30 years ago, the most unpredictable crime movie of the ’90s changed cinema forever

Thirty years ago, the most original and unpredictable American crime film ever made left an immediate, indelible mark on moviegoers everywhere.

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It’s easy to take an iconic movie for granted. On the rare occasion when a film’s reputation or pop cultural impact extends beyond its own limits, it’s almost inevitable, in fact, for the movie itself to lose some of its shine. That would seem to be particularly true of Quentin Tarantino‘s Pulp Fiction, a film that has cast a longer shadow over the past 30 years of movie history than almost any other. Its scenes are still quoted on a regular basis and its imagery continues to be endlessly imitated. While its cultural imprint may be too big for even it, Pulp Fiction still has the power to seem just as magical now as it did in 1994. Whether you decide to watch it again with someone who has never seen it before or you consciously try to look past what you already know about it on a spur-of-the-moment rewatch, you invariably find nothing but pure exhilaration waiting for you. That’s because Pulp Fiction remains, even after all these years, one of the most brazen crime comedies in film history. It is a film made with an almost unholy confidence by a director who has repeatedly demonstrated his ability to manage and surpass his audiences’ expectations. In Pulp Fiction, he not only did that better than he ever has since, but more skillfully than most directors have in their entire careers. The first thing you have to acknowledge about Pulp Fiction is that it — like many of Quentin Tarantino’s movies — adheres to its own, cockeyed logic. Not only does the film follow a time-jumping, nonlinear structure that boggled viewers’ minds when it was released in 1994, but it also exists in a version of Los Angeles in which diner-robbing lovers, Deliverance-esque hillbillies, Bible-quoting hitmen, and death-obsessed cabbies seem to lurk around every corner. Pulp Fiction‘s L.A. is just as sun-soaked as you’d expect, and there are enough diners and donut shops scattered throughout it for it to still seem somewhat recognizable, but beneath its surface lies a world of crime movie clichés and astonishing perversions the likes of which had never before been wrangled together in one film. The movie’s reality is both familiar and not, which is just another way of saying that it blends real life and the world of trashy fiction together so voraciously that it leaves you reeling. In a lesser film, Pulp Fiction‘s caricature-filled West Coast metropolis would be evidence of its own creative incoherence, but it proves to be the perfect backdrop for the crime comedy’s windy, endlessly subversive story. Its marquee scenes are so well-known now that it’s easy to forget just how genuinely surprising many of Pulp Fiction‘s biggest twists actually are. Its most noteworthy are no doubt Tarantino’s swift upending of Mia (Uma Thurman) and Vincent’s (John Travolta) will-they-or-won’t-they romantic tension by sending the former into a life-threatening drug overdose and his unexpected trapping of Marsellus (Ving Rhames) and Butch (Bruce Willis) in a sex dungeon located beneath a San Fernando Valley pawn shop. But Pulp Fiction is overflowing with subversions both tiny and big. Tarantino even pulls the rug out from under you during the film’s opening credits by literally switching the radio station partway through from one song to another. In a less talented director’s hands, these decisions might come across as desperate or grating. However, in Pulp Fiction, they perfectly align with — and reinforce — the film’s deliberately unpredictable plotting and structure. At the drop of a hat, a song can change, a flirtatious date can become a drug-crazed rescue mission, a chase can morph into a perverted hostage situation, and a seemingly simple car ride can be interrupted by a man’s head getting blown off. This is not a film that cares about letting you settle into a familiar rhythm. The only groove that matters is Tarantino’s. In this sense, Pulp Fiction manages to walk one of the trickiest tightropes in cinema. It simultaneously feels like it was constantly made with its viewers in mind and solely for the amusement of its director. The movie is an unabashed amalgamation of a wide array of influences and touchstones, including Deliverance, The Wild Bunch, Band of Outsiders, Psycho, Shaft, and countless others, and yet Tarantino’s singular voice and eye are all over it. These are ultimately just some of the contradictions that make Pulp Fiction such an enduringly compelling and entertaining piece of work. It is cohesive and yet wildly sprawling, clear pastiche and yet invigoratingly original, in constant direct dialogue with film history and yet completely unconcerned with the established rules and sensibilities of the past. It is all of these things at once, as well as so much more, and to say that it had an immediate mark on cinema itself would be an understatement. In May 1994, Pulp Fiction shocked the world by winning the coveted Palme d’Or — perhaps the most prestigious prize in all of filmmaking — at that year’s Cannes Film Festival. Months later, it was released in theaters and rocketed past its $8 million budget by grossing over $200 million at the box office. It went on to receive multiple Oscar nominations, as well as one win for Tarantino and Roger Avary’s screenplay. John Travolta’s career was revived by his performance in it, and Samuel L. Jackson became a bona fide movie star because of it. All of these achievements, as impressive as they are, pale in comparison to the film’s cultural impact. The movie fundamentally changed what both studios and moviegoers alike expected from the “independent” cinema scene — proving that even films with lower budgets and distinct voices could resonate in a mainstream way. It inevitably spawned countless imitators, most of which failed to recapture even a tenth of Pulp Fiction‘s magic. Even more importantly, the film changed what viewers thought a movie could do. It proved that nothing was off limits — that no twist is too outlandish or surprising if handled correctly. In the 30 years since then, no movie has really managed to simultaneously shock, enthrall, provoke, and entertain viewers as electrifyingly as it did. Maybe that’s because Tarantino is a filmmaker with a preternatural understanding of not only how to manipulate audience expectations, but also reliably exceed them. Maybe it’s just because no one has figured out as enticing or uncanny a formula as Tarantino did. Either way, Pulp Fiction‘s immensity is no less impressive now than it was 30 years ago. It is a movie that refuses to let you get your hands around it, but wrestles full control of you instead. It’s not meant to be conquered, but conquered by, and it’ll likely continue to do so for the next three decades and beyond. Pulp Fiction is streaming now on Pluto TV, Amazon Prime Video, and Paramount+. The crime genre has long been dominated by men doing bad things. Think of the all-time best crime movies — Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction, The French Connection — and you’ll notice how homogenous they are. Although they are not necessarily formulaic, they do follow a pattern, and it’s one where bad men live dangerously, reach enviable highs, and eventually suffer huge downfalls. Sometimes, we root for them to win, as misguided as their actions might be, like in Dog Day Afternoon. Other times, we are fascinated by their journeys without ever empathizing with them, like in The Godfather. Whatever approach we take, a crime movie are often riveting and engaging. The best of them, however, are thought-provoking and intelligent, too, and no crime movie in the past decade has been more so than Lorene Scafaria’s 2019 crime dramedy Hustlers. Based on Jessica Pressler’s 2018 article The Hustlers at Scores, the film centers around a group of New York City strippers who begin drugging their high-profile clients, including CEOs and stock traders, and maxing their credit cards. Starring an ensemble led by Constance Wu and a career-best Jennifer Lopez, Hustlers was a breath of fresh air when it premiered at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival to rave reviews. Commercial success ensued, with the film grossing a whopping $157 million against a production budget of $20 million, making it one of 2019’s biggest non-MCU success stories. At the time, Hustlers was declared one of the best movies of the year and a breakthrough in the careers of Scafaria, Lopez, and Wu. Now, five years later, it’s very easy to see it as not only a towering dramatic achievement, but also the best crime movie of the 2010s that redefined the way we see such stories on the big screen.

