Critics reviews

The warehouse where the heist’s survivors gather largely keeps Reservoir Dogs to a single cheap set, often filmed in wide-angle, long-shot tableaus emphasising its theatrical nature. But with this script and cast at his disposal, Tarantino’s dreamily smooth, wrong-footing direction also pumps every frame with value.

Reservoir Dogs is just plain brutal... Those who survive it emerge in a shell-shocked euphoria — so good and so blunt is the writing.

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.

Despite my fondness for Quentin Tarantino, I've never been a Reservoir Dogs fan. Back in 1992, the writer-director's feature debut seemed to me little more than a clever and grotesquely violent one-act play, gussied up with structural whimsy... As they say, things change. Reservoir Dogs is returning to the big screen, in a beautiful new 35mm print, and a recent revisit made the picture come alive for me. I still don't quite buy any of these characters, but I'm not sure I was supposed to.

There are many reasons why, after 25 years, Tarantino's quintessence-of-cool, game-changing debut Reservoir Dogs, not only holds up beautifully, but also timelessly (there's nothing dated about this picture) – one of the reasons is … depth. _Feeling_. Something many of the Tarantino imitators who followed did not possess. They just tried to copy the cool, never the _real_ blood and guts spilling all over the place.

Despite the clockwork theatrical dynamics - most of the action is restricted to the warehouse - the film packs a massive punch. It's violent, intelligent, well written (by Tarantino) and acted (Buscemi, Roth and Penn take the prizes). A tour de force.

Reservoir Dogs is a great film, showing what a mature level Tarantino entered the directoral arena at... Cutting back and forth in time, throughout the film, Tarantino builds the richness of the story by giving it to us in such a convoluted manner. His narrative strategy is that of a cinematic storyteller.

Debuts are not meant to capture all the plaudits at Sundance before storming to cult status around the world and igniting a forest fire of newsprint in an endless debate about the morality of screen violence... With Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino started as he meant to go on. And what he meant to go on to be is evident from the opening shots of the movie: an auteur, no less.

A stunning debut (1992) from writer-director Quentin Tarantino, though a far cry from Stanley Kubrick's 1956 The Killing, to which it clearly owes a debt. Like The Killing, it employs an intricate flashback structure to follow the before and after of a carefully planned heist and explores some of the homoerotic allegiances, betrayals, and tensions involved; unlike The Killing, it never flashes back to the heist itself and leaves a good many knots still tied at the end.

Tarantino's dialogue crackles with obscene wit and gutter poetry, and he uses the widescreen to acute effect with deep focus compositions that create a dramatic space between people. Be warned, however, that this is a violent film.