Quentin Tarantino had never been to a film festival, or even seen the snow, when he arrived at Sundance wearing a tee-shirt in 1992. His movie shocked and divided the indie crowd. But everyone agreed things would never be quite the same again…
Beginning in the middle and then carving the story of a failed jewellery store robbery into a series of chapters that introduces each of the crooks by turn, Tarantino rifles through the heist movie back catalogue, borrowing from Kubrick’s The Killing, Ringo Lam’s City on Fire, Joseph Sargent’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and a bunch of Jean-Pierre Melville films as he sees fit, and all but omitting the robbery itself. Tarantino’s profane, funny, pop-littered dialogue puts its own ironic spin on things. His heavies don’t talk like movie gangsters, they talk like geeks who have seen too many films. But it’s the disquieting ease with which Tarantino jumps from postmodern cool to blood-soaked violence that made the film so controversial, and so impactful.
Content Considerations: Graphic violence
It’s dynamite on a short fuse.
Rick Groen, Globe and Mail
Those who survive it emerge in a shell-shocked euphoria — so good and so blunt is the writing.
Duane Byrg, Hollywood Reporter
Quentin Tarantino
Harvey Keitel, Michael Madsen, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi, Lawrence Tierney, Eddie Bunker
USA
1992
English
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Credits
Producer
Lawrence Bender
Screenwriter
Quentin Tarantino
Cinematography
Andrzej Sekula
Editor
Sally Menke
Production Design
David Wasco
90s, Baby!
Ten years. 11 weeks. 90 films from the 1990s. This summer, 90’s Baby! takes a deep dive into a defining decade of cinema.
GoodFellas
The ultimate crash and burn movie, Scorsese's exhilarating gangster film is infused with the excitement of fast cash, girls, guns and drugs. Yet this brazenly amoral movie also captures the brutality, betrayal, and spiritual void of the criminal world.
Madonna: Truth or Dare
A year in the life of Madonna at the height of her fame, touring Blonde Ambition through 1990. There's concert footage, but the movie is also daringly truthful about life behind the scenes — not that Madonna is every really off-stage.
Pulp Fiction + The ReViberators
In the spirit of Quentin Tarantino, we're going to launch our summer series 90s, Baby! smack in the middle, with 1994's Pulp Fiction, the most exciting and influential movie of its era. On 35mm. Preceded by surf guitar sensations The ReViberators live!
Jacob's Ladder
Ever feel you're losing your mind? Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins) comes back from the Vietnam War with a firefight in his head. Sanity is a losing battle in Adrian Lyne's terrifying psychological thriller.
Reservoir Dogs
Quentin Tarantino announced himself to the world with this ingeniously fractured heist movie, carved into character-centric chapters, riffing breezily on pop culture, but counterpointing all this with blood-soaked intensity.
Total Recall
The master of the subversive blockbuster, Paul Verhoeven concocts a film about corporate mind-control vs. revolutionary uprising by setting it on Mars and allowing for the possibility the whole thing is just an escapist fantasy...
True Romance
Rockabilly comic book clerk Clarence (Christian Slater) meets dream girl Alabama (Patricia Arquette) with trouble in her wake, in this seminal couple on the run thriller from Quentin Tarantino's excitable mind.
The Company of Strangers
In this Canadian gem, seven elderly women find themselves stranded when their bus breaks down in the wilderness. With only their wits, memories and some roasted frogs' legs to sustain them, this remarkable group of strangers share their life stories.
Boyz n the Hood
Twenty-three-year-old writer-director John Singleton's groundbreaking portrait of three young men growing up in South Central is a film of integrity and compassion. It's a far richer portrait of Black lives than Hollywood's gangsta exploitation pics.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
In 2029, Earth has been ravaged by the war between the malevolent artificial intelligence Skynet and the human resistance. (Yep.) James Cameron's all too relevant action movie is in some ways unsurpassed. Linda Hamilton is the mom we all need right now.
Thelma & Louise
In this iconic feminist road movie BFF Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon take off for a weekend getaway that turns violent when one of them is attacked. The stakes get higher as they flee the scene. Winner: Best Original Screenplay (Callie Khouri).
Julio Avila Cuban Band Live + The Mambo Kings Film Screening
Feel the heat! Shake your booty as we combine a live set of exhilarating Cuban music followed by a rediscovered 90s barnstormer of a movie starring Latin heartthrobs Armand Assante and Antonio Banderas alongside the likes of Tito Puente and Celia Cruz.
The Silence of the Lambs
Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) gives FBI serial killer hunter Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) pointers from his maximum security cell. But is he trying to aid the investigation, or just messing with her head?
Delicatessen
Amelie director Jean-Pierre Jacquet collaborated with Marc Caro on their first film, a breathlessly inventive and unexpectedly charming comedy about two young lovers evading a cannibal butcher in a post-apocalyptic France.