Every Quentin Tarantino Film, Ranked

Tarantino spent just over a decade on this script, starting in 1998 and detouring into Kill Bill because he couldn't crack the ending. The wait bought him the farmhouse opening, where Landa's interrogation of dairy farmer LaPadite turns a glass of milk into an instrument of dread — Tarantino has called it the favorite thing he has ever written. Christoph Waltz took Cannes Best Actor in 2009 and the Supporting Actor Oscar in 2010. Top slot, no apology.

Adapting Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch, Tarantino renamed Burke to Brown, changed her ethnicity, and handed Pam Grier the role of her career — he had her posters up in his office and nearly took them down before her audition. Robert Forster earned a 1998 Best Supporting Actor nomination. The money exchange, staged across a food court and a dressing room with each player told a different story, is the most patient sequence in his filmography. Second place. Argue below.

Here it sits at three, and that placement is the argument this list exists to start. It won the Palme d'Or in 1994 and Best Original Screenplay at the 1995 Oscars from seven nominations, on an $8 million budget that returned nearly $213 million worldwide. The adrenaline shot into Mia's chest — lifted from a Steven Prince anecdote in a Scorsese documentary — still hits harder than most whole films. Vote it back to the top if you must.

A debut planned for $30,000 in 16mm black-and-white until Harvey Keitel signed on as co-producer and helped raise real money. It premiered at Sundance in January 1992 and rewired American independent crime film on the spot. Mr. Blonde's shuffling dance to Stuck in the Middle with You before the ear comes off is the scene everyone still cites; Michael Madsen reportedly struggled to finish it after Kirk Baltz ad-libbed a plea about his little kid.

Cannes premiered it on May 21, 2019, and the production earned that stage: crews covered modern LED signage and restored the Bruin and Fox Village theater marquees to walk 1969 Hollywood Boulevard back into existence. Cliff's drive out to Spahn Ranch — rebuilt over roughly three months at Corriganville after the real site was lost — is the tensest stretch Tarantino has directed. Brad Pitt's Cliff Booth won Best Supporting Actor, his first acting Oscar.

Harvey Weinstein suggested splitting Tarantino's four-hour revenge epic during editing, so this half became its own 2003 release — and Tarantino still counts the two volumes as one film, which is half this comment section sorted in advance. The House of Blue Leaves brawl with the Crazy 88 took eight weeks to shoot, six over schedule, with Yuen Woo-ping advising, and drops into black-and-white to duck an NC-17 rating.

Will Smith passed on the lead, saying the part wasn't the lead, and Jamie Foxx made it his — the film went on to gross $426 million worldwide, Tarantino's biggest earner. Two Oscars followed in 2013, Waltz for supporting and Tarantino for the screenplay. At the Candyland dinner table, DiCaprio sliced his hand smashing a glass mid-monologue, barely reacted, stayed in character, and the take is in the finished film.

Slower and talkier, and better for it in stretches — the 2004 back half trades sword ballet for David Carradine's Bill and Gordon Liu's Pai Mei. Beatrix punching her way out of a coffin, buried alive in the dark, is the series' most claustrophobic set piece, and Uma Thurman drew a 2005 Golden Globe nomination for the whole performance. It sits below Vol. 1 because the five-step payoff needs the first half's momentum.

Shot on 65mm and projected in Ultra Panavision 70 at a 2.76:1 ratio, largely to photograph one room — that's the joke, and the point. Roadshow prints ran 187 minutes with a three-minute overture and a twelve-minute intermission, and Warren's monologue landing just before that break is the showstopper the first half winds toward. Ennio Morricone's score took the 2016 Oscar, his first competitive win after decades of nominations.

Even Tarantino ranks this last — at a 2012 roundtable he called it "the worst movie I ever made," then allowed that for a left-handed movie it wasn't so bad. Released in April 2007 as half the Grindhouse double bill with Rodriguez's Planet Terror, it grew to 127 minutes for Cannes competition. Stuntwoman Zoe Bell clinging to the hood of a 1970 Dodge Challenger, held on by belts at highway speed, outruns anything Stuntman Mike drives.