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Quentin Tarantino’s Movies Ranked

On the occasion of the release of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, we ranked Tarantino's feature films.

Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood
Photo: Columbia Pictures

Quentin Tarantino’s commitment to fortifying the themes of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood with layers of self-reflexivity, while still anchoring its concepts to fully realized, emotionally invested characters, makes the film one of his greatest—a dense but focused effort that validates the divisive artist’s status as one of American cinema’s preeminent pop-cultural figures. The film navigates late-’60s Hollywood, an immersive playground of opulence and iconicity, alongside Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), a fading star of TV westerns trying to break into the movies, and his best friend and longtime stuntman, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), before then jumping six months ahead to take the temperature of Hollywood on the eve of the Charles Manson murders. As the landscape and the sociocultural identity of Hollywood continue to change, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood takes on an elegiac quality, with Dalton and Booth returning to L.A. from a sojourn to Europe and a pregnant Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) preparing her home for the arrival of her baby boy.

The flash and fun of the film’s first half gives way to a haunting decline into the valley of alcoholism, and to increasing signs that a new generation is about to push the old one out. And, then, inevitably, those tensions come to a head one August night on Cielo Drive in the Hollywood Hills. We won’t spoil the ending here, but we will tell you below where Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood falls on our ranked list of Tarantino’s features. Sam C. Mac


Death Proof

10. Death Proof (2007)

With his hair combed in a flashy pompadour and a white scar running down his cheek, Kurt Russell plays evil Stuntman Mike as a swaggering, folksy raconteur. Even in the universe of Tarantino, which suggests a self-contained and increasingly self-referential cinephile’s mixtape of the countless films he’s absorbed throughout his life, Russell feels like a living, breathing human being. By comparison, Mike’s victims simply suggest regurgitating pop-culture sponges. Indeed, by the time Mike comes after them in his skull-painted hellmobile, we connect more to the graphic image of the stunningly crafted gore than we do to the loss of life. When the female characters turn into avenging angels, their motivations seem to turn on a dime. Their attitude toward life and death, whether it be their own (“I’m okay!” one of them happily beams right after she’s almost been decimated by Mike’s muscle car) or Mike’s, is so casually flippant that we’re denied that sense of righteous rage. Maybe it’s a joke on those old drive-in movies, which never gave much thought to life or death either, but somehow the reverent self-referential quality of Death Proof is more offensive than those old grindhouse filmmakers who were in it simply to make a buck. Jeremiah Kipp


Django Unchained

9. Django Unchained (2012)

With Django Unchained, Tarantino doesn’t transcend the tropes of the revenge film, or the odd-couple buddy comedy for that matter. For all the film’s ostentatiously shocking imagery and dialogue (Tarantino employs the n-word in a fashion that resembles the gimmicky scare tactics associated with director William Castle), one can’t escape the suspicion that this film’s a bloated vanity project with delusions of grandeur. Django Unchained features a blunter treatment of slavery than we routinely encounter in mainstream American cinema, but the garish fantasy violence only superficially distracts from Tarantino’s allegiance to the same damn clichés that govern politer “issue” films. Django Unchained is ultimately a white fantasy of purging shared cultural guilt, one that follows a benevolent white man (Christoph Waltz is the lead regardless of what his Oscar may say) as he befriends and liberates an appreciative black man who goes on to symbolically wipe the slate clean on subjugation. Chuck Bowen


Kill Bill: Vol. 1

8. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)

Even when he isn’t at the top of his artistic game, Tarantino, like Jean-Luc Godard, is talented enough that he doesn’t put this kind of spot-the-references playfulness front and center in his films: Tarantino always provides us with some kind of plot or emotional context in which such references—and in a QT film, they’re legion—mean something to viewers other than the fact that they’re referencing something. In other words, you don’t have to know a great deal about the martial arts genre to enjoy the sheer kinetic energy of Kill Bill, Vol. 1 any more than you have to know about the various crime thrillers Godard references in order to enjoy Breathless or Band of Outsiders. It might enhance one’s appreciation of those films more, but there’s more to them than just showing off how encyclopedic their movie knowledge is. Although Tarantino’s films sometimes make recognitions toward real-world hurt and pain, they almost invariably take place in a movie-induced fantasy world, one that takes no part in political discourse and prefers instead to wallow in the detritus of popular culture and movie history—entertainment, in other words. Kenji Fujishima

