Featuring one of the most distinctive styles in film, Quentin Tarantino has staked out his place in the modern canon with witty, magniloquent dialogue, flamboyant acting, and a proclivity for stylized violence. He began his career with “Reservoir Dogs,” which laid out many of his signature elements: non-linear plots, ensemble casts, and a slightly disturbing love for macabre violence. His best film, “Pulp Fiction”, is one of the great masterpieces of modern cinema, using allusion and black humor to keep the audience glued while smoothing out the less refined portions of Reservoir Dogs and constructing a tightly paced triptych that efficaciously covers all the themes he has explored in his career. The script remains one of the greatest in film: its connective nature, its confidence and, of course, its quotable wit. However, his subsequent films have never left that shadow and increasingly feel like recreations in different time periods and environments, to less ingenious levels. “Kill Bill” is “Pulp Fiction” with a ronin/revenge bend, “Inglourious Basterds” is “Pulp Fiction” set in World War 2, “Django Unchained” is “Pulp Fiction” set in the antebellum south, and “The Hateful Eight” is “Pulp Fiction” as a western. His one outlier is “Jackie Brown”, but that is largely because it is based off the novel “Rum Punch,” Too often in the aforementioned list, scenes drag on and devolve into self-indulgence, knowing that a singular ability to craft dialogue will save the scene from absolute degeneracy. The violence has become less to challenge notions of entertainment and more designed as contrived shock value. The depiction of violence loses its desired effect due to its overbearing nature and the camera’s obsessive gaze upon the carnage. Despite faltering as of late, his films will never be boring.

Reservoir Dogs (1992) - 8 - The film is a manipulation of the audience’s allegiances and plays on the audience through three major characters: Blonde, White, and Orange. They are all set up as anti-heros at the beginning of the story, however, our views of the characters slowly shift as more and more of their personalities are shown. Absent is Tarantino’s sense of black humor, and there is little whimsy. It is overall his bleakest film, but the structure, sharp dialogue, and excellent use of non-linear structure to subvert expectations of characters all act as a precursor to “Pulp Fiction”, and make this his second strongest film.

Pulp Fiction (1994) - 10 - The film is a bold declaration that anything can be turned into pulp entertainment. Tarantino deftly creates punchy dialogue and humorous scenarios out of extreme situations that are horrific outside of this movie’s panache. The outcomes of so many things: drug overdoses, murder, etc. all act as nothing more than an inconvenience to the protagonist of their respective storyline -- Vincent (John Travolta), Butch (Bruce Willis), Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) -- and it is the comedic events and lack of philosophical introspection that lead to them being completely free of the obvious moral difficulties that should arise from the scenarios. It creates a sense that these things are just designed to entertain, and challenges the viewer to find something in the world that can’t be rendered into vacuous entertainment.

What the film does so brilliantly is then invert the viewer’s expectations for how the characters act and talk. This is best reflected in the film’s use of death and the bathroom. Death is everywhere, and yet it is treated with a complete lightness, and, twice, death escalates without a reaction from the protagonist. Jules and Vincent discuss cheeseburgers and foot massages right before entering an apartment with armed men, and shooting them all to death. Later, there is a serious accident that again should them a pause. The man killed helped them and was no threat, as opposed to their shooting men who had crossed Marsellus. Yet, in both situations, neither Jules nor Vincent are concerned with the morality of murder. They are instead focused solely focused on the result, the inconvenience those men’s deaths represent for them. It’s entirely selfish and should be reprehensible, yet the murders are done with such flair, such panache that the audience is sucked in. For the accident, the ensuing conversation is so hilarious that the audience instantly glosses over the potential moral implications. Butch kills three people in his portion, of increasing consciousness and premeditation, the first is an accident, the second is due to fear and self-defense with a machine pistol, and the third is a thought out murder. In the third, Butch lingers on each of the potential weapons, brandishing them and considering them carefully before picking out his choice. There is an escalation of pre-meditation that should disconcert the audience, but it doesn’t because it is all done so slickly, the audience is so wrapped up in the action they become culpable as well. On the flip side, the bathroom is a plan of grave seriousness and importance. A place used everyday by everyone becomes where death and life-threatening events happen all of the time, and it is here that there are actual consequences and/or introspection of their actions.

