Every fan of Quentin Tarantino has their own personal ranking of his movies. Here's mine. If you're not a Tarantino fan, skip straight to the voting. Otherwise, settle in. You're encouraged to post your own rankings in the comments section below.
10. Grindhouse (2007) — The only Tarantino movie that gives me no pleasure, Grindhouse is a loving homage to drive-ins and double features directed in two halves by Robert Rodriguez (Planet Terror) and Tarantino (Death Proof). Tarantino's half is about a stuntman (Kurt Russell) who slums as a serial killer while driving a "death proof" car. The film is a faithful rendering of what you might have seen in a 1970s "grindhouse" movie — according to Wikipedia, "low-budget horror, splatter and exploitation films for adults" — but the nostalgia is lost on me. Double features weren't really a thing in my part of the country and the closest drive-in was in a swamp next to Mansker Creek — it was literally underwater most of the time.
9. The Hateful Eight (2015) — See my original full-length review here. Eight seemingly unrelated strangers wind up stuck in a cabin during a blizzard in the days after the American Civil War. True to all Tarantino movies, baroque chat and cartoonish levels of violence ensue. I mean that as a compliment. Ennio Morricone won an Oscar for his score, Jennifer Jason Leigh earned an Oscar nomination (and an alternate Oscar win). Also stars Kurt Russell, Samuel L. Jackson, Walton Goggins, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern and Demián Bichir. Katherine and I saw the 70 mm road show edition at the AFI-Silver. Great fun.
8 and 7. Kill Bill: Volumes 1 and 2 (2003 and 2004) — A martial arts movie released in two parts, Kill Bill stars Uma Thurman as "the Bride" who seeks revenge against a team of assassins who tried to kill her on her wedding day. She hops and chops, slices and dices her way across the globe, dispatching hundreds of trained killers along the way, until she confronts the leader of the assassins, "Bill" (David Carradine). If you're a fan of the martial arts exploitation films of the 1970s, this two-parter is for you.
6. Jackie Brown (1997) — Some people have this first, which is a reminder of how consistently great Tarantino really is. An adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch, this is a story of a stewardess (Pam Grier) who gets caught smuggling laundered cash for a lowlife drug dealer (Samuel L. Jackson) and risks everything to get out from under. Along with Get Shorty and Out of Sight, this was one of the few adaptations of the great Elmore Leonard that understood what the man was up to. The most restrained of Tarantino's movies (and maybe a tad reverential for my tastes), Jackie Brown revived the careers of Grier (Golden Globe nomination, alternate Oscar winner) and Robert Forster (Oscar nomination).
5. Django Unchained (2012) — A pre-Civil War spaghetti Western starring Jamie Foxx as a runaway slave named Django and Christoph Waltz as the bounty hunter who helps him rescue Django's wife from a cruel plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio). Stuff gets blowed up real good! Waltz won his second Oscar for his performance, Tarantino his second Oscar for writing, but more importantly, Foxx took home the alternate Oscar.
4. Reservoir Dogs (1992) — Tarantino's first directorial effort, this one put the video rental store clerk turned auteur on the map. The story of a heist gone terribly wrong, Tarantino took fifty years of noir tropes, drenched them in blood, added dialogue worthy of William Shakespeare and changed crime movies forever. Stars Tim Roth as a gut-shot undercover cop, Harvey Keitel as the gang member he duped, and Michael Madsen as the psychopathic killer who doesn't trust either one of them. The infamous Lawrence Tierney (read about Eddie Muller's hilarious encounter with the noir legend here) is great in support as the gang's leader.
3. Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood (2019) — If you've never seen a Tarantino movie and you're feeling a bit reluctant to dive in, this is the one I would start with. An insider's look at Hollywood at the end of the 1960s, Once Upon a Time is the story of a washed-up television actor (Leonardo DiCaprio), his stunt double (Brad Pitt in an Oscar-winning role) and the real life Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). Stars hang out, deals are made, work is done. And then Pitt gives a hitchhiker a lift and drops her off at her home with (uh oh!) the Manson Family. But if you think you know where this is going, well, clearly you've never seen a Quentin Tarantino movie. Features Al Pacino, Kurt Russell, Bruce Dern, Timothy Olyphant, Damian Lewis (as Steve McQueen) and Mike Moh (as Bruce Lee).
