Once Upon A Time In...Hollywood (2019)

In Tarantino's temporally slight ninth movie - it may be a homage to the 60s but a lot of what happens happens while Sharon Tate sits in a cinema watching herself in The Wrecking Crew - another actor, the fictional Rick Dalton and his stunt double Clint Booth saunter around an impressively recreated 60s Hollywood and with not much to do while they anxiously anticipate the demise of their Golden-Age-of-Hollywood careers due to the advent of colour television, they drop lines referencing 60s culture, have benign encounters with sinister hippies and occasionally strike poses and do things reminiscent of other Tarantino films. 

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Kill Bill Volume 2 (2004)

The superior second half of Quentin Tarantino's four-hour revenge opus continues the Bride's bloody quest to kill those on her Death List 5 and continues the director's trademark devil-may-care enthusiastic film-making.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Kill Bill Volume 1 (2003)

Quentin Tarantino abandons narrative conventions and any concerns other writer-directors might have regarding style, taste and decorum, and has a blast introducing his Nameless Bride and setting her on her four-hour murderous path of revenge that was only at the last minute before its cinema release sliced into two halves as if by the swoosh of Hattori Hanzo steel; as it turns out, this first half is concluded in an even better second half, Kill Bill Volume 2.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Death Proof (2007)

Quentin Tarantino is at his best making movies unfettered by conventions or expectations and that is the case with this grindhouse exploitation horror, really only one-and-half acts of any other more conventionally told flick, about a highway madman who kills women with his death-proofed car...until he comes up against some spunky women who fight back.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)

Director Robert Rodriguez and writer Quentin Tarantino display their penchant for talky, stylised violence and fun unconstrained by genre conventions with this road movie that halfway through suddenly changes into a vampire horror, a precursor to their later grindhouse collaborations.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Hateful Eight (2015)

The signature Quentin Tarantino violence, when it comes, detracts from this otherwise metered, suspenseful story of eight or so men and a whole lot of lies holed up in a snowed-in room; I'd have preferred more plot and twists to the From Dusk Til Dawn gorefest that brings everything to a decidedly unfun finish.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Django Unchained (2012)

It is interesting this, another Tarantino revenge-driven pulp saga, references The Three Musketeers because it is Dumas' other work, The Count of Monte Cristo, that springs to mind watching Jamie Foxx's ex-slave Django, at one stage horseback in a shimmering electric blue Fauntleroy outfit, enjoying a renaissance in disguise, meting out a cold dish of revenge against America's South, but this is less rollicking fun than Dumas' story and more than other Tarantino, anxiety-inducing and contrived.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Pulp Fiction (1994)

A series of interconnected noir vignettes comes to life under Quentin Tarantino's direction, in this pulp fiction romp as compulsively watchable today as it was upon its release in 1994.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

In making Inglourious Basterds, a movie about a troupe of Nazi scalp hunters, Quentin Tarantino has clearly had so much fun that not even Nazi history, film-making and story-telling conventions, or even the expectation that he'd correctly spell the title, has restrained him, and despite the film's grave subject matter, that fun translates to the audience.

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS