Quentin Tarantino films ranked, from Reservoir Dogs to Hateful Eight

Quentin Tarantino is very conscious of the cinematic legacy he’s building. His most recent movie, The Hateful Eight, is labeled in the opening credits as “The 8th Film By Quentin Tarantino.” 

We count nine, actually, because we count the two Kill Bills as separate films — and it’s nearly impossible to rank them. Everyone has a favorite Tarantino joint, but there’s really not a misfire in the bunch. And to think we could’ve tossed in True Romance and Natural Born Killers, two other revered Tarantino screenplays that made it to the screen in the hands of another director — Tony Scott and Oliver Stone, respectively. 

The Hateful Eight is Tarantino’s second consecutive Western. Is it better than Django Unchained? It it his best film since… Pulp Fiction? Scroll through to find out. 

Death Proof in last place? This is an obscenity. Yes, Death Proof is by far Tarantino’s lightest film. The director usually spends years on a project, maybe a little too focused on ensuring that he always knocks every project out of the park. Death Proof is Tarantino letting himself hit a double. The result may be his most radical film, period, with a wild mid-film jump that’s arguably more effective than the twist-killing of Janet Leigh in Psycho (insofar as there was only one Janet Leigh.) Vanessa Ferlito and Tracie Thoms are standouts in a cast full of women, with Kurt Russell as their gender nemesis, Stuntman Mike. The joy of Death Proof is that it’s the one time that Tarantino, that great lover of B-movies, makes a movie that actually feels like a B-movie, drunk on thrills and transgressive at every turn. — Darren Franich 

Tarantino’s latest film is, in some ways, him coming full circle, a cross-splicing of Django‘s Western genre with Reservoir Dogs‘ baddies-in-a-room premise. But it’s also its own kind of departure. Slower paced and frosted with a rime of cynicism, the story of eight hard-bit, fleshed-out archetypes hoping to leave the snowbound Minnie’s Haberdashery with their bounties and/or their lives intact is clear of the revisionist catharsis that marked the director’s first two historical movies. Instead, its characters are trapped in a setting as frozen and as punishing as the ninth circle of Hell. — Keith Staskiewicz

The usually effervescent Jamie Foxx dials it down for his leading turn in Tarantino’s Western revenge fantasy. Django is a slave recruited by dentist turned bounty hunter, King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), who promises freedom and assistance to rescue Django’s wife, Hildi (Kerry Washington) in exchange for crucial intelligence. Their odyssey brings them to Calvin Candie’s plantation, where Leonardo DiCaprio steals scenes as a comically evil slave owner. In typical Tarantino fashion, he paints his story with broad blood-spattered strokes, dropping humorous dialogue into the darkest moments — the KKK mask kerfuffle being the funniest instance. But Django shows the most emotionally moving relationship in any of Tarantino’s films: Django loves Hildi and vows to mow down anyone to save her. — Will Robinson

Kill Bill: Vol 2 is much more subdued than its first half. Instead of colorful samurai fights and anime homages, the second half provides flashbacks and drawn-out meditations, most of them set in the desert. (It may, in fact, qualify as Tarantino’s first Western.) But this film’s unique achievement is that among Tarantino’s recent run of revenge thrillers, only Kill Bill: Vol 2 weighs ambivalent notions of the very concept of vengeance. Unlike the massacre of the Crazy 88, the Bride only kills one person in this movie. When she does finally fulfill her titular objection, it doesn’t feel triumphant. It feels hollow and sad — just like real violence. — Christian Holub

Tarantino’s follow-up to Pulp Fiction marked the director’s successful but seemingly contrarian attempt to orchestrate drama in a lower key. Adapting Elmore Leonard’s crime novel, Tarantino gave the film his own flavor — including the casting of 48-year-old blaxploitation goddess Pam Grier in the title role. She delivers the goods, as does Samuel L. Jackson in his most tacitly sinister performance. Unlike Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction, the more introspective movie never explodes in a hail of gunfire; but its sense of interior melancholy translates better after a second viewings on the small screen. The film’s extraordinary closing moments — Jackie says goodbye to a quiet bail bondsman (Robert Forster) while the gorgeous beat of “Across 110th Street” hums on the soundtrack — might be Tarantino’s most pure and indelible crescendo. — Joe McGovern

Tarantino’s most aggressively postmodern effort can be boiled down to a single enduring image: vengeful Bride Uma Thurman in a Bruce Lee-yellow jumpsuit massacring Crazy 88s with the surgically precise strikes of her samurai katana. The martial arts epic lays out the character’s righteous mission but deliberately omits her creation myth. After surviving a wedding-day assassination attempt, the Bride goes on a search and destroy mission, hunting down those who did her wrong (the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad). Vol. 1’s rollicking pastiche of chop socky violence, Spaghetti Western frontier justice, and winking blaxploitation culminates with a frenzy of arterial splatter in the hideout of O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu). But in the end, the eponymous Bill still lives. — Chris Lee

Tarantino’s bloody, talky, gleefully profane calling card elevated him almost instantly to full-blown auteur status when it premiered at Sundance in 1992. The movie’s scrappy, too-good-to-be-scripted backstory — twentysomething video-store clerk conceives wild homage to the films he grew up obsessing over, finds angel investor/star in Harvey Keitel — didn’t hurt. But it was his style, a kinetic, pitch-black pastiche of comedy and thriller and B-movie noir that announced the arrival of a singular talent. A heist movie that never actually puts the heist onscreen, Dogs introduced countless Tarantino hallmarks, including ratatat pop-culture references (Madonna, Pam Grier, the Partridge Family), a killer soundtrack of obscurities and B-sides (George Baker, Blue Suede, Stealers Wheel), and gory bursts of violence (straight razor, meet ear) — sometimes all in the same scene. — Leah Greenblatt

In this darker-than-dark comedy set in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II, Tarantino envisions an alternate history, one with a plot to take down the Third Reich leadership. Beginning with the introduction of a perfectly terrifying Christoph Waltz — as “Jew Hunter” Hans Landa — to its dramatic conclusion at — where else? — a movie theater, this madcap ride never lets up for a moment of its 153 minutes. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards — including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (for Waltz, who won), and Best Original Screenplay — and part of the fun is that its stars, including Brad Pitt, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger, Michael Fassbender, and Melanie Laurent, appear to be having as much film acting in it as we do watching. — Sara Vilkomerson

Its Moebius-strip structure was a conjurer’s trick. Its violence felt like a shot of adrenaline to the heart. And its comic menagerie of lowlifes seemed ripped from the pages of a demented dime-store paperback. It is, hands down, Quentin Tarantino’s greatest film — a deck-shuffling dive into the criminal underworld of lovestruck stick-up artists, granite-jawed palookas, and hit men who could spout fire-and-brimstone and do a killer rendition of the Twist. Tarantino’s sophomore turn behind the camera is an overstuffed briefcase of ideas, a quantum leap from the spartan set-up of Reservoir Dogs. It feels urgent and electric and exhilarating — an after-hours nightmare presented as a candy-colored day dream. John Travolta has never been more effortlessly charismatic, Uma Thurman has never been more crazy-sexy-cool, and Christopher Walken has never been more Walken-y. Most films that are as bold and revolutionary as Pulp Fiction was when it came out seem to grow less and less so as time passes. But Tarantino’s masterpiece retains its elemental pop power to intoxicate more than 20 years later. It belongs to the ages now. — Chris Nashawaty