Pulp Fiction: Critic Reviews

One of the coolest things about Pulp Fiction is its many links to other pleasures.

A triumphant, cleverly disorienting journey through a demimonde that springs entirely from Mr. Tarantino's ripe imagination, a landscape of danger, shock, hilarity and vibrant local color.

Brilliant and brutal, funny and exhilarating, jaw-droppingly cruel and disarmingly sweet.

The experience overall is like laughing down a gun barrel, a little bit tiring, a lot sick and maybe far too perverse for less jaded moviegoers.

The movie resurrects not only an aging genre but also a few careers.

The overall project is evident: to evict real life and real people from the art film and replace them with generic teases and assorted hommages. Don't expect any of the life experiences of the old movie sources to leak through.

A spectacularly entertaining piece of pop culture.

The whole is finally greater than the sum of its pulpy parts.

Writer/director Quentin Tarantino demonstrates his encyclopedic grasp of filmmaking by bending, chopping and deconstructing narrative while keeping a groovy beat.

Scintillating.

Tarantino's guilty secret, which the international critics should have noticed, is that his films are cultural hybrids.

There's a special kick that comes from watching something this thrillingly alive.

Look deeply enough, and the universe emerges in full.

[VIDEO] After reinventing American cinema with his thrilling first film "Reservoir Dogs," Quentin Tarantino delivered an even better one, "Pulp Fiction."

A modern classic, more memorable than the 1970s flicks that inspired it.

The way that this picture has been so widely ravened up and drooled over verges on the disgusting. Pulp Fiction nourishes, abets, cultural slumming.

Samuel L. Jackson's wallet from the film is sitting in my back pocket right now. Enough said.

But what makes the film such wicked fun is the way Tarantino delivers the familiar with a twist. He continually prepares us for one thing and then delivers another.

Tarantino shows penchant for the rhythm of words--the banter has the drollery of gangland Samuel Beckett--and he's also good at taking seemingly routine situations and giving them a sudden vertiginous twist, such as the farcical drug overdoze scene.

It's the way Tarantino embellishes and, finally, interlinks these old chestnuts that makes the film alternately exhilarating and frustrating.

In most cases, the three-act, A-to-B-to-C film formula works just fine. But the letter Q makes the other letters obsolete.

A devilishly lurid blast of great entertainment. Ultra-violent and wickedly funny.

A brash, smart, wildly entertaining movie that will be oft imitated but never duplicated.

Ce film represente le summum de la carriere de Tarantino

It can be a difficult, rattling experience, but this reviewer has found its rewards to vastly outweigh its weaknesses.