2. Inglourious Basterds (2009) — This is every great World War II commando movie ever made, only better. The story follows three broad narratives — "the Jew Hunter" Nazi Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz in an Oscar-winning turn), and his favorite prey, Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent); a British officer (Michael Fassbender) and his double-agent contact (Diane Kruger); and finally the Basterds of the title, a group of commandos (led by Brad Pitt) wreaking havoc behind the German lines. These three narrative threads converge on a small cinema in Paris where the Reich's leaders, including Hitler himself, are attending a movie premiere. It's my pick for the best picture of 2009. As someone says at the end, "I think this just might be my masterpiece!"
1. Pulp Fiction (1994) — If Tarantino had stopped making movies after this one, he'd still be one of the greatest directors of all time. This black comedy crime classic weaves together multiple unrelated storylines featuring a heroin-addicted hitman (John Travolta), his Bible-quoting partner (Samuel L. Jackson), a bloodthirsty crime boss (Ving Rhames), his dance-crazy wife (Uma Thurman), a washed-up boxer (Bruce Willis), and the glowing MacGuffin in a shiny black briefcase. Told in a thematic rather than linear fashion, it should be utterly confusing but somehow isn't, and it's still one of the most wildly entertaining movies ever made. Also features Tim Roth, Amanda Plummer, Harvey Keitel, Eric Stoltz and Christopher Walken. Tarantino and Roger Avery won a well-deserved Oscar for the screenplay. I have it down as the best picture of 1994 which is saying something — 1994 was one of the best years for movies in history.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
When I find myself in times of trouble — and Lord knows, these are troubled times — I turn not to the Bible or the op-ed page, but to the movies.
With Katie-Bar-The-Door out of town on Tuesday, I took the day off and by happenstance, wound up watching a triple feature of films contemplating man's ugliest impulses. I came away with a renewed sense of optimism that if we can't fix the world, we can at least spruce up our little corner of it.
These movies have been around a long while so spoilers abound. No complaining.
First up on the program was Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, a film I saw in the theater back in 2009. I hailed it as a masterpiece at the time then haven't watched it since, afraid to find out I was wrong.
I needn't have worried. As with all of Tarantino's movies, there's lots of talk punctuated by cartoonish levels of violence; as with most of his movies, it's absolutely brilliant.
Freed of the need to follow the plot and digest the movie's many surprises, this time around I allowed myself the luxury of thinking and perhaps even more dangerous, feeling. As it turns out, Inglourious Basterds has something to say about our current predicament, although I'd hesitate to suggest it offers a workable solution.
If you don't know the movie, it's set in Nazi-occupied France during World War II and follows three broad narratives — that of "the Jew Hunter" Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz in an Oscar-winning turn), and his favorite prey, Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent); a British officer (Michael Fassbender) and his double-agent contact (Diane Kruger); and finally the Basterds of the title, a group of commandos (led by Brad Pitt) wreaking havoc behind the German lines.
"We in the killin' Nazi business. And cousin, business is a-boomin'." Those Germans the Basterds don't kill, wind up with a swastika carved into their foreheads as a sign for the rest of time that they once fought in service of the worst cause in human history.
These three narrative threads converge on a small cinema in Paris where the Reich's leaders, including Hitler himself, are attending a movie premiere.
But that's the plot. It was the message I was interested in this time around. And that is this: Whether you are a true-believer or a shameless opportunist, an enthusiastic volunteer or a pants-wetting draftee, you are responsible for the cause you fight for and you will answer for the damage you do.
As Kurt Vonnegut once said, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
Something for trolls of every stripe to keep in mind.
The second movie, There Will Be Blood, I had actively avoided for a decade — perhaps because the famous line "I drink your milkshake!" led me to believe it was a comedy about dairy products.
It is, in point of fact, a tragedy featuring petroleum byproducts. Based on Sinclair Lewis's novel Oil!, Paul Thomas Anderson gives us the story of Daniel Plainview (the great Daniel Day-Lewis winning his second of three Oscars), a would-be oilman who gets everything he ever wanted and loses himself in the process.
But this isn't a morality play about greed, it's a cautionary tale about that most American of virtues and vices, rugged individualism. Plainview's dream isn't to pile up money — he turns down an easy million, for example, opting instead for the hard, risky work of building a pipeline to the sea. No, what Plainview longs for is to cut the middleman out of his business affairs. And not just the railroads and the big oil producers who take a large cut of the profits, but all middlemen everywhere: friends, family, God, and finally dignity and sanity — anyone or anything upon which he might have to rely.
By the end he's living like a feral cat in a giant mansion, free at last.
Many reviews concluded that Plainview is a monster and maybe he is, but there's a certain majesty in his labors. At least he's making something of tangible value as opposed to the worthless paper products Wall Street's fraudsters and slicky-boys fobbed off on a gullible public.
But crazy Plainview most definitely is, the end for all of us who think we can live without regard for our fellow human beings.
