his characters than he did with Rick and Cliff. While we knew Vincent lived in Amsterdam and realized Jules is a deep thinker, Rick Dalton is losing his identity in the midst of a cultural sea change, drinking too much and probably having a nervous breakdown. Cliff is Cliff – but there is enough tangible mystery there for Tarantino to write a four-hour epic. Sharon Tate’s mythology changes from victim to star, as her wholeness symbolically triumphs over the hate, paranoia and fear represented by Charles Manson.
Mia Wallace’s story ends when she thanks Vincent for dinner. Tarantino also shows that he’s still full of surprises. Way back in 1994, you heard about Pulp Fiction because of Marvin, Dead N-er Storage or the Gimp. Those were the weird draws that lured you in.
In 2019 – where literally no one can keep a secret – Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was hyped as “the Manson movie” – one to be released on the anniversary of the Manson killings. And beyond all that, can you only imagine what blood and guts Tarantino would do with a Manson movie??? Of course, the swerve is that Manson is a bit player in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
That probably wouldn’t have been the case in 1994 – when Pulp Fiction or Natural Born Killers were released. The restraint that Tarantino shows here reflects his grace as a storyteller but is also a reminder of the magic of movies. Two hours into Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, I’m completely absorbed by Rick trying to remember his Lancer lines and have completely forgotten about Manson.
There is no swerve in the movie – because it doesn’t need one. Dicaprio and Pitt are Tarantino’s two biggest name actors to date – each playing the best roles he’s ever written. Margot Robbie gives the story its soul – and while there’s nothing inherently quotable or meme-worthy, it’s simply the best work that one of the most innovative writer-directors ever has created.
And it should be his last movie. In the end, movies win. Nostalgia wins.
How can you top that?
3. Kill Bill (2003)
4. Jackie Brown (1997)
Rewatching Tarantino’s movies, I had forgotten how strong the run of Pulp Fiction-Jackie Brown-Kill Bill proved to be. These three movies couldn’t be any different but are weirdly linked. While there’s a strong 70’s influence coursing through all of Tarantino’s work, I feel it most strongly in Jackie Brown and Kill Bill.
Reservoir Dogs is kind of on its own island yet can be lumped in with Pulp Fiction when you consider both are essentially 90’s LA crime stories. Inglourious Basterds can stand alone, while Hateful Eight and Django are the Spaghetti Western-Civil War era block.
Yet, Jackie Brown and Kill Bill both feature female leads who are equal parts badass and critically vulnerable. Beatrix slaughters the Crazy 88’s and keeps their limbs, while Jackie stays a step ahead of the Feds and an increasingly desperate small-time criminal.
The supporting actors are pulled from 70’s oblivion – Robert Forster and virtually every Kung Fu movie veteran left standing. The foes Jackie and Beatrix face are dangerous – Ordell Robbie sees his money vanish and she knows the ATF guys are using her. Beatrix is going up against world class trained killers.
Both movies are surprisingly tender. Jackie has reached that point in life where she knows she can’t start over. Yet she also has nothing to lose. She is incredibly manipulative but oddly endearing – you believe her when she tells Max that she didn’t use him. You clearly want her to win.
For Beatrix, she has to start over to ultimately gain her revenge. Wiggling her big toe is the beginning of the rebirth – one that ends with taking Bibi home. The visual spectacle of the “kill crazy rampage” is stunning and delirious to watch. But in the end, there’s a wholesome reward attached to it.
After Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was released – and Hateful Eight as well – there was criticism leveled towards Tarantino that he doesn’t give females their due. Margot Robbie didn’t have enough scenes and Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character was physically abused. It’s bizarre to take such thoughts seriously, as Jackie Brown and Beatrix Kiddo are perhaps Tarantino’s two strongest characters – regardless of gender.
It’s difficult to rank one movie over another.
Jackie Brown has a lot going for it: it features the best Tarantino male-female leads in Pam Grier and Robert Forster, has the best soundtrack in terms of overall songs – including the best Tarantino song moment when Max meets Jackie, features Samuel Jackson’s best Tarantino performance and boasts terrific supporting roles for DeNiro, Chris Tucker and Bridget Fonda.
