If, in 'Volume 1', Quentin Tarantino made one of the best movies for people who love Japanese grindhouse, then in 'Volume 2' he made one of the best movies for people who love movies. Tarantino is just about the most unerring director I've seen. He has never made a film that was less than Very Good, and 'Kill Bill Vol. 2' is the greatest of all his films to date. This isn't a sequel to 'Vol. 1', as he didn't decide to split 'Kill Bill' up until just after he finished shooting, it's simply the second half. 'Vol. 1' is an excellent, excellent film, but no where in the range of this one. I grin ear-to-ear all the way through this movie.

This is Quentin's most visually beautiful movie yet (and the magnificent opening chapter in the chapel, shot in gleaming black-and-white, is profoundly resplendent, as is the great sequence at Pai Mei's ancient abode, shot in gloriously seventies-style over-saturated greens and glaring whites), and it's where his flair for spaghetti-Westerns comes out the most; the majority of the movie is vintage Wild West. As in all of Tarantino's films, the dialogue is an unadulterated joy, and there's actually relatively little of it here, nearly all of it spoken slowly and ponderously, much of it philosophically, as befits a movie with this Western setting. The way the characters each savor and weigh their words is one of the best aspects of the film; Quentin has never written dialogue as lastingly satisfying as this.

In a beautiful scene that grins at us with delight (as is Tarantino's wont), the Bride tracks down a father-figure of Bill's to learn his location, and he tells her a story about taking him to a movie as a little boy, at which he learned what type of women Bill 'was a fool for', even at that age. We learn from this brief story the fancy Bill always had that first attracted him to the Bride long before the 'Kill Bill' story began. Where so many movies would give us a disturbing childhood story explaining how the villain became that way, Quentin gives us one about a likable, positive trait that reminds us of his humanity, just before our heroine confronts him.

'Vol. 2' is nearly his least violent film yet, and I've read both the original script and David Carradine's 'The Kill Bill Diaries', about all he saw of the making of the movies, and it's clear that many of Quentin's best decisions had to do with diminishing or removing the action. In place of the more obvious strategy of showing us a detailed sequence of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad gruesomely gunning down the people in the chapel, he decided no, pull back and let us just listen to a brief event from a distance, observing it in a kind of silhouette. And in place of Bill firing a warning shot at the Bride and holding her at gun-point while she walks towards a couch to seat herself, he decided Bill simply regards her casually, his pistol just visible at his waist, of which they are both aware. In the earlier idea, all suspense would have been spent with the warning shot. When Bill relates the tale of Pai Mei to the Bride, he decided it would be more effective to let us use our imaginations while listening to Bill's ponderous speech by the camp-fire in the dark than to play seventies Kung Fu footage of Pai Mei in action over the monologue.

The first time I saw the movie, the first big thing that struck me was Budd, one of the Bride's three remaining targets. His is a great and tragic character, and Michael Madsen is a great actor. His performance begins in a singularly perfect scene with Carradine which shows us his indifference to, and acceptance of, his approaching probable demise. And for a long stretch the Bride is forgotten, and we simply follow Budd into the lonely strip club he tends bar at, getting a taste of what his existence has become, of his disappointment and withdrawal from life (the scene where he argues with his boss Larry and finally relinquishes both his hat and his pride is worthy of applause). Every time I watch the scene of the Bride's sneak-attack on him, I am more amazed by how exquisitely constructed the whole sequence is. A long, meticulous build-up ending in unexpected truncation is a trade-mark of Quentin's, in activity as well as dialogue. What Budd does with the Bride is endlessly fascinating to me in its brilliant, terrifying, primeval simplicity. This is the stuff of great myths.

A while ago I realized I can't truly cherish movies, even great ones, that zip right along, whose scenes each seem to exist mostly to set the next scene up. 'Vol. 2', and for that matter, all of Quentin's movies, allow us to inhabit its scenes' settings, their situations, their characters, their moods. The scenes in this movie are each genuine, distinct places to me. Discussing his 'Jackie Brown', Tarantino said that for a film to last beyond its theatrical run, its scenes need to have substance in themselves and can't only be about that specific film's plot, as you pretty much get that the first time around. He said people often wonder why 'Jackie' has so many 'hang-around' scenes, in which the characters just hang around and talk to each other - scenes about the characters, about great dialogue. He believes those are crucial in bringing people back to a film for the sixth, the seventh, the fiftieth times. What happens when Elle visits Budd when all seems to be finished? They hang out for a while. What basically happens for most of the Bride's stay at Bill's residence? They hang out.

In the last chapter the tone of the film changes from the grandiose, Tarantinian adventure of the first four chapters - in which almost godlike characters imprison, and barter, and betray, and apprentice, and battle each other, and do great deeds, and in which much depends on who possesses the Bride's unequalled Hanzo sword - and settles into an intimate dialogue between the story's two central characters (and one other, for a time), in which Quentin subtly and expertly simmers the tension and danger that exists between these two supremely deadly assassins. This section of the film is in keeping with an other trade-mark of Quentin's, that of inserting elements of simplest, uttermost reality into an over-the-top, epic story. With Quentin's help, David Carradine produced a deliriously great performance in this film, as a man who is possibly even more laid-back than Carradine was himself, but who can be deeply, genuinely menacing. In the last chapter, he delivers two of the movie's best speeches, one about the death of a goldfish, the other about his favorite superhero.

'Kill Bill Vol. 2' is the most joyful, the most exciting, the most glorious celebration of the cinema I've ever seen. It is Tarantino's deepest and most emotionally powerful film by far (and the often over-looked sequence of the Bride slowly preparing herself before leaving a bed-room to face Bill is one of the very best in the film) and during an autoexcavation it has one of the very best uses of music I've heard in a movie. The climax of the Bride's raggedly magnificent confrontation with her wicked rival Elle evokes in me the emotion of sheer love. And the scene of the Bride's triumph over the designs of Budd has become one of my central images of the cinema. This film is a human object and it radiates its director's signature passion and love of the movies. Roger Ebert once said that 'The Third Man' is 'the film that most perfectly embodies the romance of going to the movies', or it is for him at least. For me, it's this one.