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Quentin Tarantino is an auteur filmmaker in every sense, having built a reputation for ultra-violence, profanity, simple dialogue that heightens absurd stories and scenes, and a penchant for non-linear storytelling – all wrapped up in a love for classic films that permeates every frame.
Tarantino’s films vary wildly in genre, setting, historical accuracy, and even in-universe canonicity. The Tarantino-verse is set across two semi-connected universes – one “realer than real” timeline, and a stylised ‘movie universe’ containing the exaggerated films his real-world characters would watch in theatres (like Kill Bill). They all share his core style and voice: that of someone who loves film.
Despite his massive impact, it’s surprising to know that he’s only directed 10 films – from his initial success with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, to his more recent work on Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood. In order to properly compare Tarantino’s body of work, we’ll be averaging out each of his films’ ratings across multiple film review databases (namely IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and Letterboxd) to find a ‘total’ score, ranked from 10th to 1st.
Quentin Tarantino’s Entire Filmography, Ranked
10. Death Proof
| Total | Tomatometer | Popcornmeter | IMDb | Letterboxd |
| 69.75 | 66% | 71% | 7.0 | 3.6 |
- Release Date: 6 April, 2007
- Cast: Kurt Russell, Zoe Bell, Rosario Dawson, Vanessa Ferlito, Rose McGowan, Tracie Thoms
- Best Quote: “Well damn, if you ain’t so sweet you make sugar taste just like salt.”
Tarantino’s ‘worst’ film, Death Proof, is a loving tribute to the exploitative 1970s slasher films the director grew up with – following a murderous stunt driver obsessed with stalking and killing young women with his ‘death proof’ stunt car. Praised for its inventive car chases and stunt-focused crash scenes, Death Proof nonetheless didn’t quite live up to Tarantino’s usual films.
Specifically, critics argued that the film feels less focused than the director’s usual fare, with particular criticism directed at its dialogue – an area Tarantino usually excels in. However, when taken for what it is– hokey car-chase 70s slasher film focused on getting as much mileage out of the concept of a killer stuntman, it’s still a pretty good movie.
9. Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood
| Total | Tomatometer | Popcornmeter | IMDb | Letterboxd |
| 77 | 86% | 70% | 7.6 | 3.8 |
- Release Date: 21 May, 2019
- Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Austin Butler, Dakota Fanning, Timothy Olyphant
- Best Quote: “When you come to the end of the line, with a buddy who is more than a brother and a little less than a wife, getting blind drunk together is really the only way to say farewell.”
A fascinating alternate history akin to Inglourious Basterds (also starring Brad Pitt), Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood tells the story of a washed up Hollywood actor and his stunt double who hope to revitalise their careers by befriending their famous neighbours – Hollywood star Sharon Tate, with the Manson Family on her tail. As can be expected, things get dangerous and complicated quickly, as the Manson Family cult circles the group.
It’s a very fun movie, considering the somewhat bleak subject matter, but didn’t quite land for audiences in the same way some of Tarantino’s more lauded films did. In saying that, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is being graded against some of the best films in modern history, and is still regarded as one of the best films of the 2010s. Plus, Tarantino loves it, and has written a sequel, The Continuing Adventures of Cliff Booth, set to launch in 2026.
8. The Hateful Eight
| Total | Tomatometer | Popcornmeter | IMDb | Letterboxd |
| 77.25 | 74% | 77% | 7.8 | 4.0 |
- Release Date: 7 December, 2015
- Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walton Goggings, Michael Madsen
- Best Quote: “The man who pulls the lever that breaks your neck will be a dispassionate man, and that dispassion is the very essence of justice. For justice delivered without dispassion is always in danger of not being justice.”
Initially conceived of as a novelised sequel to his 2012 western Django Unchained, The Hateful Eight endured a surprisingly rocky production. The initial novelisation was adapted into a film script, which was then leaked online, causing Tarantino to temporarily abandon the entire thing. The end result is a bit messy, with an almost three-hour duration and depictions of racial tensions causing some raised eyebrows. The initial concept was eventually re-edited into an extended mini-series on Netflix, which allows the story a bit more room to breathe without overwhelming the viewer.
In all its incarnations, The Hateful Eight follows eight people taking shelter in a small lodge during a brutal snowstorm who end up, slowly but surely, turning on one another as tensions run high. Each character, it turns out, can’t really be trusted, and when push comes to shove, the pistols start firing.