Pam Grier plays everything in one role – she’s aging and weary. She’s a badass, dangerous and completely vulnerable. She’s desperate, lost but always in control. It’s really a masterful role – because of course, Tarantino wrote the role for her and because of course, Pam Grier was born to play it.
The spectacle of Kill Bill – the frenzy, the sound, the radiance, the motion, the blood – is intense. The Crazy 88 fight scenes are so dense that they are broken up in different tones; the songs quicken and change mid-battle, like an old jukebox flipping records. The lights flicker and change from color to black and white – doors slide, rooms change, another new song, then the climax in the beautiful, serene snow.
The opening scene with Vernita Green is almost ripped from Pulp Fiction – a battle that ends in the kitchen over coffee and breakfast cereal. But the movie matures. Different worlds are inhabited: Pei Mei, Paula Schultz, Budd, the Titty Bar, Mexico and finally, the showdown with Tarantino’s greatest villain, Bill.
Black Mamba becomes Beatrix and finally Mommy. One of the best moments in any Tarantino movie is Beatrix cuddling Bibi in bed. It took a vicious route to get there, but it’s a sweet ending.
I’ve read and heard a lot of people call Jackie Brown the “outlier” of Tarantino’s movies. It makes sense if only looking at the male-dominated, stylistic crime movie template laid out in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. It’s worth noting that Jackie Brown is the most stylistic crime movie Tarantino wrote – thanks in part to Elmore Leonard, who is the master of such writing.
If any of Tarantino’s movies are an outlier, it would have to be Kill Bill. There is more action in Kill Bill than most of his other movies combined. All the action directly leads to one climatic scene – with David Carradine, who is the greatest of Tarantino villains. With the exception of Django’s Calvin Candie and in a larger sense, the Nazis from Inglorious Basterds, Bill is easily the most menacing character in the Tarantino universe. He also represents a father-like figure, which is a theme Tarantino hasn’t explored much.
In a sense, both of these movies are outliers. And that’s a great thing.
5. Inglorious Basterds
6. Django Unchained
7. The Hateful Eight
Going into my Tarantino rewatch, I figured these three movies would be the hardest to rank. After watching, I feel the same. Each of the three are amazing movies and show Tarantino’s growth as a writer and director.
Without question, each movie features Tarantino’s most evolved dialogue and show off some of the most beautiful cinematography he’s done to date. And each movie is really, really weird, stupidly violent and hilarious.
If you break Tarantino’s movies into eras, Inglorious Basterds is the start of Part Two. The opening scene with Hans Landa and the farmer was quietly shocking – at least in terms of the pacing, the language and the tense quiet pauses. It was a very un-Tarantino like scene for the time, but it starts to represent the jump he had made as an artist.
15 years after Pulp Fiction, there are actors speaking German, French and English and I’m reading subtitles.
A lot had changed. However, a lot was the same.
Inglorious Basterds goes from a Dirty Dozen sequel to a Hemingway novel then morphs into a Grindhouse B-Movie about killing Nazis before ending back where it started. Yet throughout the movie, Inglorious Basterds is a celebration of movies – or cinema….to the extent that cinema is partly responsible for the Nazi rise to power along with its literal death in a burning theatre.
The themes matured – or at least got weightier. Before Inglorious Basterds, the heaviest themes in a Tarantino movie were betrayal, Jules walking the Earth or “that woman deserves her revenge.” Now, a French refugee is willing to sacrifice her cinema and life to avenge the Nazi party.
This new Tarantino phase coincides with the best acting performances of any pre-DiCaprio Tarantino movie. Christoph Waltz took a Tarantino character to a different level with his portrayal of Hans Landa. Landa was everything that made Nazis Nazis, including the stubborn and weird obsession with efficiency, mixed with a bit of resentment and a kind of neurotic self-worth.
Melanie Laurent and Diane Kruger are exact opposites – Laurent’s Shosanna is quiet and tells the story through her eyes and facial expressions, while Bridget Von Hammersmark is broad and physical. The Frederick Zoller character is equal parts pesky and scary, Archie Hicox suave and Stiglitz is silent and ready to explode.
