Yes, we believe there are 10 Quentin Tarantino movies, despite the director’s assertion that his next film will be his 10th and last. Why 10? Because we decline to count Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2 as one film. Here are all 10 Quentin Tarantino movies ranked.
The Hateful Eight (2015)
We love The Hateful Eight, as we love all Quentin Tarantino movies, but something had to be lowest ranked on our list, and this is it.
Tarantino became known early in his career for certain hallmarks — pop-culture references, impeccable left-field song choices, a very modern sense of cool — and after his initial success, went about proving he could make great films without any of them. The Hateful Eight, set in snowy Wyoming in the late 1800s after the Civil War, leaves Tarantino with no attention-grabbing gimmicks to rely on. But he does have his most reliable tools: a terrific, twisty script, and magnificent actors.
The Hateful Eight puts Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kurt Russell, Tim Roth, Walton Goggins, Channing Tatum, and other excellent actors under one roof and lets all hell slowly break loose. The stakes aren’t as high as they feel in some of his other films, but the movie is still a warm cinematic fire.
Death Proof (2007)
Death Proof is one of the flashiest Tarantino movies, filled with car crashes, mayhem, dancing girls, and cool music. Designed as a parody/homage to exploitation films, as part of Tarantino’s Grindhouse double feature with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, it pulls out all the stops to entertain — and it does, relentlessly.
Death Proof is Tarantino at his most unchained — it starts with a long shot of female feet, which feels like a jokey middle finger to everyone who ever accused him of a foot fetish — and inspired hand-wringing about whether Tarantino was objectifying or celebrating his heroines (played by Rosario Dawson, Vanessa Ferlito, Jordan Ladd, Rose McGowan, Tracie Thoms, Sydney Poitier, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Zoe Bell).
Death Proof has it both ways: It’s lascivious while making fun of the lasciviousness of 1970s grindhouse films. It works, and it’s a nice breather between the epic scale of the Kill Bill films — which preceded Death Proof — and Inglorious Basterds, which followed it. It may be Tarantino’s least important movie, and that’s fine — sometimes you just want to have fun.
Also, it features two of the 15 Most Beautiful Cars in Movies.
Reservoir Dogs (1992)
The movie that started it all for Tarantino, a former video store clerk and struggling actor who made ends meet, while prepping the film, in part with residuals from a role on The Golden Girls as an Elvis impersonator.
Smaller in scale than any other Tarantino movie, Reservoir Dogs introduces many of his trademarks: pop culture dissertations dropped into scenes that, in the hands of other directors, would be ultra-serious; shocking violence; cool twists; and an out-of-nowhere soundtrack that — like so many things in a Tarantino movie — shouldn’t work but absolutely does.
Reservoir Dogs also introduced Tarantino’s phenomenal way with actors and skill at bringing out their best work. Harvey Keitel, Michael Madson, Steve Buscemi and many others shine with dialogue different than we’d previously heard in any crime movie… but then heard throughout the ’90s, as countless other screenwriters tried to copy QT.
Jackie Brown (1997)
Even more than The Hateful Eight, Jackie Brown feels like Tarantino setting out to prove he can make a movie that doesn’t rely on his most-familiar moves. It’s a beautiful meditation on aging, and continuing to hustle as you age, with a little more wisdom and a lot of disappointment behind you.
After the back-to-back success of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, Tarantino could have done anything — and chose to elevate his genre heroes. The film is the only one of his movies that isn’t based on his own original story, and is instead adapted from the Elmore Leonard novel Rum Punch.
The director cast as his leads two actors who were not in especially high demand: Robert Forster, a new Hollywood star for 1969’s Medium Cool who later appeared in films films Alligator and Delta Force, and Pam Grier, a Blaxploitation icon for roles in Coffy and Foxy Brown who had not yet gotten the respect she deserved from mainstream Hollywood.
In another unconventional casting choice, he placed A-listers like Robert De Niro, Bridget Fonda, Michael Keaton and Samuel L. Jackson in smaller roles, where they waited, like little bombs, to explode.
Tarantino also personalized the material by moving the setting from Florida to L.A.’s South Bay, and setting key moments at the Del Amo Mall, where he (and I) saw many a movie in the ’80s.
Django Unchained (2012)
Tarantino hit on a brilliant formula with Inglorious Basterds and continued it in Django Unchained: Find a bad guy so repugnant that you’ll be passionately invested in the hero’s success. Inglorious Basterds let us delight in the killing of Nazis, and Django lets us thrill in a revenge story against American slavers, as Jamie Foxx’s Django and Christoph Waltz’s Dr. King Schultz take on the repugnant Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his aide Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson) to rescue Django’s wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington).
Django does many audacious things, including holding back on the introduction of its biggest star, DiCaprio, and making Candie’s enslaved servant, Stephen, a bad guy. All the risks pay off.
Django is also fascinating for Tarantino’s exacting use of violence. The pain inflicted on slaves in the film is as real as the violence they suffered in real life. But the fantasy revenge carried out by Django on the slavers is fantastical, even comical.