7. Jackie Brown
| Total | Tomatometer | Popcornmeter | IMDb | Letterboxd |
| 81.5 | 88% | 85% | 7.5 | 3.9 |
- Release Date: 8 December, 1997
- Cast: Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Forster, Bridget Fonda, Michael Keaton, Robert De Niro
- Best Quote: “Here we go, AK-47. The very best there is. When you absolutely, positively got to kill every motherfucker in the room, accept no substitutes.”
The only film Tarantino has ever made that was based on another work – as in, not just referencing others, but was specifically based on the 1992 novel Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard – Jackie Brown was the director’s third crime film, following Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Where Brown differs, though, is in its lead character, Jackie Brown (Pam Grier), who isn’t a slick career criminal, but a flight attendant who gets wrapped up in a bigger drug-running plot after getting caught with cocaine in her bags.
While Brown certainly features some of Tarantino’s trademark humour and pacing, it also lacks some of the mannerisms that have come to define many of his best films, likely as a result of having been adapted from someone else’s work.
6. Kill Bill: Vol. 1
| Total | Tomatometer | Popcornmeter | IMDb | Letterboxd |
| 82.5 | 85% | 81% | 8.2 | 4.1 |
- Release Date: 10 October, 2003
- Cast: Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox, Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen, David Carradine
- Best Quote: “Revenge is never a straight line. It’s a forest, and like a forest it’s easy to lose your way. To get lost, to forget where you came in.”
A love letter to 1970s-era martial arts films, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 follows the ultra-violent revenge tale of a skilled assassin against her former teammates and leader-turned-lover, Bill. The Bride (Uma Thurman), as she is known, starts the film seemingly paralysed and comatose, and finishes it having tracked down and killed two of her targets – the Yakuza leader O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) and Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox) – with a plan to track down her remaining victims. To say the film packs a lot of action into its almost 2 hour runtime would be an understatement, with Volume 1 featuring arguably some of the best martial-arts action scenes in modern cinema.
The Bride’s assault against Ishii’s Yakuza henchmen, known as the Crazy 88, is a thing of beauty, switching into a black-and-white pastiche of samurai action films in order to fully present the absurd levels of death and destruction without painting the entire film in blood. It’s easily one of Tarantino’s best scenes, and turns what is already a fantastic film into an absolute classic.
5. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
| Total | Tomatometer | Popcornmeter | IMDb | Letterboxd |
| 83.75 | 84% | 89% | 8.0 | 4.1 |
- Release Date: 8 April, 2004
- Cast: Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Michael Madsen, Daryl Hannah, Gordon Liu
- Best Quote: “You’re not a worker bee. You’re a renegade killer bee. And no matter how much beer you drank or barbecue you ate or how fat your ass got, nothing in the world would ever change that.”
The second part of Tarantino’s martial arts duology, Kill Bill, Volume 2 takes the basic framework set up by the first film to its logical conclusion: The Bride aka Black Mamba aka Beatrix Kiddo (Uma Thurman) completes her revenge quest against what’s left of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad and its leader, Snake Charmer aka Bill (David Carradine). However, while the first film focuses far more on martial arts spectacle, Volume 2 instead delivers more context for Kiddo’s quest, delving into the background and events that led to the infamous wedding chapel massacre.
That’s not to say there isn’t action here, but the film was purposefully split in two to better serve the narrative, and Tarantino has said he saved much of The Bride’s character development for the sequel in an effort to make her “scary” in her initial outing. In saying that, you should really consider the two films part of one greater whole, as the recently released Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair does.
4. Reservoir Dogs
| Total | Tomatometer | Popcornmeter | IMDb | Letterboxd |
| 87 | 90% | 94% | 8.2 | 4.1 |
- Release Date: 21 January, 1992
- Cast: Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi, Lawrence Tierney, Michael Madsen
- Best Quote: “I don’t wanna kill anybody. But if I gotta get out that door, and you’re standing in my way, one way or the other, you’re getting outta my way.”
Tarantino’s feature-length debut, Reservoir Dogs initially sparked controversy over its heavy use of violence and profanity, but is now a cult classic that defines the stylistic trademarks that have now made the director so famous. Following eight career criminals whose attempt to steal a shipment of diamonds goes terribly wrong, Reservoir Dogs injects a healthy dose of paranoia into the group by asking whether they’d been set up by an undercover cop in their ranks. What follows is a bloody affair, with the surviving criminals systematically turning on and killing one another.
