Dead Nazis, Dance Moves, And Decapitations: Every Quentin Tarantino Film, Ranked
'Hateful Eight' apologists, this list is for you.
Of course, the release of any new film by a canonical director provides an excellent opportunity to plumb back through their catalogue. But in the case of Quentin Tarantino and his forthcoming film Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, that nostalgic exercise feels especially urgent.
After all, Tarantino himself has claimed that the forthcoming Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio-starring epic is set to be his penultimate work. He wants to bow out on ten films, meaning — at least according to his dodgy maths — his freshly-announced Star Trek sequel will be the flick he drops before slinking off to write plays and novels.
Oh, and continue his quest to watch every bit of celluloid in existence.
So, hey, in light of that impending retirement, let’s all celebrate the man’s career with a complete, rather controversial ranking of his entire cinematic oeuvre.
10. Four Rooms
1995’s Four Rooms is such a widely-derided Tarantino project that even the director himself has tried to strike it from his filmography — Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is only his ninth film if Four Rooms doesn’t exist. And Quentin, I’m sorry to tell you this, but it absolutely does.
A comedy anthology starring a bevy of ’90s talent, including but not limited to Antonio Banderas, Kathy Griffin, and Marisa Tomei, Four Rooms is a long, unfunny slog. But of all the four segments, Tarantino’s might be the worst: it’s a self-mythologising load of wank, starring the director himself as, you guessed it, a famous and beloved director who everybody wants to sleep with.
Yep, probably best if we all helped Tarantino and got down to the important business of sweeping this one under the rug, to be honest.
9. Django Unchained
Queue the angry comments — for some Tarantino fans, Django should be in at least the top three, not slumming it down here in Four Rooms territory. But for my money, Django is one of the biggest missteps in the man’s career; an overlong, bloated exercise in gory waffling that manages to make a redundant point very loudly.
Even Leonardo DiCaprio’s beloved turn as the villainous Calvin Candie, one of the film’s supposed highlights, is nothing more than a facsimile of Christoph Waltz’s work in Inglorious Basterds.
As for Waltz himself, the usually more-than-capable actor spends the film sucking down the scenery, chin-wagging his way through a lopsided revenge movie that takes an ass-numbingly long time to get to the actual revenge.
All those who tried to cancel the film on its first release were giving Django more credit than it’s worth, to be honest.
8. Reservoir Dogs
Sure, Reservoir Dogs crackles with the dialogue and humour that would quickly become Tarantino’s trademark.
Sure, the ear-slicing scene is a work of real pop art; a flourish of style that condenses the key takeaways from the French New Wave movement into a slow camera pan away from the violence and into the corner of the room. And sure, not a single second of the film drags or stumbles.
But despite all of that, there’s something oddly glib about Reservoir Dogs. It’s like a serve of candy floss, or a ride on the bumper cars; short, sweet and largely forgettable. Sorry.
7. Pulp Fiction
Warned ya we were going to get controversial, hey?
Don’t get me wrong: Pulp Fiction is pure confection, overloaded with moments that have been seared into the side of pop culture like a brand on a bull. Samuel L. Jackson playing a deadly game of Guess Who?, a lengthy conversation about fast food in France, and one of the most brutal uses of a needle in the modern cinematic canon: all of these are flashes of pure, unbridled brilliance.
Yet, despite all that, Pulp Fiction is Tarantino building a table. It’s a very good table, sturdy and stylish. But at the end of the day, it’s just that: a table.
It took a few years after Pulp Fiction for Tarantino to get down to the real business of his career — not just propping up the tropes of the American cinematic canon, but exploding them in piles of offal and controversy.
6. Death Proof
Now we’re really cooking with gas.
Don’t let Death Proof‘s relatively low position on this list fool ya: the leather-clad masterpiece has more style and panache than most mainstream American directors manage in their entire careers.
Held in place by an odious turn from Kurt Russell and filled with incredible stuntwork by longstanding Tarantino regular Zoe Bell, Death Proof is a pure fetish object; glinting, and mean, and glistening.
For all the controversy he has courted over the course of his career, this is his true cinematic fuck you — the sound and sight of a director luxuriating themselves in the filth they have spent their career defending.
5. The Hateful Eight
The Hateful Eight dropped during a period of significant Tarantino fatigue.
Many critics were simply over the man’s saturation in film bro circles, and bored of what they saw as his same old tired tricks. In the process, they unfairly dismissed one of the most surprising and subtle works of art in his back catalogue; a steel-jawed trap of a film, filled with characters that are less clearly defined heroes and more walking bags of meat.
Indeed, Hateful might be Tarantino’s most nihilistic film. A dour trip through snow-clad hell that strips its eight antagonists of all honour, ranking and pride, its final image is a violent invocation, not a finale; a leering admission that nothing means anything.
4. Kill Bill Vol. 1
Proof that there truly is artistic value in maximalism, Kill Bill Vol. 1 sees Tarantino chuck homages to every film that he’s ever loved into a heady mix of gore and panache.
Opening with an extended hat-tip to Brian DePalma, before pilfering from Shaw Brothers hyperbole and anime cool, the film should absolutely collapse under its own weight. Only, it never does. Instead, it’s this perfect object of a film — a hyper-extreme Jackson Pollock, as aimless as it is complex.
3. Kill Bill Vol. 2
After the nonstop chaos of Volume 1, Tarantino clearly realised that there was no way to top himself in the energy stakes.
So instead, he turned in his most mournful and elegiac film: a John Ford-style Western that trades in the insanity of the first film for a series of long conversations about how over time you will only ever end up hurting the ones you love.
It’s a bait and switch of the highest order, a little like if one of Michael Bay’s Transformer sequels was a stealth The Seventh Seal remake. But more than that, it’s one of the most shimmering testaments to Tarantino’s humanity; the film to disprove those naysayers who assume he’s nothing but a loud, punky brat.
2. Jackie Brown
In the years immediately after its release, Tarantino-heads and critics alike tended to undersell Jackie Brown.
It’s not hard to see why: unusually for Tarantino, it’s based on a novel, rather than an original idea from the director, and it has none of the gonzo energy that would define the latter half of his career.
But despite all that, Jackie Brown is one of the most unabashed masterpieces in the man’s back catalogue.
Updating blaxploitation films without ever slavishly remaining in their debt, it’s a sensitive look at independence and freedom, elegantly weaving together disaparate plotlines without ever resorting to shock, as Pulp Fiction occasionally does.
Don’t be fooled by its sometimes lukewarm reception: this is an out-and-out classic, as engaging and heartfelt as any of the auteur’s dirtier works.
1. Inglorious Basterds
A vicious work of revenge porn.
An unusually open-minded exploration of the things — good and bad — that cinema can do. An unpicking of the banality of evil. A series of linked, increasingly tense set-pieces. A film where Eli Roth shoots Hitler’s face off with a machine gun.
Inglorious Basterds is all of these things and even more; one of the most involving, creative and brash masterpieces produced by modern mainstream Hollywood. Watch it once and it’ll haunt you like a curse. Not just because it’s angry, and entitled, and bizarre.
But because it’s perfect.
Joseph Earp is a writer and critic, who tweets @Joe_O_Earp. He promises he is not as much of a stereotypical film bro as a ranking of Quentin Tarantino films might make him seem.