Jackie Brown: Critic Reviews

It's like a scuzz-bucket film noir directed by Stanley Kubrick at his most static-mesmeric.

For all its enthusiasm, this film isn't sharp enough to afford all the time it wastes on small talk, long drives, trips to the mall and favorite songs played on car radios.

Between Jackson's opining and De Niro's hopeless alibis when he messes up, Jackie is good for a bundle of bloody ho-ho-hos.

Turns out that author Elmore Leonard and director Quentin Tarantino are not the odd couple after all.

Working from an Elmore Leonard novel, Tarantino has created a gangster fiction that is never larger than life and sometimes smaller.

This is the movie that proves Tarantino is the real thing, and not just a two-film wonder boy.

Quentin Tarantino puts together a fairly intricate and relatively uninvolving money-smuggling plot, but his cast is so good that you probably won't feel cheated.

[A] surprisingly sluggish Tarantino piece.

Offers an abundance of pleasures, especially in the realm of characterization and atmosphere.

Beyond the grasp of most directors, this is tour de force stuff -- definitely meriting the price of admission and almost worth the three-year wait.

[Tarantino] wanted to give Grier a role worthy of her, and he has. If only he'd given her a movie worthy of her as well.

The film is more Jarmusch than Peckinpah -- its soul is in the minutiae.

An entertaining diversion, but not a masterpiece.

A leisurely and easygoing diversion that goes down easy enough but is far from compelling.

While Jackie Brown can be too languid, drifting like one of Melanie's highs, its wearied, over-40 lows reveal Tarantino as a director who, once upon a crime, could've mined complexity and depth from the cracks and crevices of American genre movies.

A much moodier, slower pace from Tarantino's other work, but Jackie Brown is one enjoyable flick that rewards its audience with each viewing.

might be his best film

Succeeds as a witty Elmore Leonard crime story...but also as a surprisingly affecting mid-life romance. [Blu-ray]

Tarantino's films aren't so much stories as strings of anecdotes: movie moments, urban myths, conversations strewn with pop culture references.

Mellower Tarantino still has sex, drugs, swearing, murder.

Loaded with all the crisp dialogue, trademark camera work, and memorable characters that we've come to expect from every Tarantino film.

Consider it a superb Elmore Leonard adaptation by a filmmaker who knows how to serve someone else's material while making it his own.

That this modest crime thriller can't quite live up to its audacious dance across so many strata of hip and hommage and self-referential cool it makes your head spin is hardly a surprise, or even a criticism.

The tale is filled with funny, gritty Tarantino lowlife gab and a respectable body count, but what is most striking is the film's gallantry and sweetness.