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The Hateful Eight

7. The Hateful Eight (2015)

Rather than following a clean genealogical path back to Hollywood westerns of the Golden Age, The Hateful Eight often resembles Italian giallo horror, less for that subgenre’s tendency to luxuriate in synth scores and extravagant lighting setups than for its less-celebrated preoccupation with cruelty and pain. As in those extravagant and supernaturally tinged slashers, characters in The Hateful Eight who choose to have any agency apart from maintaining a cover story find a nebulous reward for forcing fate’s hand. When the gun smoke clears, we somehow end up with more dead bodies than we had living ones at the start, and the film proves to have quite a lot in common with John Carpenter’s The Thing, apart from having the same lead actor (Kurt Russell) and largely identical blizzard conditions: Death emerges from the floorboards, and, following a crisis, an impromptu “court” is established to distinguish between friend and foe. Even the final moments echo the creature classic: Having dispensed justice at long last, two doomed men share a laugh over a great lie, and the camera retreats upward and away from their near-lifeless detente. The haberdashery, by design a sanctuary, has been transformed into a self-cleaning oven, now strewn with an assortment of particulate matter, and we arrive at an unexpected Reservoir Dogs callback: a vetting of moral arithmetic that leaves no survivors. Jaime N. Christley


Kill Bill: Vol. 2

6. Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004)

From a structural standpoint, Kill Bill’s two volumes connect us to serial cinema past, specifically the two-part films of Fritz Lang. It’s a mess at times, but a seemingly intentional and glorious one. Certainly, Tarantino’s greatest skills are literary and his numerous digressions recall the stylistic flourishes of Thomas Pynchon. When Tarantino abandons the Bride (Uma Thurman) in her premature burial deathtrap to focus on an extended flashback of her martial arts training, it’s reminiscent of Pynchon’s nine-page aside in Gravity’s Rainbow, which details the biography of a light bulb named Byron. If that comparison makes Kill Bill sound like so much compulsive masturbation, rest assured that Tarantino has a point. Consider the movie’s two volumes as yin and yang: The first installment, focusing primarily on the Bride, corresponds to the Chinese principle of darkness, negativity, and femininity, while the second, with a tone heavily influenced by the charming and seductive Bill (David Carradine), corresponds to the opposing principle of light, heat, motivation, and masculinity. Tarantino revels in the filmic power of verbal and (meta)physical pas de deux, and it’s in the final section of the second part, detailing the Bride and Bill’s surprising confrontation, that the entire enterprise reveals its profoundly mortal (and moral) soul. Keith Uhlich


Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood

5. Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019)

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is presented, right down to the ellipses in its title, as a diptych. But instead of just being a way to structure a piece of entertainment for commercial reasons—like the Grindhouse double feature, the two-part Kill Bill, and the “roadshow” version of The Hateful Eight, which was broken up by an intermission—this demarcation separates two distinct periods: the beginning of the end (February 1969) and the end itself (the summer of ‘69). And it’s a juxtaposition that shows old Hollywood in a time of transition, from dog days to death throes. While Tarantino’s films tend to provide audiences with much evidence of where the auteur’s love of Hollywood’s lurid lore finds root (in blaxploitation, World War II dramas, kung-fu movies, or spaghetti westerns), Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood gets the closest of any to giving us the complete picture. In this sense, the film is nothing less than Tarantino’s magnum opus—a sweeping statement on an entire generation of American popular culture and an almost expressionistic rendering of the counterculture forming at its margins, gradually growing in influence. It’s an uncharacteristically thoughtful and sobering film for Tarantino, while somehow also being his funniest, and most casually entertaining. Mac


