John Travolta

Samuel L. Jackson

Uma Thurman

Bruce Willis

Ving Rhames

Harvey Keitel

Eric Stoltz

Tim Roth

Amanda Plummer

Maria de Medeiros

Quentin Tarantino

Christopher Walken

Rosanna Arquette

Peter Greene

Duane Whitaker

Angela Jones

Phil LaMarr

Steve Buscemi

Bronagh Gallagher

Laura Lovelace

Frank Whaley

Burr Steers

Paul Calderon

Jerome Patrick Hoban

Michael Gilden

Gary Shorelle

Susan Griffiths

Eric Clark

Joseph Pilato

Brad Blumenthal

Lorelei Leslie

Emil Sitka

Brenda Hillhouse

Chandler Lindauer

Sy Sher

Robert Ruth

Rich Turner

Don Blakely

Carl Allen

Karen Maruyama

Kathy Griffin

Venessia Valentino

Linda Kaye

Stephen Hibbert

Alexis Arquette

Julia Sweeney

Lawrence Bender

Cie Allman

Rene Beard

Glendon Rich

Ani Sava

Richard Rossi

Danny DeVito

Michael Shamberg

Stacey Sher

Andrzej Sekula

Sally Menke

Gary M. Zuckerbrod

Ronnie Yeskel

David Wasco

Charles Collum

Sandy Reynolds-Wasco

Betsy Heimann

Vance Trussell

Paul Hellerman

Kevin McTurk

Andrew Ambrose

Richard N. Gladstein

Bob Weinstein

Karyn Rachtman

Kathy Nelson

Michelle Bühler

Bill Fletcher

Audrey Futterman-Stern

Heidi Vogel

Ken Lesco

Ruth Lambert

Jeff Olan

Jacqueline Aronson

Mary Claire Hannan

Patia Prouty

Jennifer Beals

Ziad Doueiri

Donald Likovich

Bruce Jagoda

Dean Beville

Mike Stanwick

Andrew Dickler

Linda Arnold

Emily Wolfe

Samantha Gore

Brian Markey

Ray Maxwell

Marc Gillson

Peter Borck

Adam Silver

Giuseppe Maini III

Daniel Bradford

Michael Levine

Mark Shane Davis

Chris Ahern

Bob Gorelick

Iain Jones

Joseph W. Grafmuller

Gary L. Brennan

Derek Hurd

Alonzo Brown Jr.

Thomas L. Bellissimo

Ben Parker

Jonathan R. Hodges

Ruben Cortez

Matthew C. Beville

Larry Fioritto

Cameron

Derek Raser

Deborah Wuliger

Francis R. Mahony III

Martin Kitrosser

Tatiana S. Riegel

Anthony Hall

Marc Meisenheimer

Anna-Lisa Nilsson

Larry Scharf

Dana Gustafson

Rolf Johnson

Ken King

Stephen Hunter Flick

Rick Ash

Kristen Becht

Billy Gottlieb

Harvey Weinstein

Rory Dauson

Lou Arkoff

Agnès B.

Linda R. Chen

Cathryn Jaymes

Stephen Martines

Ricardo Mestres

Mike Simpson

Scott Spiegel

Emanuel Steward

Lee Stollman

Bill Unger

Roger Avary

Barbara Harris

Kristin Dangl

Kelly Kiernan

Thriller

Crime

Pulp Fiction

Miramax

A Band Apart

Jersey Films

United States of America

English

Español

Français

drug dealer

boxer

massage

stolen money

briefcase

crime boss

redemption

heirloom

dance competition

los angeles, california

theft

nonlinear timeline

multiple storylines

speculative

domineering

neo-noir

melodramatic

ominous

film in chapters

***The cream of the crop of quirky crime thrillers***

RELEASED IN 1994 and written & directed by Quentin Tarantino, "Pulp Fiction" is a drama/thriller/black comedy about two hit men in Los Angeles (John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson), their mob boss & his wife (Ving Rhames and Uma Thurman) and a champion boxer who incurs the wrath of the boss (Bruce Willis).

The lurid, droll tale is told in a non-linear fashion, but it's easy to follow and the final act ties everything up nicely. The dialogue's witty and the story maintains your attention, despite its 2 hour and 34 minutes runtime. The film's stylish and pulsates with energy and innovation; it understandably influenced many 90's films and beyond.

I put off seeing this iconic picture until almost twenty years after its release because the protagonists are all big city gangsters or somehow involved with 'em. These are lawless people who would kill a person without batting an eye. Their god is money or hedonism. Let ’em shoot each other to smithereens for all I care. But if you can look beyond this and the constant profanities, the film's worth your time. What redeems it for me, besides the all-around entertaining movie-making, is that it's a tale of redemption and the high price of stubborn folly: The wise person recognizes God’s grace and responds accordingly while the fool doesn’t and blithely goes on his (doomed) way. Once a person receives grace they naturally extend it to others. There are additional gems spiced throughout.

Both Travolta and Jackson shine here. There are several other celebrities on hand, like Harvey Keitel, with many in cameos, e.g. Christopher Walken; not to mention several formidable females, like curvy Julia Sweeney (Raquel), cutie Maria de Medeiros (Fabienne), Angela Jones (Esmarelda) and voluptuous Susan Griffiths (Marilyn Monroe).

BOTTOM LINE: If you're in the mood for a quirky crime drama/thriller you can't go wrong with "Pulp Fiction." It's top-of-the-line in every way, including the subtext.

THE FILM WAS SHOT in the Greater Los Angeles area. ADDITIONAL WRITER: Roger Avary.

GRADE: A

Erick Cabral

Insane movie! 
One of the bests(if not the best) Tarantino's movies!

