Tarantino’s Movies – Ranked: Blood, Banter and Bad Decisions

Imagine if Quentin Tarantino had a midlife crisis during a car commercial shoot and decided to turn it into a movie. That’s Death Proof. It’s half grindhouse homage, half meandering pub crawl of tedious dialogue and inexplicable foot shots.

Kurt Russell plays Stuntman Mike, a serial killer who murders women using his reinforced car – because guns are too mainstream, apparently. The first half is a sluggish build-up to a spectacular crash and the second half is women talking. And talking. And then beating him to death with the enthusiasm of someone returning an overdue library book.

The car chase is genuinely brilliant – a reminder that Tarantino can still direct kinetic action when he isn’t obsessing over whether his female characters are barefoot. But that’s a long wait for a short thrill.

Death Proof isn’t awful, just… self-indulgent. Like watching your mate perform karaoke when they think they’re Frank Sinatra. A rare misfire in the Tarantino canon.

Ah yes, The Hateful Eight: Tarantino’s attempt to film cabin fever – literally and emotionally. What starts as a snowy western quickly turns into a slow-burn Agatha Christie dinner party, but with more casual racism and exploding heads.

You spend three hours in a single room with people who all desperately need therapy, a bath, or both. The dialogue is sharp, but so are the spikes of violence – sudden, savage and somehow still less horrifying than listening to someone explain the plot.

Samuel L. Jackson gets a monologue so vivid it may get you arrested just for watching it. Jennifer Jason Leigh is battered like an overused piñata. By the end, you’ll feel like you’ve aged with the furniture.

It’s not bad, but it is exhausting. Like a Tarantino fanfic written by a nihilistic frontier dentist. A blizzard of blood and bluster.

If Vol. 1 was the blood-splattered anime-laced rollercoaster, Kill Bill: Vol. 2 is the long, scenic walk home – with occasional throat punches. It’s meditative, introspective and proof that even Tarantino can occasionally use his indoor voice.

The Bride’s roaring rampage of revenge continues, but this time it’s less samurai sword and more samurai soul-searching. David Carradine’s Bill finally shows up to deliver long monologues that feel like he’s auditioning for a TED Talk on sociopathy.

The fights, though fewer, are still brutal and elegant. The coffin sequence? Nightmare fuel. The Pai Mei training montage? Gloriously absurd. It’s a film about vengeance, closure and just how many ways Uma Thurman can kill a man while wearing yellow.

Vol. 2 suffers a bit from being the second half of a whole – it’s quieter, less flashy and more philosophical. But as a companion piece, it completes a story arc with surprising grace. Like finding zen at the end of a blood trail

Django: the D is silent, but the body count isn’t. Tarantino’s spaghetti western-slavery-revenge-fantasy hybrid is a messy, audacious, occasionally brilliant beast – part Blaxploitation epic, part bloody fairy tale.

Jamie Foxx is Django, a freed slave turned bounty hunter and Christoph Waltz plays the most likeable dentist in cinematic history. Together, they shoot their way through the Deep South with the casual flair of men shopping for curtains. Then Leo DiCaprio shows up to chew scenery, break glasses (literally) and deliver a performance that oozes malevolence.

It’s stylish, thrilling and hilarious — until it isn’t. The violence is Tarantino cranked to eleven, but so is the discomfort. It walks a tightrope between catharsis and exploitation and sometimes wobbles alarmingly.

Still, it’s bold filmmaking with a killer soundtrack. And if nothing else, it gave us Samuel L. Jackson as the most terrifying Uncle Tom in cinematic history.

This is the one where Tarantino turns the volume up to ‘anime blood geyser’ and throws every genre he’s ever loved into a blender. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is a hyper-stylised revenge flick that’s less a movie and more a fever dream scored by Ennio Morricone and the RZA.