Is There Will Be Blood a great film? Yes, absolutely. Unless it's terrible. The movie is two and a half hours long, is virtually silent for long stretches as it contemplates the West like no one since John Ford, and when people do finally speak, they say nothing of value, which is fine because no one is listening anyway. Like Dunkirk which I reviewed recently here, the characters in There Will Be Blood reveal themselves strictly by their actions.
Do they reveal enough? That is the question. I'd have to see the movie again to decide for sure whether there's as much moving under its surface as I think there is.
Check back here in 2027 for my final verdict.
The third movie on the list, The Grand Budapest Hotel, I have seen again — first on Tuesday then again on Wednesday when Katie-Bar-The-Door returned to town — and in this case, at least, I'm sure it is a great movie, Wes Anderson's masterpiece.
On its surface, The Grand Budapest Hotel is a shaggy dog story about how a hotel lobby boy (Tony Revolori) became the richest man in Europe. But ultimately, it's a contemplation of grace under pressure, kindness in the face of cruelty, beauty in an ugly world.
Set in the years between the two world wars, Ralph Fiennes plays the lobby boy's mentor, Monsieur Gustave H, the concierge of the Grand Budapest, eastern Europe's finest hotel. Gustave meets his guests' every need, especially the needs of rich, lonely women, not from any motivation as mundane as reflexive servitude or the Puritan work ethic but because he is a civilized man who finds pleasure and meaning in creating a bubble of civilization for those fleeing an uncivilized world.
"You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. Indeed that's what we provide in our own modest, humble, insignificant ... oh, fuck it."
Like the inchworm measuring the marigolds, Gustave labors unceasingly despite knowing that in the long run it won't make the slightest bit of difference. But what's the alternative? Surrender to chaos and cruelty and death? Hell, no.
If sooner or later we're all going to die, I have written before, can't we at least do it with a bit of dignity and honor and laughter and good company? And in Gustave's case, poetry and perfume and pastry, as well?
As it turns out, Ralph Fiennes is the perfect actor to lead a Wes Anderson film. He can deliver helium-filled balloons of dialogue without puncturing the illusion that he actually believes what he's saying. And in a film like this, that's absolutely vital. One prick of cynicism, and the balloon bursts.
This is Fiennes best work since Schindler's List.
I confess, I haven't much enjoyed Wes Anderson in the past. I have detected underneath the celebrated whimsy of such films as The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou a sourness that for me at least curdled his confections and made them hard to swallow.
That, and when everybody is a nut, nobody is a nut, and the whole thing gets a bit tedious.
But here, there's something generous and moving and maybe even heroic in Gustave's devotion to the better angels of our nature.
"Rudeness is merely an expression of fear. People fear they won't get what they want. The most dreadful and unattractive person only needs to be loved, and they will open up like a flower."
Well, some of them anyway.
Cameos by everyone — Bill Murray, Ed Norton, Harvey Keitel, Jude Law, Tom Wilkinson, F. Murray Abraham, Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, Owen Wilson, Bob Balaban, Léa Seydoux, and many others. Excellent supporting work from Adrien Brody, Willem Defoe, Jeff Goldblum and Saoirse Ronan. Tony Revolori as the lobby boy, Zero Moustafa, was terrific. Ralph Fiennes deserved an Oscar nomination at the very least.
The Grand Budapest Hotel was 2014's best movie, Wes Anderson its best director.
"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." — Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
After getting shutout of a sold-out performance Saturday, Katie-Bar-The-Door and I drove back down to the AFI-Silver on Sunday to see the eighth film of Quentin Tarantino's illustrious career, aptly titled The Hateful Eight. Tarantino resurrected the long-abandoned Panasonic Ultra 70 film format, the same ultra-widescreen process used on the 1959 classic Ben-Hur (indeed, the film was shot with the same lens used to shoot the chariot race), and for one week only has released it in 98 theaters as an old-school roadshow engagement, complete with overture, intermission and commemorative program.
Just the way they used to make 'em in my childhood.
The story is essentially a three-hour retelling of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None in a Wild West setting. A motley crew of bounty hunters, war veterans, cow punchers, an Englishman with a fascination for the niceties of public executions and a gallows-bound Jennifer Jason Leigh wind up riding out a blizzard in a strangely-deserted general store deep in the trackless nowhere of a very empty Wyoming. They sit by the fire, drink coffee and talk, talk, talk.
And then when the talking is through, the blood and the bullets start flying.
Stripped of the filigree, this is the plot of every Quentin Tarantino movie ever made.