Jackie Brown (1997) - 7 - The least saliently “Tarantino” of his films, which shouldn’t surprise, considering it is his only adapted screenplay, is also his most patient and careful. The plot is intricate, but doesn’t use any form of unique narrative format to delineate the layers -- as Pulp Fiction did in its Triptych, or Inglourious Basterds does with its episodic nature -- instead relying on the reader to piece together the outcome. The film’s dominant themes, love and greed, are also hardly Tarantino staples. The film features one of the greatest one-liners in film “Is white guilt supposed to make me forget I am running a business?”. However, there is a questionable consistency of certain character motivations: Ordell Robbie, Louis Gara, and the dichotomy of Max Cherry. The film’s black and white morality is disappointing compared to Tarantino’s first two nebulous affairs, the villain has all of Tarantino’s typical panache, but does nothing to distinguish himself from a million other greedy mobsters.

Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003) - 6.5 - Killing and gore reach a fever pitch in this outrageous stylization of hyper-violence in Asian film. The first scene, a terrifically choreographed knife fight, is a short ode to Asian ultraviolence in the style of John Woo. However, instead of guns Tarantino uses katanas, often to the visceral delight of the audience. The fight in Japan, in particular, reaches self-parodic levels of absurdity and visual bombast. In doing so, Tarantino asks a little too much of the audience’s suspension of disbelief.

Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004) - 5 - This film seems to lose the core of what made the first Kill Bill so intriguing and spends too much time talking. Dialogue in film inherently will slow the pace and force a more cogitative approach the film, both are bad for Tarantino. The scene in the mobile home is hilarious in its bathos.

Inglourious Basterds (2009) - 7.5 - The first and second chapters are weak. Particularly, the first, which is little more than a recreation of the famous apartment scene in Pulp Fiction. The third and fourth are brilliant in their construction of tension, which drenches the scenes, all the while Tarantino maintains his wit and taunts his characters through small inconveniences. These are flashes of his previous genius. The fifth chapter contains too much excess and fabrication, but redeems itself through a genuinely hilarious moment when the Basterds speak “Italian” to Landa. The chapter shows Tarantino’s worst abilities to revel in his outrageous plots and desire to forego anything he had for a cool moment.

Tarantino relies heavily on the nefarious association with Nazis to justify the actions of the protagonists within the film. Landa steals every scene he's in, and though he is egregious in the first chapter, afterwards his actions are less obnoxious in dragging the film on, and instead provide the film with a flair and narcissistic panache perfectly suited for Tarantino. He is a break from the classic ideologue, and makes the villainy in the film far more intriguing, rising above mundane Naziism. He also is clearly the genius of the film. His plans always work when within his rules, which are what he perceives society’s to be. His defeat comes from Raine changing the rules of the game.

Django Unchained (2012) - 7 - While containing some of Tarantino’s best moments, particularly the scenes between Candie and Schultz/Django, there are also some incredibly self indulgent ones on the writer/director’s part, and the last half-hour is superfluous. A moral objection enters the film with its portrayal of slavery. There is something off about the way in which the mandingos are shown. The fight between the two men is brutal, primeval, but the camera doesn’t depict it that way. The fixation on the men fighting is one of fascination, and there is a revelling in the violence, not to say that it is a racist one of “look at the primitive people fighting”, but rather one that simply likes violence. This current runs throughout the film, and that breeds an undertone of flippancy that has no place in a film on slavery.

The Hateful Eight (2015) - 6.5 - The film is split into 6 chapters, however, aside from a flashback for the 5th chapter it would be more apt to split the film into halves. The first half is an excruciating, 80+ minutes of expository dialogue. It has the typical Tarantino wit, but the worst of his excess as well. Particularly frustrating is for the three hour film to have anaphoric repetitions of phrases within other character’s lines, as if that gives it an epic or more dramatic quality to what someone said. The break from the mediocre pre-intermission portion of the film is a warm up for the ensuing insanity at its very end. It uses the racism that dominates the first half for an actual purpose, and establishes clenching tension through the violence and racism.

The film’s weakest element is its vacuity and sense of mindless violence. The panache doesn’t make a point, or at least makes even less of one than usual. Perhaps aware of this, the film also injects social commentary into itself, largely revolving around race and its place in America.