All of Quentin Tarantino’s Movies Ranked

While we wait for famed writer-director supposedly final film, we decided to take a look back at all 10 Quentin Tarantino movies and rank them from worst to best—just as we did recently with Steven Spielberg’s oeuvre. Tarantino’s resumé is a bit shorter than Spielberg’s, but it nonetheless contains some seismic, seminal American classics alongside a few smaller curiosities. We have decided to count the Kill Bill films as separate movie, as they are distinct enough in style to register as their own entities. We realize some, including Mr. Tarantino, might disagree with that decision.

10. The Hateful Eight (2015)

Genre: Western

Notable cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kurt Russell

MPA rating: R

While the idea of Tarantino doing a snowbound Agatha Christie riff sounds fun—strangers who are maybe not so strange to one another stuck in a lodge during a blizzard—the results are less than engaging. Dull and self-indulgent, The Hateful Eight marks perhaps the only time that Tarantino’s idiosyncratic instincts fully fail him. His careless, career-long fascination with a particular racial epithet is on garish display in the film, a nasty and mostly pointless post-Civil War story of revenge. Even a stellar cast—Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Dern, and more—can’t make any magic out of Tarantino’s clunky, meandering script. The Hateful Eight would maybe work better as a stage play, but it would still be hampered by Tarantino’s crass assessment of the Old West. The work is rotten at its core; it’s Tarantino’s sole disaster.

9. Death Proof (2007)

Genre: Action, Horror

Notable cast: Rosario Dawson, Kurt Russell

MPA rating: R

Tarantino’s most forgotten film is an odd curio. Made as part of a Grindhouse double feature with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, Tarantino’s homage to 1970s car movies also poses as a kind of feminist rebuke to violent, predatory men. It almost works on that level, though the many leering shots of feet and butts muddy the righteous message some. Depending on which cut you watch, Death Proof is either just under or just over two hours—either one is too long given the limits of its plotting. And yet, Tarantino’s rambling cousin of a Richard Linklater Austin hang movie (suddenly interrupted by gory violence) has a distinct pull, thanks in large part to a winning company of actors, including Vanessa Ferlito, Tracie Thoms, Rosario Dawson, and especially the stuntwoman-actor Zoë Bell, the most effervescent part of the movie. Kurt Russell is also a hoot, playing a murderous stuntman whose weapon of choice is a souped up muscle car. It’s offbeat fun, even if it sometimes tries patience.

8. Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Genre: Crime, Thriller

Notable cast: Steve Buscemi, Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth

MPA rating: R

The film that began it all is slight and modestly satisfying, a bloody short story about a jewel heist gone terribly wrong. Watching the film now, over 30 years since its release, it’s impossible to fully put oneself in the mindset of those who first beheld it at Sundance in the winter of 1992. We know Tarantino’s various tropes and tricks so well by now that their earliest form seems almost derivative. But we can at least surmise what was so exciting and shocking back then: the ornately profane language, the nonlinear narrative, the sureness of scale. Reservoir Dogs is an impressive sizzle reel of a movie, a young Tarantino showing the powers that be what he can do on a relatively small budget with only a few locations. It worked exactly as planned, paving the way for Tarantino’s followup film, which would change the medium forever.

7. Django Unchained (2012)

Genre: Western, Thriller

Notable cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Kerry Washington

MPA rating: R

A sprawling, daring Western about a freed slave teaming up with a mysterious German bounty hunter to stage a rescue mission on a brutal Southern plantation, Django Unchained is frequently captivating. Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz are ideal interpreters of Tarantino’s mix of graveness and arch humor, keeping the film grounded even as the director strains for ever more absurdity. Leonardo DiCaprio, as a sadistic slave owner, goes a bit more baroque, but his mustache twirling histrionics also have their place in Tarantino’s grim fable. Sometimes the weight of Django’s subject matter is too clumsily handled, and a bloody finale of reprisal isn’t enough to atone for some of the film’s ugly missteps. But on the whole, the film is strange and bracing entertainment, a look at one of our nation’s original sins through the unique lens of a filmmaker with a complicated reverence for American life.

6. Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003)

Genre: Action

Notable cast: Vivica A. Fox, Daryl Hannah, Lucy Liu, Uma Thurman

MPA rating: R

Tarantino’s ode to martial arts movies is a zippy, intricately crafted delight. While the samurai sword and kitchen knife fights are a gas—and exactly what you’d expect from Tarantino—this is the filmmaker’s first movie to also weave in some genuine pathos. There’s real emotion in Uma Thurman’s eyes as her character, a left-for-dead trained killer here known only as The Bride, slashes her way toward vengeance. She’s a wronged and grieving woman, lending Tarantino’s cartoonish violence and reference-heavy slyness some actual depth. Mostly, though, Vol. 1 is a kicky comedy of bright colors and severed limbs, populated by a host of game and nimble actors. Most notable are Vivica A. Fox and Lucy Liu as fellow assassins who are so cool you almost want them to best The Bride. Tarantino has written real characters for them, with interior desires and motivations that make them far more than mere obstacles in The Bride’s path toward Bill. Antic and goofy as the film often is, Kill Bill Vol. 1 is Tarantino operating with a new thoughtfulness and maturity.

5. Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004)

Genre: Action

Notable cast: David Carradine, Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen, Uma Thurman

MPA rating: R

For the second part of his epic, Tarantino eschews the hack-and-spray aesthetics of Vol. 1 and instead turns up the dread and sadness. Not overwhelmingly, though. Vol. 2 is still a good time. It’s just a good time that also features a terrifying sequence in which Uma Thurman’s Beatrix Kiddo (finally named) is buried alive, and another in which a wealth of complex feeling passes between Beatrix and her final victim. It’s the dark half of the Kill Bill saga, and all the more rewarding for it. The standout set piece is probably the one in a lonely trailer in the middle of the desert, in which Daryl Hannah’s Elle Driver double crosses Michael Madsen’s Budd in the most brutal of fashion, before facing off against Beatrix in a tear-the-house-down fight. The results of that tussle are not deadly, but they’re entirely gruesome. Gnarly as it all is, Tarantino still finds moments of bleak humor and surprising warmth. It’s a knockout.

4. Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Genre: War, Thriller

Notable cast: Diane Kruger, Mélanie Laurent, Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz

MPA rating: R

Given Tarantino’s love of genre movies from the 1960s and ’70s, it was inevitable that he would eventually make a WWII film. His entry into that overstuffed canon is a long, scary, sorrowful story of, you guessed it, revenge. A terrific Mélanie Laurent plays Shosanna, a Jewish woman living under an assumed identity in France who has a chance encounter with the SS officer who killed her family, and then hatches an elaborate plot to give him his comeuppance. The officer is played as a perky psychopath by Christoph Waltz, who enshrines Hans Landa as one of filmdom’s great villains. Elsewhere in Tarantino’s mural of chaos and intrigue, Brad Pitt winningly plays a brutal but righteous Army lieutenant in charge of a vicious group of Jewish GIs, Diane Kruger is a shrewd movie-star spy, and Daniel Brühl is a perfectly contemptible German war hero with eyes on Shosanna. Though Tarantino allows for plenty of silliness to enter the picture, Inglourious Basterds is, at its best, disarmingly sincere. Its climax is downright moving, and its scenes of suspense are edge-of-your-seat tense. Inglourious Basterds is a Second World War movie that only Tarantino could have made.

3. Jackie Brown (1997)

Genre: Crime, Thriller

Notable cast: Robert De Niro, Bridget Fonda, Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson

MPA rating: R

There are two great film adaptations of Elmore Leonard novels: Steven Soderbergh’s lithe and sexy Out of Sight and Tarantino’s take on the novel Rum Punch, which he renamed Jackie Brown. It’s Tarantino’s most straightforward film, which is partly what makes it such a success. He trusts in Leonard’s savvy plotting, only adding embellishments here and there. Tarantino imbues the film with a lot of his signature talk, but it works quite well in Leonard land. As a nod to Blaxploitation films of old, Tarantino cast Pam Grier to play the titular character, an airline stewardess who gets caught up with a small-time arms dealer played with creeping menace by Samuel L. Jackson. Grier’s no-nonsense bearing is in exact harmony with the rest of this coolly competent film. And she’s got great chemistry with Robert Forster as a weary bail bondsman who agrees to help Jackie out of her jam. Smart, sophisticated, and endlessly entertaining, Jackie Brown suggests a different career path that Tarantino might have taken had he chosen to be more of a studio company man. I’d devour a dozen more grownup caper movies like this, but I’m also happy with what Tarantino decided to do instead.

2. Pulp Fiction (1994)

Genre: Crime, Comedy, Thriller

Notable cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, John Travolta, Bruce Willis

MPA rating: R

One of the most influential movies of the 20th century, Tarantino’s glorious tangle of criss-crossing plots still shines 31 years later. Pulp Fiction may play like a hundred other 1990s and early 2000s indies, but that’s because they were all so heavily influenced by Tarantino’s riot of cinematic invention. John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis, Harvey Keitel and many more cleverly cast actors glide through Tarantino’s survey of crime and consequence in Southern California. They groove on Tarantino’s pop-culture patter, his ruthless approach to life and death, the mysterious interconnectivity of everyone and everything in the film’s world. Though often grimy and violent, there is a beauty to Pulp Fiction. Tarantino’s assertion of artistic arrival is staggering, thrilling. One watches the film now and there’s that sense of awe all over again, the sensation that is something cracking open and revealing a new realm of possibility. The director’s talents have evolved in the years since, sometimes fruitfully and sometimes frustratingly. But the whole of his oeuvre can be glimpsed, in faint glimmers and obvious portents, in Pulp Fiction. It’s still breathtaking.

1. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

Genre: Drama, Comedy, Crime

Notable cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie

MPA rating: R

When I first saw Tarantino’s ode to 1960s television and the sunny, swinging culture of mid-century Los Angeles, I actually wasn’t a fan. Something about it felt too preening, too self-regarding, too high on its own supply. But in subsequent viewings, the grandness of Tarantino’s design has grown ever more apparent. While noodling around with his various fascinations—forgotten shows, slushy cocktails, women’s feet—Tarantino is, like he did in Inglourious Basterds, rewriting history, rescuing at least a few people from the oblivion of the past. Chiefly, he saves Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), who in our world was murdered by members of the Manson Family. In saving her, Tarantino is reclaiming an entire era and putting Hollywood—and, maybe, America—on a different course than the one it was forced onto. There’s a lovely sentiment lilting through Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a wistful melancholy that grows more resonant every time I watch the film. The film’s resigned but hopeful demeanor is ably embodied by its two leads: a vain, lovably messy fading TV actor played by Leonardo DiCaprio and a trusty stunt double/aide-de-camp played by Brad Pitt. They work wonders in the film, going for sweetness rather than anything cool or tough. They’re so effective in that mode that the film’s ultra-violent finale feels almost unnecessary—yes, it’s what we’ve come to expect from a Tarantino movie, but just having a boozy, mellow hang with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood proves plenty engaging on its own. It’s a dream of a film, weird and digressive and bursting with affection for the words, images, people, places, and things that have been rattling around Tarantino’s mind since 1963.