Reservoir Dogs

The first thing to strike a contemporary viewer, of course, is how comparatively nonviolent it is—we see a couple of shootouts, a carjacking, and a cop being beaten up, but nothing that you wouldn’t see today on an episode of “24.” To those coming to the film from the freewheeling mayhem of the director’s later work, it’s a remarkably disciplined feat of storytelling… Without an ounce of fat, at a trim ninety-nine minutes, the movie pierces like a bullet, leaving a clean hole.

As Tarantino’s first film as both writer and director, Reservoir Dogs indicates a remarkably fully formed cinematic sensibility, for both better and worse. It’s a personally impersonal film, which is to say that Tarantino’s fetishizing of objects—coffee, sunglasses, boots, posters, guns, knives, music, movies—and intricate genre situations inadvertently reveal something specific about him, which is his deep and abiding need for these tropes and textures as comfort blankets.

Tarantino’s revelatory gut-punch of a first feature, now 25 years old, has profoundly influenced crime movies. It established snappy dialogue on life’s banalities, 1970s nostalgia, extreme casual violence, vintage noir tribute, and foul-mouthed jokes as staples of the genre that endure to this day.