Quentin Tarantino: Ranking His Movies

2. Reservoir Dogs A cult classic that launched Quentin Tarantino's career, Reservoir Dogs is frequently cited as the greatest independent movie ever made, a thrilling, hilarious, completely unique crime film that didn't gather too much traction upon release, but following the director's Pulp Fiction, it garnered a lot of retrospective acclaim, often being cited as one of the best modern American movies. Dogs is a classic heist movie rooted in film noir origins that has a collective of six thieves, codenamed Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen), Mr. Blue (Eddie Bunker), Mr. Brown (Quentin Tarantino), Mr. Orange (Tim Roth), Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi), and Mr. White (Harvey Keitel), preparing to perform a diamond heist. The film deals largely with the fallout of that heist, as the men return to their warehouse hideout and try to work out quite how everything got bungled so badly. The suspected double-crossings make a superbly tense atmosphere, best encompassed by Roth's Mr. Orange, an undercover police officer who is trying to keep things at bay until the police arrive to raid the warehouse. Though the film is largely all about its dialogue, it's an absolutely white-knuckle cinematic experience, as Orange gets closer and closer to being outed by his suspicious colleagues. Blood-soaked, darkly comic and superbly acted, Reservoir Dogs is a solid-gold classic.