Quentin Tarantino: Ranking His Movies

1. Pulp Fiction Fantastic as these films are, none of them is as wholly influential as Pulp Fiction, the Palme d'Or winning gangster film that helped revive the career of John Travolta post-Grease, and also elevate Samuel L. Jackson to a global platform. Unfolding with an unconventional plot structure, the film follows a number of stories that, as it turns out, intersect with one another in a labyrinthine, complex manner, but the meat of the film isn't so much its chronology but its fantastic dialogue. Each scene crackles with comic, depraved wit; the banter between the characters, especially Jules (Jackson) and Vincent (Travolta), is superb, such that we actually care about the characters when the bullets start to fly. Many of Tarantino's favoured actors such as Harvey Keitel and Tim Roth appear in memorable cameos, while the sheer number of iconic scenes - the adrenaline needle, the dance-off, Zed's basement etc - is staggering. So successful was the film that it's been massively influential in the crime genre since; the term "post-Tarantino" emerged to describe the glut of gangster films that attempted to ape the conversational Tarantino dialogue style, though of course, none of these managed to capture the same zeitgeist feeling that Pulp Fiction did. Tarantino's masterwork, and one of the best films ever made. How do you rate Tarantino's films? Let us know in the comments below.