Reservoir Dogs

4. Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Reservoir Dogs introduced the core conflict that still runs through Tarantino’s filmography: between sensitivity and inquisitiveness and shock-jocularity. Cumulatively, Tarantino doesn’t have a solely cartoonish relationship with violence. Jackie Brown, Death Proof, and The Hateful Eight abound in violence that’s upsettingly beautiful and cathartic as well as mysterious and socially undigested. Not coincidentally, these are among Tarantino’s least profitable films. Even in Reservoir Dogs, there’s a yearning for something richer than what Tarantino the astute showman knows will “play” to vast audiences. This yearning is visible in the extraordinary performances of Tim Roth, Harvey Keitel, and Steve Buscemi as the most significant of the quintet of jewel thieves at the center of Reservoir Dogs. These are great and experienced actors, but Tarantino’s rapport with them is astonishing, particularly as a neophyte. For all its problems, Tarantino’s early work has a vitality that’s missing from the more ambitious and preachy epics that have turned the filmmaker into a gory social-issues artist—a hip version of Stanley Kramer. Tarantino now has the power to command vast budgets and fabricate his own realities wholesale, while Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown depend on an element of spontaneous verisimilitude. Bowen

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Inglourious Basterds

3. Inglourious Basterds (2009)

The epic Inglourious Basterds brazenly boils half a century of war movies into a saturated fresco of truculent heroes, silky villains, avenging angels, slugger-toting golems, and tainted victories. For Tarantino, flesh and celluloid are perpetually mingled. A multilayered study of (spoken, visual, cinematic) language posing as an exuberant paean to wartime adventure movies, his self-declared masterpiece turns WWII into a volatile arena in which truculent heroes and suave villains try on role-playing masks as they wrestle for control of the screen. All of QT’s staples—dialogue, violence, overflow of love for filmmaking—here feel larger, fuller, deeper. Pulling all of the film’s coruscating simulacra and direct emotion into a sublime, literally incendiary image, Tarantino exalts the medium’s transformative force by simultaneously looking back at its past and ahead into its future. Both a culmination and a subversive travesty of men-on-a-mission gorefests (as well as the most ingenious display of languages wrestling for cultural domination since Godard’s Contempt), this movie buff’s sonata builds to a literally incendiary climax that once again reinforces the need to watch QT’s films not as hipster karaoke sessions, but as volatile avalanches of old-into-new images and sounds where memory, identity, and transformation jostle. Fernando F. Croce


Pulp Fiction

2. Pulp Fiction (1994)

Accept no substitute. Jackie Brown may very well be the greater film: pleasure-giving, tender, coolly assured, yet impossibly delicate. But Pulp Fiction seems like a chapter heading in a massive tome on the history of the cinema. Quentin Tarantino’s influences are well-catalogued, of course, earning him praise and condescending dismissal from various, breast-beating quarters of the critical world. For fans like me, there’s “before Pulp Fiction” and “after.” It didn’t invent cinephilia, obviously, but it seemed to revitalize it and recruit from the younger generation in large numbers. Lament fanboy culture all you like, or decry the “movies aren’t great anymore, only cool” phenomenon whose DNA can almost certainly be traced back to the “Royale with cheese” conversation, but lots of young moviegoers were blown away—and continue to be blown away—by Tarantino’s breakout hit, and it’s helped connect them to movies in ways that were, before 1994, simply not on their itinerary. Its elusive, addictive thing-ness remains fresh today, a potent brew of genre and visceral pleasures, a catalogue of comedy (black, visual, low-brow, shock, awkward pause, etc.), structured to feel like a party that went all night and well into the morning. Christley


Jackie Brown

1. Jackie Brown (1997)

After Reservoir Dogs’s gut-punch fatalism and Pulp Fiction’s mesmerizing dynamism, Quentin Tarantino surprised everyone by going all Douglas Sirk on audience’s asses with Jackie Brown. The film’s crime-saga façade hides an emotionally complex love story between the eponymous Jackie Brown (Pam Grier), a stewardess embroiled in a dangerous drug ring, and Max (Robert Forester), an old-school bail bondsmen who can’t help but fall head over heels for her imposing beauty. This amazingly sincere pair resides at the center of a sublime and mournful melodrama draped in jive talk, double-crosses, and thematically resonant soul music. Fate and chance seem to inspire every vibrant scene, from the audacious set piece inside the Del Amo Mall to the final parting moment shared between two lovers who never were. Like most films that examine the mysteries and disappointments of unrequited love, Jackie Brown ends with a fleeting goodbye and an infinite sense of yearning. Yet this one stings. No single moment in the Tarantino canon has held so much unresolved emotion. Glenn Heath Jr.

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