Making your way through Quentin Tarantino's movies while in lockdown? Maybe you're struggling to prioritise which one to watch next?
If the whole year of release approach is a bit boring, here's our blog-based alternative, ranking the movies based on their Rotten Tomatoes score. The site aggregates a percentage score for each particular movie, based on its 'fresh' versus 'rotten' reviews system.
As we've mentioned before, it's an imperfect system, given that some films score highly based on a lower number of consistently fresh reviews. Meanwhile, others have more reviews to their name but are dotted with positive and negative reactions, bringing their overall percentage down. In short, it's disproportionate.
Nevertheless, scroll down below the GIF to discover the rankings.
9. Death Proof (64%)
Tarantino's lowest-ranked movie stars Kurt Russell as Stuntman Mike, a motorist with a very sadistic streak. Designed and shot in a manner that apes sleazy, low-budget grindhouse horror/thrillers (explicit violence, gaps in the film negative, sexually-charged storylines), critics largely agreed that Tarantino was indulging himself with this one. Little surprise given that his love of gory, trashy B-movies from the 1960s and 1970s has influenced so much of his output.
Find out more about Death Proof.
8. The Hateful Eight (75%)
Agatha Christie meets Sergio Leone in Tarantino's ambitiously mounted Western/thriller. A consort of the filmmaker's favourite actors, including Samuel L. Jackson, Tim Roth, Kurt Russell and Michael Madsen, assemble for a story of snowbound paranoia. It's largely set indoors, the interior space elevated by expansive ultra-widescreen cinematography from Robert Richardson. Even so, we couldn't escape the feeling that Tarantino had been here before.
Find out more about The Hateful Eight.
7. Kill Bill: Volume 2 (84%)
Uma Thurman's crusading killer Beatrix aka The Bride catches up with her murderous former mentor in the second chapter of the Kill Bill saga. It's somewhat less violent than the first movie, more character-driven as Beatrix lays bare her history with Bill (late B-movie icon David Carradine). That said, it packs a nasty punch when it wants to, namely in the eyeball-squishing fight between Beatrix and Elle Driver/Black Mamba (Darryl Hannah).
Find out more about Kill Bill: Volume 2.
=6. Kill Bill: Volume 1/Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (85%)
Tarantino had intended for both Kill Bill chapters to be presented as one movie, until disgraced former producer Harvey Weinstein made him chop the movie in half. The first instalment is more of a lean, more, gore-tastic frenzy as Uma Thurman's vengeful anti-hero cuts a swathe through her enemies en route to Lucy Liu's O-Ren Ishii. Tarantino's blood-soaked homage to Japanese samurai and revenge movies divided critics but was a box office success.
On a level pegging with the first Kill Bill is Tarantino's most recent movie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. This sprawling black comedy lies at an intersection point between reality and fantasy, interweaving the real-life Manson murders with the fate of a clutch of fictional characters. Leonardo DiCaprio and an Oscar-winning Brad Pitt excel as a fading actor and his loyal stuntman, with Margot Robbie turning up as actress Sharon Tate. The way the movie reworks Tate's horrendous real-life fate is audacious, and quintessential Tarantino.
5. Django Unchained (87%)
Tarantino's biggest box office success ($425 million worldwide) is a typically confrontational mix of Spaghetti Western pastiche and Blaxploitation riff. Tarantino empowers Jamie Foxx's titular slave Django to rise up against his oppressors with the help of Oscar-winning Christoph Waltz's dandy Dr. King Schultz. And Leonardo DiCaprio is on fiendish form as diabolical slaver Calvin Candie, with a startling Samuel L. Jackson just behind as manipulative house slave Stephen.
Find out more about Django Unchained.
4. Jackie Brown (87%)
It's alleged by some that Jackie Brown is Tarantino's most mature and emotionally resonant movie. This may stem from the fact that he's working from someone else's idea: novel Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard, who lauded Tarantino's interpretation of his work. Former Blaxploitation icon Pam Grier gets the role of her career as a tough-talking air stewardess drawn into a complicated drug-running conspiracy.
Find out more about Jackie Brown.
3. Inglourious Basterds (89%)
Tarantino's love of the Spaghetti Western finds further expression in this multi-stranded World War II opus. A host of different stories pivot around the eponymous Basterds, an elite unit working behind German enemy lines to scalp Nazis. Brad Pitt is the big name but its the supporting actors who steal the show, namely a sensational, Oscar-winning Christoph Waltz as the devious 'Jew Hunter' Colonel Hans Landa.
Find out more about Inglourious Basterds.
2. Pulp Fiction (91%)
Tarantino's taboo-breaking style was cemented in this landmark black comedy, which exerted a huge influence on independent cinema at the start of the 1990s. Criss-crossing a clutch of lurid, low-life storylines with gallows humour and eruptions of violence and hard drugs, Tarantino's Oscar-winning classic blew through Hollywood like a breath of fresh air. Among its many highlights: John Travolta resurrecting his career in the role of hitman Vincent Vega.
Find out more about Pulp Fiction.
1. Reservoir Dogs (92%)
Tarantino's calling-card movie announced his intentions right off the bat. In the first indication of his magpie approach to filmmaking, Tarantino collates a host of his greatest influences, both in terms of film and music, to stage a violent, gritty story of a diamond heist gone horribly wrong. From the juxtaposition of pop tracks with horrendous violence, to the presence of actors such as Harvey Keitel and Tim Roth, many of Tarantino's later hallmarks can be seen here.
Find out more about Reservoir Dogs.
What is your favourite Quentin Tarantino movie? Let us know @Cineworld.
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