Pulp Fiction
Academy Award × 1·AFI #94·National Film Registry
Rent/Purchase
A burger-loving hit man, his philosophical partner, a drug-addled gangster's moll and a washed-up boxer converge in this sprawling, comedic crime caper. Their adventures unfurl in three stories that ingeniously trip back and forth in time.
What critics thought
Pulp Fiction landed as a near-unanimous critical sensation, with most major reviewers treating it as an event film that redefined what American cinema could do with genre material. The main fault lines were not about quality but about what the film's celebrated style actually meant: whether its postmodern recycling of pulp conventions was genuinely inventive or cleverly hollow, and whether the rapturous critical reception itself revealed something troubling about what audiences were willing to call art.
“The screenplay by Tarantino and Roger Avary so well-written in a scruffy, fanzine way that you want to rub noses in it – the noses of those zombie writers who take 'screenwriting' classes that teach them the formulas for 'hit films”
Roger Ebert·RogerEbert.com
“The miracle of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction is how, being composed of secondhand, debased parts, it succeeds in gleaming like something new.”
David Ansen·Newsweek
“The writer-director appears to be straining for his effects. Some sequences, especially one involving bondage harnesses and homosexual rape, have the uncomfortable feeling of creative desperation, of someone who's afraid of losing his reputation scrambling for any way to offend sensibilities.”
Kenneth Turan·Los Angeles Times
“Tarantino represents the final triumph of postmodernism, which is to empty the artwork of all content, thus avoiding its capacity to do anything except helplessly represent our agonies ... Only in this age could a writer as talented as Tarantino produce artworks so vacuous, so entirely stripped of any politics, metaphysics, or moral interest.”
James Wood·The Guardian
“the way that [it] has been so widely ravened up and drooled over verges on the disgusting. Pulp Fiction nourishes, abets, cultural slumming.”
Stanley Kauffmann·The New Republic
Genres
Crime, Drama
Cast & Crew
DirectorQuentin Tarantino
StarringJohn Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis, Ving Rhames
Pulp Fiction
Academy Award × 1·AFI #94·National Film Registry
A burger-loving hit man, his philosophical partner, a drug-addled gangster's moll and a washed-up boxer converge in this sprawling, comedic crime caper. Their adventures unfurl in three stories that ingeniously trip back and forth in time.
What critics thought
Pulp Fiction landed as a near-unanimous critical sensation, with most major reviewers treating it as an event film that redefined what American cinema could do with genre material. The main fault lines were not about quality but about what the film's celebrated style actually meant: whether its postmodern recycling of pulp conventions was genuinely inventive or cleverly hollow, and whether the rapturous critical reception itself revealed something troubling about what audiences were willing to call art.
“The screenplay by Tarantino and Roger Avary so well-written in a scruffy, fanzine way that you want to rub noses in it – the noses of those zombie writers who take 'screenwriting' classes that teach them the formulas for 'hit films”
Roger Ebert·RogerEbert.com
“The miracle of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction is how, being composed of secondhand, debased parts, it succeeds in gleaming like something new.”
David Ansen·Newsweek
“The writer-director appears to be straining for his effects. Some sequences, especially one involving bondage harnesses and homosexual rape, have the uncomfortable feeling of creative desperation, of someone who's afraid of losing his reputation scrambling for any way to offend sensibilities.”
Kenneth Turan·Los Angeles Times
“Tarantino represents the final triumph of postmodernism, which is to empty the artwork of all content, thus avoiding its capacity to do anything except helplessly represent our agonies ... Only in this age could a writer as talented as Tarantino produce artworks so vacuous, so entirely stripped of any politics, metaphysics, or moral interest.”
James Wood·The Guardian
“the way that [it] has been so widely ravened up and drooled over verges on the disgusting. Pulp Fiction nourishes, abets, cultural slumming.”
Stanley Kauffmann·The New Republic
Genres
Crime, Drama
Cast & Crew
DirectorQuentin Tarantino
StarringJohn Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis, Ving Rhames
Rent/Purchase