While we wait for famed writer-director supposedly final film, we decided to take a look back at all 10 Quentin Tarantino movies and rank them from w
While we wait for famed writer-director supposedly final film, we decided to take a look back at all 10 Quentin Tarantino movies and rank them from worst to best—just as we did recently with Steven Spielberg’s oeuvre. Tarantino’s resumé is a bit shorter than Spielberg’s, but it nonetheless contains some seismic, seminal American classics alongside a few smaller curiosities. We have decided to count the Kill Bill films as separate movie, as they are distinct enough in style to register as their own entities. We realize some, including Mr. Tarantino, might disagree with that decision.
© Weinstein Company/Everett Collection.
10. The Hateful Eight (2015)
Genre: Western
Notable cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kurt Russell
MPA rating: R
While the idea of Tarantino doing a snowbound Agatha Christie riff sounds fun—strangers who are maybe not so strange to one another stuck in a lodge during a blizzard—the results are less than engaging. Dull and self-indulgent, The Hateful Eight marks perhaps the only time that Tarantino’s idiosyncratic instincts fully fail him. His haphazard, career-long fascination with a particular racial epithet is on garish display in the film, a nasty and mostly pointless post-Civil War story of revenge. Even a stellar cast—Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Dern, and more—can’t make any magic out of Tarantino’s clunky, meandering script. The Hateful Eight would maybe work better as a stage play, but it would still be hampered by Tarantino’s crass assessment of the Old West. The work is rotten at its core; it’s Tarantino’s sole disaster.
© Weinstein Company/Everett Collection.
9. Death Proof (2007)
Genre: Action, Horror
Notable cast: Rosario Dawson, Kurt Russell
MPA rating: R
Tarantino’s most forgotten film is an odd curio. Made as part of a Grindhouse double feature with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, Tarantino’s homage to 1970s car movies also poses as a kind of feminist rebuke to violent, predatory men. It almost works on that level, though the many leering shots of feet and butts muddy the righteous message some. Depending on which cut you watch, Death Proof is either just under or just over two hours—either one is too long given the limits of its plotting. And yet, Tarantino’s rambling cousin of a Richard Linklater Austin hang movie (suddenly interrupted by gory violence) has a distinct pull, thanks in gigantic part to a winning company of actors, including Vanessa Ferlito, Tracie Thoms, Rosario Dawson, and especially the stuntwoman-actor Zoë Bell, the most effervescent part of the movie. Kurt Russell is also a hoot, playing a murderous stuntman whose weapon of choice is a souped up muscle car. It’s offbeat fun, even if it sometimes tries patience.
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