Reservoir Dogs

Reservoir Dogs might be the closest Quentin Tarantino ever got to making a serious, gritty, straight-up thriller.

True, his debut has its share of his trademark, pop culture-soaked dialogue and quirky, eccentric characters, but at 90 minutes, Reservoir Dogs is lean and mean. The characters have fewer redeeming qualities, indulging in cruelty and violence for their own sake. Innocent people are hurt and killed, and the violence is less surreal and comic and more brutal; it looks like it really hurts, with nothing about it being remotely funny.

When John Travolta accidentally shoots Phil LaMarr in the back of the car and groans, "Ah man, I just shot Marvin in the face," it's hysterical because he's such a doofus and his choice of words tries to downplay the severity of what he did.

When Michael Madsen slices off a cop's ear with a straight razor while dancing to Steeler's Wheel's "Stuck in the Middle with You," it's terrifying in its coldness and cruelty. Even though we don't see the act, it is uncomfortable to imagine, and famed horror director Wes Craven reportedly walked out of a screening of the movie in disgust.

Travolta in Pulp Fiction plays a screwup; Madsen in Reservoir Dogs plays a sociopath.

Inglourious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino's characters love to talk, and throughout his films, they talk at length about the ethics of tipping, the implied meaning of a foot massage, and the concept around Superman's identity. The dialogue is often profane, often funny, and more often than not, revealing, giving new dimensions to the characters and taking the plots in unexpected directions.

Inglourious Basterds features a lot of talking and enough pop culture references to feel like a Tarantino movie, but there's something else at work. Instead of going just for laughs, the dialogue goes for tension and suspense. Each sentence is another turn of the screw. 

Inglourious Basterds is a funny movie. Like Pulp Fiction, it is a surreal, pop comic world of quirkiness, absurdity, and violence - but it's also incredibly tense and uneasy and not just in the moments of unexpected gore.

Hitchcock postulated the bomb-under-a-table-theory: a bomb that explodes unexpectedly is a surprise, but a bomb, under a table, that the audience is waiting to see go off, is suspense. Tarantino understands this theory, and it's at play throughout Inglourious Basterds. The violence in Pulp Fiction was often a surprise, but here, the drawn-out dialogue keeps us uneasy because we know a bomb, literal or metaphorical, is about to go off; we just don't know when or how.

Pulp Fiction

Reservoir Dogs announced Quentin Tarantino's arrival, but Pulp Fiction cemented his place as a quirky, idiosyncratic filmmaker whose presence was going to be felt in Hollywood for a while.

Pulp Fiction contains many recognizable elements and tropes from the crime and film noir genres - professional hitmen, crime bosses, murder gone wrong, etc. - but the presentation and layout are wholly original. The movie has its moments of shocking violence and sequences of almost unbearable tension, but the overall effect is comedic. Despite the ghastliness and the morally bankrupt characters who commit atrocities, the viewer can't help but laugh (as long as they aren't too squeamish).