But what makes Inglorious Basterds a vintage Tarantino movie is how dangerous it feels while never taking itself seriously. Aldo Raine is a lunatic hillbilly, Donowitz is so psycho, he’s almost a caricature. Hitler just appears worn out and almost sad and Goebbels is the tortured artist. Donowitz and Omar speaking Italian, Aldo and Wilhelm and the hidden dynamite all plays like a Road Runner cartoon. Meanwhile, the relative fate of the world hangs in the balance and poor Bridget Von Hammersmark decided to climb a mountain.
Django Unchained unfolds along a similar path. Tarantino tackles slavery through the lens of a spaghetti Western – albeit a really well made one. There’s enough comedy to momentarily offset the tragedy: King Schultz’s tooth carriage, Jamie Foxx’s swagger and clothing, even DiCaprio’s cruel and unhinged Calvin Candie has a few lighter moments with Samuel Jackson’s Stephen.
However, Tarantino does such a great job creating what is probably the scariest environment in all his movies – Mississippi during slavery – that anything moving peripherally from this setting feels a bit misplaced. Perhaps this is why Jamie Foxx’s Django is probably Tarantino’s most succinct lead character. He doesn’t say a lot, but then again, its hard to imagine a long of stretch of dialogue after Django sees his wife pulled out of a hot box.
Christoph Waltz is excellent again as Dr. King Schultz but Foxx is the closest thing Tarantino has written to a superhero….and Foxx plays the role well. Django is unflappable and essentially indestructible, and Foxx is laser-focused throughout the entire movie. DiCaprio’s Calvin Candie offers the exact opposite – a verbose, sometimes jittery explosion of pure evil. However, overcoming Candie is just one stop on Django’s journey. Saving Hildy is the personal, human and material goal, but the ultimate destruction of Candieland serves as a metaphor of sorts for a triumph over slavery.
Without question, Django is the hardest Tarantino movie to watch. To his credit, Tarantino creates the kind of brutal, hopeless environment that we can only imagine slavery to be. The Mississippi chapter of the movie is painful. Yet, the first part of Django features some of the most beautiful moments in Tarantino’s career. The shots of snowy mountains as Jim Croce’s I Got a Name plays is near perfect – it’s my favorite Tarantino song sequence and maybe one of the greatest brief moments in any Western ever made.
The Hateful Eight is the natural follow-up to Django, both in terms of its style, setting and time period. It’s another post-Civil War movie – although it’s set in the middle of nowhere Wyoming during a snowstorm.
It’s by far Tarantino’s most sparse setting – it’s basically a three-act play that occurs in two places. It’s a Western mystery – a who done it that is weirdly best related to Reservoir Dogs. It’s definitely a slow build, but like any of Tarantino’s later movies, it’s totally worth it.
The characters are tremendous. Like Reservoir Dogs, you learn enough about them for the story to function, but there is mystery attached to all. Everyone involved is probably a liar or at the least, not who they claim to be. This leads to some fun acting – with a cool mix of old Tarantino regulars and new faces.
Samuel Jackson is his usual dominant self and commands the best dialogue of the movie. Tim Roth oozes deceit – his fake hangman is a smarmy mess and probably his best Tarantino character. Joe Gage is the perfect role for Michael Madsen, as he basically inhabits himself. He’s easily the coolest and probably quirkiest supporting actor in the Tarantino world.
However, the movie belongs to Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Daisy Domergue. She gives the best physical performance in Tarantino history – at least in terms of physical comedy.
So much happens to her face. She’s punched, elbowed and planted in the snow – all before getting splattered with stew, blood, vomit and her brother’s brains. She’s Tarantino’s mix of Carrie and Calamity Jane – only with a guitar. She’s vile, gross, funny and you have to root for her a little bit.
Walton Goggins is a standout as usual and he’s made for Tarantino dialogue. However, the final 20 minutes of the movie starts to drag – it feels like his Chris Mannix ends a hundred sentences with “bitch” and there isn’t much for the remaining characters to do except slowly bleed out.