Reframing crime There’s a lot that goes into the making of any good action movie. Fight scenes, car chases, shootouts, and just about every kind of set piece known to man require extensive planning and rehearsal time. A director must also know how to block, shoot, and cut an action sequence together if they want to ensure that each lands with maximum impact. Action movies have, of course, existed longer than talkies, and directors have spent the past 100 years working tirelessly to find new ways to outdo their predecessors and continue to thrill audiences. But, in all of that time, very few action movies have ever ascended to the same level of technical and aesthetic brilliance as Hero. The 2004 film, which hit theaters in the U.S. 20 years ago this week, is one of the most astonishing exercises in cinematic style that any filmmaker has ever attempted. Directed by Zhang Yimou, Hero is essentially a collection of vibrant, monochromatic martial arts sequences that are all executed at the highest possible level. Featuring a cast of some of China’s most talented and beloved movie stars, it is a symphony of movement and editorial cuts that flow seamlessly from one to the other. Like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon before it, Hero invites viewers into a world where warriors who have the power to become literal forces of nature are still governed by the basest of emotions, whether it be rage or grief. The result is a film that is elegant but blunt, musical and yet discordant — a ballet that hits with the force of a thousand closed fists.

Hero plays the greatest hits in Asian cinema Quentin Tarantino is a bona fide genre aficionado. Over the course of his 30-year career, the former video store clerk turned world-renowned filmmaker has used his infectious passion for cinema at its most stylized and kooky to reinvent the gangster, crime, samurai, revenge, slasher, Western, and bounty hunter genres. Having spent his first 17 years as a writer-director making genre-bending hits like Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown, it didn’t come as much of a surprise when it was announced that his follow-up to 2007’s Death Proof was going to be a World War II thriller in the same vein as classics like The Dirty Dozen, The Great Escape, and The Guns of Navarone. Few could have ever imagined, though, just how thoroughly Tarantino would go on to reinvent the traditional Hollywood war epic. The resulting film, 2009’s Inglourious Basterds, is — like all of Tarantino’s films — simultaneously a cluster of references and homages to a wide range of 20th-century thrillers both widely esteemed and not and a singular piece of work. It is a thriller of slick style and rock-and-roll verve, and it oozes with the same unbridled, shameless confidence that has long defined Tarantino’s work and persona. That confidence burns particularly bright in Inglourious Basterds’ stunning finale, in which Tarantino does something that neither he nor anyone else had ever had the guts to do before: He rewrites history and, consequently, ensures that Inglourious Basterds’ magic can never be touched or replicated. Fifteen years later, no film has managed to do either.

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