CinemaSerf

Ving Rhames ("Wallace") is the kingpin who provides the loosest of templates for a couple of inter-twining tales that are amusing, bizarre and sometimes down right dangerous before we get a sort of alignment at the conclusion. "Winnfield" (Samuel L. Jackson) and "Vincent Vega" (John Travolta) are a pair of dapper enforcers, despatched to retrieve a stolen briefcase. Though their manner may be precise, the execution of their tasks are usually more hit and miss, definitely messy - and frequently requiring of the specialist clean-up services of "Mr. Wolf" (Harvey Keitel). "Vega" is also charged by his boss with looking after his cocaine-loving wife "Mia" (Uma Thurman) and that flirts with dancing and disaster too. Meantime, ageing boxer "Butch" (Bruce Willis) is supposed to help the boss by taking an early dive in a fight. Instead he manages to kill his opponent! Soon he is intent on fleeing town, well at least he tries before he and "Wallace" end up being the playthings of some interesting characters who keep their own leather-clad gimp locked in a box... It's really difficult to make sense of the narrative in writing. It flows really well, but at differing speeds and in several different directions at once. The stories are violent but delivered in an almost tongue-in cheek way. The dance between "Mia" and "Vega" has become the stuff of cinema legend; there is loads of chemistry - especially between Travolta and an on form Jackson who really does deliver his biblical verses with a puritanical - an lethal - zeal; Willis is as good here as he ever was and you cannot but feel sorry for poor old "Pumpkin" (Tim Roth) and his pal "Honey Bunny" (Amanda Plummer) whose habit of committing petty robberies when they realise that nobody ever thinks to hit a restaurant, all goes awry. The dialogue is cleverly targeted, with wit and pith but also used sparingly when the first rate soundtrack is allowed to let everyone come up for air. Tarantino himself features towards the end as just about everybody gets their just desserts. This is a classy and sharp piece of enigmatic and enjoyable cinema held together well by a creative and visionary director who appreciates how to get the best of a cast that know how to entertain!

Tarantino is the most overrated director of our times, all his films are silly but people say they are masterpieces, perhaps they are but not for the right way, the only good thing about Tarantino is that he isn't afraid of revenge for the sake of making his characters good.

really fun to watch and the attention to detail is great

Filipe Manuel Neto

**One of the unavoidable movies to know Tarantino… but I think it's not as incredible as it is sometimes said to be.**

This was one of the films that consolidated Tarantino's career and made him one of the "superstar" directors who, whenever he releases a film, whether good or bad, attracts a legion to the cinema. I was never a fan of his, and I don't think I will be. He made some films that I liked and others that I hated. I wouldn't call it regular, a “safe bet”, but we can't deny it, it's original, true to his style and doesn't seem concerned about pleasing anyone.

The film follows more than one plot: we have a couple of violent bandits who try to rob a cafeteria, we have a boxer at the end of his career who has to flee after winning a fight he had agreed he would lose, we have a couple of murderers in the pay of a mobster who are tasked with recovering a stolen suitcase, and we also have the capricious girlfriend of that same mobster, whose boredom forces her darling to assign one of his assassins to babysit for her. What unites them all? In addition to the fact that they naturally intersect, they are all part of the same violent, brutal and marginal universe.

For many, this film is one of the best of the 90's. I would never consider it as such, that is, for me, an exaggeration. It's reasonably good, it's gained cult status, it has fans, but it's not a masterpiece, not for me. It's not a boring film, it doesn't tire us out and the various sub-plots are intertwined very well, with skill and elegance. There's a lot of violence, heavy slang and drugs, and that can be really hard at times, I felt that too. However, this heavier language, drugs and violence end up being a natural part of the underworld of crime and marginality where the characters move, so it's something we can count on right from the start. And there are no sympathetic characters who can arouse some empathy, so it doesn't matter to us whether they live or die in the most unpleasant ways (and some of them suffer a lot).

These are all qualities, and will be even more valued by those who are more familiar with the “pulp” literary subgenre. I'm not, it's not part of my culture, and I even had to go look it up on the Internet to understand what it was, and what its characteristics were. Despite that, there are a few things about this film that I really didn't like or felt over the top. One of them is the dialogues. There are scenes with a lot of dialogues, dialogues without any interest, which can dwell on boring topics, just because. One of them, right at the beginning of the film, is about foot massages, just to give a small example. There are many scenes that seem overly drawn out due to these endless dialogues. I also think the film has too many images of bare feet. Tarantino gained fame as a fetishist, but he always said he wasn't… watching this film makes it hard to believe him. And one of the characters, who is a murderer, makes a very long quote from the Bible… it's the kind of “literature” that I think an underworld murderer probably wouldn't know by heart.

The actors are very good, we have several notable names: John Travolta is excellent in the role he was given, with that black suit and his hair soaked in oil. Samuel L. Jackson is not far behind, and Uma Thurman is fantastic. I would say that, at least, Thurman and Travolta achieve performances at the best level of their respective careers in this film. Bruce Willis isn't bad, but he's just not that interesting. I enjoyed seeing my countrywoman Maria de Medeiros in her only major international role, I'm sorry she couldn't go further, but that's life. Tarantino also appears in the film, and it would have been much better if he hadn't. He's a ham as an actor.

Technically, the film has many qualities, starting with the excellent cinematography, with vivid colors and good lighting. There are excellent action scenes, for all tastes, and the soundtrack makes good use of several musical themes that we know very well.

Pulp Fiction( 1994)

You won't know the facts until you've seen the fiction.

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A review by Wuchak

Written by Wuchak on Sat Jul 21 2018

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