The film makes us wish the slavers suffered violence as real as the violence they inflicted in real life, but there’s a vast emotional chasm between reality and the wish fulfillment on screen. Tarantino thrives in that chasm.
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Pulp Fiction is a little like Shakespeare — you’ve seen it imitated so many times it’s easy to forget that when it first appeared, it was completely groundbreaking and new.
Tarantino and co-writer Roger Avary explicitly elevated inspirations once dismissed as trashy — like the pulpy novels of the title — and combined flashy dialogue and set pieces with grounded, troubled characters, hopeful strivers caught in the muck of violence.
It pulls off a barrage of cool narrative tricks that amuse on a surface level, then drill into and confuse our lizard brains — like having one character we love kill another, in a way that thrills and then horrifies us. And it manages an ambitious spirituality that, again, shouldn’t work but does.
It also marks the first of many collaborations between Tarantino and Samuel L. Jackson, and the start of his partnership with Uma Thurman, who will turn up again in our next entry.
Kill Bill, Vol. 2 (2004)
After three smaller-scale films, with very ground-level characters, Tarantino made epics with the Kill Bill films. They were originally intended as one movie, then were released in two parts, Kill Bill Vol. 1 in 2003 and Kill Bill Vol. 2 in 2004. We love them both.
Once again, Tarantino elevated his genre inspirations, this time martial arts films. Uma Thurman’s heroine, The Bride, aka Beatrix Kiddo, even wears a yellow jumpsuit modeled on Bruce Lee’s in Game of Death.
Vol. 2 has some of Tarantino’s most showstopping moments, including The Bride’s trailer fight with Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), her escape from being buried alive, and a final faceoff with Bill (David Carradine), whose speech about Superman is one of Tarantino’s greatest pop-culture monologues.
But we still like Kill Bill Vol. 1 better, for reasons we’ll soon explain.
Inglorious Basterds (2009)
This is the Tarantino film with the highest stakes: Brad Pitt’s ragtag group of Nazi-killin’ commandos, including Eli Roth’s magnificent, bat-wielding “Bear Jew,” are out to kill Adolf Hitler himself.
Inglorious Basterds has one of the best opening scenes of any movie, as Christoph Waltz’s charming but evil Hans Landa builds up unbearable tension while persuading a French farmer to give up the Jewish family he’s been protecting. But it gets even better from there, building to a climax absolutely no one would expect.
More than almost any other movie, Inglorious Basterds asks, “Why can’t you do that?” and then does it. It thrives, once again, in the chasm between cinematic fantasy and reality — between what we wish would have happened, and what actually did.
And the cast, including Melanie Laurent (above), is perfect.
Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
Speaking of that chasm: Quentin Tarantino uses our knowledge of the Manson murders to keep us utterly rapt, terrified, on the edge of our seats, through three hours of relatively low-stakes drama involving rising star Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), washed-up actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), and Dalton’s dangerous assistant, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt).
We watch them over two fairly uneventful days — at one point joining Tate on an errand and a trip to the movies — as Dalton and Booth reckon with their faltering prospects in life. Everything is imbued with a sense of menace (wait — is that Charles Manson?) because we know the real Tate’s fate.
But on the third day, Tarantino plunges us deep into his chasm — the place between what we know really happened, and what we wish could have happened. And he delivers cinematic wish fulfillment unmatched by any film, except perhaps his own Inglorious Basterds.
The film is also very fun for the chance to see early appearances by future stars Mikey Madison, Austin Butler, and Margaret Qualley.
Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003)
I mentioned growing up in L.A.’s South Bay in the ’80s. If you, like Quentin Tarantino and I, spent any amount of time watching TV in that place and time, you became very familiar with an ad that ran constantly on local TV for a two-record or two-cassette collection of songs by “Zamfir, Master of the Pan Flute,” available for $19.98 by credit card phone order and pointedly not sold in stores.
It was the embodiment of dull-day, depressing TV schlock, when no one had the internet and not everyone even had cable. The Zamfir ad, like the ad for a four-record or three-cassette collection called Freedom Rock, was a thing you would endure or openly mock during commercial breaks between replays of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly or reruns of Gimme a Break, hating yourself a little for not having something cooler to do.
It took Quentin Tarantino to recognize its power. With his knack for elevating the most seemingly disposable elements of our culture, he realized that Gheorghe Zamfir’s version of “The Lonely Shepherd” was the perfect way to end Kill Bill, Vol. 1. In doing so, he created, for my money ($19.98), one of the best endings of any movie.
It comes after a stunning battle between The Bride and the Crazy 88s and Gogo Yubari, which leads into a cathartic faceoff in the falling snow between O-Ren Ishiii (Lucy Liu) and The Bride. The movie could have ended with O-Ren’s defeat, but instead continues with a montage as The Bride flies home in a plane, against a blood-red sky, as the film’s central characters take stock of her revenge mission, Zamfir playing softly behind them.
Bill delivers a final line that changes everything, as the drums and horns kicks in behind the pan flute. It’s devastating and hopeful: The chasm opens wide.
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You might also like this list of every Christopher Nolan movie ranked.
Main image: Inglorious Basterds. TWC.
Editor’s Note: Updates main image.
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