Uma Thurman’s The Bride slices and dices her way through Tokyo, decked out in Bruce Lee’s jumpsuit and more vengeance than a Greek tragedy. Lucy Liu as O-Ren Ishii is both tragic and terrifying, and the Crazy 88 fight is what happens when a director says, “What if we never cut away from the carnage?”

It’s bloody, beautiful and bonkers. Plot takes a backseat to set-pieces, but no one’s here for emotional nuance – we’re here for scalpings and snow fights. A wild, wild ride.

Tarantino’s most adult film and ironically, the one people forget even exists. Jackie Brown trades blood splatter for character study and guess what? It works. Like a good vinyl record, it’s all about the slow groove.

Pam Grier plays the titular flight attendant caught between a gun-running slimeball (Samuel L. Jackson) and a weary bail bondsman (Robert Forster). What follows is a twisty, low-stakes crime story that simmers rather than explodes.

No katana fights, no exploding heads. Just middle-aged people being quietly brilliant while soft jazz hums in the background.

It’s a different flavour of Tarantino – subtle, soulful and strangely sweet. Proof that he doesn’t always need to scream to be heard.

Quentin Tarantino’s love letter to a lost Hollywood is nostalgic, dreamy and… kind of insane. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood feels like it was written on acid, filtered through sunshine and dipped in blood at the last minute just to remind you who directed it.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, a fading actor with more emotional baggage than an airport carousel. Brad Pitt is his stunt double/best mate/fix-it guy Cliff Booth – who may or may not have murdered his wife. They meander through late 1960s Los Angeles doing very little until the Manson Family shows up. Then things get… flammable.

The film is less plot, more vibe. It’s a Tarantino mixtape – charming, aimless, weirdly touching. And then, in the final act, it turns into the goriest alternate history bedtime story ever told.

It’s self-indulgent? Absolutely. But also hypnotic. Like watching a beautiful car drive slowly off a cliff – and loving every minute.

Tarantino rewrites World War II like a madman with a film reel and a flamethrower. Inglourious Basterds is a glorious, violent fairy tale where cinema literally kills Hitler. Subtlety is not invited.

Brad Pitt’s Aldo Raine leads a group of Nazi-scalping soldiers who operate with all the finesse of a bar brawl. But the film’s real heart and razor blade is Christoph Waltz’s Hans Landa, the Jew Hunter. He’s polite, multilingual and completely horrifying.

From the milk farm opening to the final explosion of the Third Reich, this is Tarantino at his most audacious. It’s tense, absurd, hilarious and cruel. No one else could pull it off. No one else should try.

The film that made Tarantino a household name – or at least the name whispered whenever someone quotes pop culture while bleeding out. Reservoir Dogs is a claustrophobic crime thriller filled with sharp suits, sharper dialogue and the worst ear-related incident in film history.

A group of criminals pull off a heist, then fall apart like a dodgy Ikea table when they realise there’s a rat in the mix. It’s stripped down, raw and all the more powerful for it.

Every scene hums with tension. Every line snaps like a mousetrap. It’s nihilism with a soundtrack. Bold, brash and bloody unforgettable.

You can read our full review of Reservoir Dogs HERE

And here it is – Tarantino’s magnum opus, the film that launched a thousand film school dissertations and at least six ironic wallet purchases.

Pulp Fiction isn’t just a movie, it’s a bloody kaleidoscope of crime, comedy and heroin overdoses. John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson play philosophical hitmen. Bruce Willis is a boxer with a samurai sword problem. And Uma Thurman dances, dies, revives and still manages to look iconic.

The nonlinear structure? Genius. The dialogue? Quotable forever. The violence? Inevitable. This is the movie that made Tarantino Tarantino. And for better or worse, cinema was never quite the same.

You can read our full review of Pulp Fiction HERE

Conclusion:

Whether you worship at the altar of Pulp Fiction or insist Jackie Brown is secretly his best work (you hipster), Tarantino’s filmography is a glorious, blood-spattered tribute to cinema itself. Let’s just hope his so-called “final” film doesn’t end up ranked next to Death Proof.