Quentin Tarantino - Ranking His Films From Worst To Best
3. Jackie Brown
Still the directors most undervalued film, Jackie Brown, a mash-up of hard-boiled 40s Noir and 70s Blaxploitation, is Tarantino straightest work; heavy in his tropes and references and touchstones, but ultimately a more classical work than the rest of his oeuvre, one far more concerned with narrative and resolution than it is any kind of timeline-fracturing chicanery (though, as is Noir, the plot is convoluted, and there is an instance towards the films close where the timeline is tampered with momentarily) or off-topic discourse.
70s Blaxploitation queen, Pam Grier, is the eponymous JB, and her entrance is the coolest in all of Tarantino, the star tracked along a travellator (in a nod to The Graduate) to the sound of Bobby Womacks Across 110th Street. Its a great way to open a movie, and Jackie Brown only gets better; not quite as heavy in Tarantino moments but just altogether more satisfying as an overall, complete film.
It helps that Brown is one of the great QT characters, and her kind-of romance with Max Cherry, played by cult B-movie star Robert Forster, here nominated for an Academy Award, is one of the most touching, believable relationships in the directors entire body of work. Tarantinos characters, as established in The Hateful Eight, are now becoming caricatures, acted by stars well aware that they are in a Quentin Tarantino film. Not so in Jackie Brown, where Grier and Cherry are genuine in a way thats becoming increasingly rare in the directors work.