Pulp Fiction Reviews
Top CriticThis movie gets its charge not from action pyrotechnics but from its electric barrage of language, wisecracks and dialogue, from the mordant '70s classicism of its long-take camera style and its smart, offbeat, strangely sexy cast.
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| Original Score: 4/4
The result, especially in the scenes involving Bruce Willis as a nervy boxer, can be long patches of dialogue that must have tickled Tarantino but will not necessarily resonate for anyone else.
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| Original Score: 2/5
The talk is dirty and funny, the violence always waiting just around the corner.
Whether you call it razzmatazz, pizazz or sizzle, Pulp Fiction's got it, enough style for a dozen movies and, truth be told, enough story for five.
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| Original Score: 3/4
At 153 minutes, the movie does occasionally flirt with tedium, but the risk is worth it: The whole is finally greater than the sum of its pulpy parts. What could have been an anything-goes pastiche has surprising rigor and narrative clarity.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
In terms of mood and style, it could be the most influential film to come along since Blue Velvet.
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| Original Score: 5/5
If you smile at David Mamet's dialogue, you'll laugh out loud at the words of Quentin Tarantino.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Tarantino's dialogue, with its densely propulsive, almost lawyerly fervor, its peppery comic blend of literacy and funk, has more snap and fight than most directors' action scenes.
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| Original Score: A
Tarantino's guilty secret, which the international critics should have noticed, is that his films are cultural hybrids.
Just when you thought the last thing the world needed was another violent, self-conscious, hipster homage to film noir, along comes Tarantino to blow away your deja vu.
The way that this picture has been so widely ravened up and drooled over verges on the disgusting. Pulp Fiction nourishes, abets, cultural slumming.
A spectacularly entertaining piece of pop culture.
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.
It's the way Tarantino embellishes and, finally, interlinks these old chestnuts that makes the film alternately exhilarating and frustrating.
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.
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| Original Score: 5/5
There's a special kick that comes from watching something this thrillingly alive.
All the details are executed to perfection. Ironies abound in the smallest situations.
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| Original Score: 4/4
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.
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
It's the movie equivalent of that rare sort of novel where you find yourself checking to see how many pages are left and hoping there are more, not fewer.
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| Original Score: 4/4
The movie resurrects not only an aging genre but also a few careers.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Writer/director Quentin Tarantino demonstrates his encyclopedic grasp of filmmaking by bending, chopping and deconstructing narrative while keeping a groovy beat.
Brilliant and brutal, funny and exhilarating, jaw-droppingly cruel and disarmingly sweet.
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| Original Score: 5/5
