10 Groundbreaking Films That Are Actually Terrible

As a pop culture phenomenon, 1994 belonged to Pulp Fiction. The soundtrack, the performances, the unutterable cool of the movie - it changed the game for badass, slinky cinema, not to mention the fortunes of many of the cast. But divorce the film from the cultural context, and how does it hold up?

Like a house of cards in a high wind, unfortunately. Pulp Fiction has no real story, no narrative direction. As a result, it has no protagonist, no one to follow over two and a half hours of weary meandering - it’s just a collection of cool scenes featuring cool people being cool. There’s plenty of rhyme, but no reason for any of it.

It’s also where we first see warning signs of QT’s worrying fetishisation of black men and black culture, with his overuse of the n-word - and there’s an even more worrying homophobic issue with the film that’s never been explained or resolved. A quarter of a century on, it’s a film clearly made by an arrested adolescent with little in the way of emotional intelligence.

After Pulp Fiction, Tarantino was at a fork in the road. He could grow up, follow Reservoir Dogs and deliver on his stellar talent… or he could plunge down the Pulp Fiction rabbit hole and spend his career making cartoons in his own weird, self-indulgent, hyperreal Wonderland, saying nothing about real people in the real world.

The impeccable Jackie Brown shows the road not taken - but everyone knows what path Tarantino chose.