If you know and love Tarantino the way we do, you know you're in for a banquet of ornate oratory, digressions and shaggy dog stories that for someone eager to get to the point I suppose must be maddening. But I'll tell you right out, I like listening to a man who likes to talk and The Hateful Eight stars some of the great talkers of screen history.
Kurt Russell is the bounty hunter determined to see Jennifer Jason Leigh swing, Samuel L. Jackson is another bounty hunter lugging three dead bodies and a letter from Abraham Lincoln through waist-deep snow, Walton Goggins as a would-be sheriff finally gets a big screen role worthy of his silver-tongued talents, Tim Roth as the hangman channels Eric Blore in Top Hat, Bruce Dern is a broken-down Civil War general, and Michael Madsen is a passing cowboy who says he's just headed home to visit his dear old ma.
For such an out-of-the-way place, this deserted cabin starts to seem a bit like Grand Central Terminal. With the emphasis on "terminal."
This is Tarantino, and you know at some point you're going to get a bloodbath worthy of a 1970s horror movie, violence so over-the-top it has an innocence about it, like something a demented preschooler might doodle in his hymn book during a long, boring church sermon. As I put it in an e-mail to my good pal Mister Muleboy, "it's a 3-hour gabfest ... directed by a drunk Sam Peckinpah right after he'd seen John Carpenter's The Thing."
Best Performance in a Quentin Tarantino Movie
In case you haven't noticed, this is actually a pretty tough category. Several actors and actresses have given career performances in Tarantino's films—Michael Madsen, Samuel L. Jackson, John Travolta, Pam Grier, Robert Forster, Uma Thurman ...
Any one of whom would be a great choice. But I'm going with Christoph Waltz as Col. Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds. Smart, smarmy, sinister, he might be the only actor in history who could make you sweat bullets simply by eating a strudel.
Best Performance With a Serious Disease
Oscar loves this sort of thing, but generally speaking, the Monkey doesn't. If a cartoon character's performance counted, I'd go with the two-part breast cancer episode of FX's spy spoof Archer. But that's television and we're talking movies, so I'm going with Greta Garbo in Camille. She makes dying look so beautiful and stylish, I almost wish I had tuberculosis.
Best Performance Where You Do a Lot of A-C-T-I-N-G and Arm-Waving
Meryl Streep owns this category, but I'll be honest with you—outside of her latter-day comedies, Meryl Streep's not really my cup of tea. Acting may indeed be hard, but I've always thought the best actors made it look easy. I'll take Cary Grant over Laurence Olivier any day.
I do enjoy some of the great ham actors of history—particularly John Barrymore and Wallace Beery—but among cinema's more serious-minded scenery-chewers, I'm quite fond of Kirk Douglas. And my favorite Kirk Douglas performance is that of bottom-feeder tabloid journalist Chuck Tatum in Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole, quite possibly the most cynical movie ever made.
Best Performance Where You Just Sit There and Your Eyes Get Sad
Usually with a pop tune playing in the background—a staple of bad television. But at the risk of enraging Douglas Fairbanks, I have to say Lon Chaney, the silent era's man of a thousand faces, did more acting with his eyes than nearly anyone I can think of. Being buried under all that makeup, he had to.
He gave many great performances, including The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, but maybe the one that depended the most on "sad eyes" was Laugh, Clown, Laugh, the story of an aging circus performer who raises an abandoned girl as his own only to find to his horror and his shame that when she grows to young womanhood he is falling hopelessly in love with her. A brilliant performance.
Best Performance With a Lot of Nudity That Was Probably Unnecessary But Not Unwelcome
The 1970s was the era of gratuitous nudity—at least one scene casually featuring bare breasts was pretty much de rigueur back then, especially in films that aspired to hip sophistication—but looking back at it now, the whole trend seems sexist, exploitative and even a bit creepy. So I'm jumping forward two decades to 1997's Titanic, a film that grossed something like a billion dollars, won the Oscar for best picture and has completely faded from my memory except for Kate Winslet's nude scene.
Bluenosed video store owners excised the footage from VHS copies of the movie without realizing Winslet's shapely bosom was the only part of the movie worth watching. I hope they at least had the good sense to stitch all that discarded tape together into a single endless loop.
Tomorrow: explosions, cross-overs, aging, manly tears and Citizen Kane.
Another great year for movies. A lot of people would go with Pulp Fiction as the best picture of the year, and I would have agreed at the time—saw it four times in the theater. I now rank it number two behind another movie I saw in the theater that year (along with about nine other people), a popular little ditty called The Shawshank Redemption.
Trying to harness violence to serve an end other than violence itself is like relying on a mad dog to protect your property—you're more likely to get bitten yourself.
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
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