The film is probably most famous for one scene in particular: that of Mr. Blonde dancing to Stuck in the Middle with You by Stealers Wheel, while torturing and slicing the ear off of a captured police officer. It’s a scene that has now been parodied to death, but at the time was so shocking that advance screenings often saw audience members get up and leave due to the brutality. Tarantino leaned into it, though, noting that he “wanted that scene to be disturbing”.
3. Inglourious Basterds
| Total | Tomatometer | Popcornmeter | IMDb | Letterboxd |
| 87.25 | 89% | 88% | 8.4 | 4.4 |
- Release Date: 20 May, 2009
- Cast: Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Michael Fassbender, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger, Daniel Bruhl
- Best Quote: “Say ‘Auf Wiedersehen’ to your Nazi balls!”
If you know anything about Tarantino, you know he loves watching, and making, genre films – and Inglourious Basterds is his take on a war film. Set during an alternate history World War II, Basterds follows two converging plots to assassinate Nazi Germany’s leader, Adolf Hitler – one plot carried out by a group of Jewish American black ops commandos aiming at striking fear in the Nazi regime by way of killing and disfiguring its officers within its own territory, and another by a French Jewish cinema owner looking to avenge her fallen family. In typical Tarantino fashion, these plots intersect in multiple ways, but each face a considerable roadblock in the form of feared SS colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz).
Thanks to the incredible dialogue, an engaging game of cat-and-mouse, and an ending that took Tarantino almost 20 years to get perfect, Basterds is a triumph. Particular praise needs to be heaped on Waltz, who delivers perhaps the most loveable-yet-horrific villain ever put to screen in Landa – if you’re not simultaneously entertained and terrified by him in the first 15 minutes of the film, Tarantino’s movies probably aren’t your bag.
2. Django Unchained
| Total | Tomatometer | Popcornmeter | IMDb | Letterboxd |
| 87.5 | 87% | 92% | 8.5 | 4.3 |
- Release Date: 11 December, 2012
- Cast: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Walton Goggins
- Best Quote: “Gentlemen, you had my curiosity, now you have my attention.”
While many of Tarantino’s films have elements synonymous with westerns – exploring themes of freedom, individualism, justice, and conflict through the lens of a changing America – Django Unchained goes the full nine yards in adopting the genre while still injecting a number of Tarantinoisms. Set in the pre-civil war American South, Django follows the eponymous slave-turned-bounty hunter (Jaime Foxx) and his eccentric German mentor, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), in their quest to locate and save Django’s lost wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) from a sadistic plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio).
Despite tackling heavy and uncomfortable subject matter, Django manages to revel in absurdity and comedy, while spinning the western genre into a heroic tale of an African American slave rising up against oppressive slave owners and their class. It’s an incredibly satisfying tale, made all the better by a cast of characters and actors giving it their all.
1. Pulp Fiction
| Total | Tomatometer | Popcornmeter | IMDb | Letterboxd |
| 90 | 92% | 96% | 8.8 | 4.2 |
- Release Date: 21 May, 1994
- Cast: John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Ving Rhames, Bruce Willis
- Best Quote: “Zed’s dead, baby. Zed’s dead.”
Largely considered Tarantino’s magnum opus, Pulp Fiction is often cited as one of the greatest examples of a post-modern film; eschewing many of the elements found in more traditional filmmaking to deliver something that, even decades after it release, feels as fresh as it did on day one. Mixing the tropes of hardboiled and pulp crime novels with a more modern (for the time) framing, alongside some incredibly naturalistic performances from its stellar cast, Pulp Fiction remains one of the greatest films of all time.
Pulp Fiction follows a non-linear structure, often bouncing between key characters throughout the course of a few days. While the bulk of the film centers around two key storylines – that of Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent Vega’s (John Travolta) quest to retrieve a stolen briefcase, and Butch Coolidge’s (Bruce Willis) dealings with Vega and Winnfield’s boss, Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) – the movie is built around seven major sequences told out of order, which, when taken together, paint a much more detailed picture of the absurd world these characters inhabit.
Beyond the innovative framing, each character is brought to life with Tarantino’s signature eclectic dialogue and direction, oozing charisma and personality. There’s a reason Pulp Fiction tops this list – it’s easily one of the greatest films ever made.
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