8. Reservoir Dogs
9. Death Proof
Like Hateful Eight, I can see some theater group putting on Reservoir Dogs someday. There’s only a handful of sets, it’s driven by great dialogue and the characters are instantly identifiable. There’s probably a weird musical number or two to be unearthed.
Similar to Hateful Eight, you know who the characters are, yet know nothing about them – except Mr. Orange. There’s no payoff at the end and the only redemptive qualities in the story – the moral code of thief professionalism and Mr. White’s compassion – are both defeated.
Similar to Pulp Fiction, there’s a ton of nostalgia attached to Reservoir Dogs. Like most people, I wouldn’t have known about Reservoir Dogs without Pulp Fiction exploding. Although it exists in the same Tarantino LA crime universe as Pulp Fiction and because it’s full of cool characters saying cooler dialogue, a bunch of guns and things “getting fucked up”, it’s still a very different movie.
It’s Tarantino’s first movie and I had forgotten how low budget it looks. It’s probably his only movie that actually looks dated – which again, it’s a nearly 30 year old movie, which makes sense. It’s easy to throw today’s social correctness at the movie – it’s a bunch of white guys liberally throwing around the N-word, there’s no women involved, and on and on.
However, the entire reason to celebrate Tarantino is to avoid all of today’s retroactive commentary – the kind of thing that sucks the life out of everything enjoyable. Reservoir Dogs has its flaws. Again, it’s a movie made in 1991.
However, the cool factor is off the charts – both now and in 1991. There was nothing even close to the style of Reservoir Dogs then and it’s still something impossible to replicate today. Although Pulp Fiction was the entry for most people to Tarantino, Reservoir Dogs is easily his most copied movie…..and for good reason.
This is Tarantino’s best casting – at least specific to a story. If you’re telling a story about a group of bank robbers, Keitel, Madsen, Buscemi, Roth, Chris Penn and Lawrence Tierney is the way to go. Buscemi is squirrely and brainy – you can imagine his Mr. Pink both getting bullied and pulling off fantastic revenge. Keitel is the veteran in the group and the leader. He looks like a career criminal but also could be an acting coach – which he probably was behind the scenes. Roth goes meta as an undercover cop rehearsing his lines and of course, Madsen owns every scene his psychotic, yet likeable Mr. Blonde inhabits.
Reservoir Dogs is still – nearly 30 years later – Tarantino’s coolest movie.
K-Billy, Like a Virgin, “He don’t tip”, Seymour Scagnetti, “You going to bark, little doggie?”, the Commode Story and “let’s get a taco” are all timeless. Little Green Bag playing over bank robbers walking in suits can’t ever be replicated. Tarantino has made better movies, written better characters and told greater stories.
Yet, no one – not even him – can copy Reservoir Dogs.
Death Proof is the toughest of Tarantino’s movies to rank. It’s supposed to be an inherently bad grindhouse movie. But Tarantino instead creates about three hours worth of material, boasting two entirely different casts of actors and unbelievable, real stunt work.
It’s a fun idea for a movie.
The warped sections of film, the cutouts, the missing lap dance scene and music make it unique and vintage to its purpose as a 70’s throwback. Kurt Russell is dynamic as Stuntman Mike – he’s a weird blend of maniacal, over the hill, John Wayne creepiness. The rest of the cast is a collection of actors who clearly wanted to be in a Tarantino movie – although some feel like they’re trying too hard to fit in.
The dialogue is extensive but isn’t memorable – a lot of it feels like a Hollywood inside joke that never landed then and clearly isn’t meaningful now. Death Proof is Tarantino’s most self-indulgent script. It takes a lot of conversations to build to two payoffs: Stuntman Mike disposing of the first crew of girls and then getting his comeuppance.
The movie stalls at times but the last half hour is among Tarantino’s best. The chase scene – with Zoe Bell doing her own stunts – is amazing and dangerous in a real-life sense. The movie goes way beyond the grindhouse theme and is supposed to be celebrating the nameless crews who did stunts back in Hollywood’s past. I get the idea and it’s so impressive how they filmed the chases without any special effects.
More importantly, Death Proof has some bad ass car chases that you will probably never see again.
