Reservoir Dogs

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

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