Directors
Every Quentin Tarantino Movie, Ranked
Ten films, one counting system nobody agrees with, and a career built on making dialogue the action scene. Here is the whole filmography ranked, and the right place to begin.
Hero image: Pulp Fiction (artwork via TMDB)
Key takeaways
- Pulp Fiction is still the best and the most influential, though Jackie Brown is the most mature.
- Tarantino counts Kill Bill as one film, which is why he says he has made nine and everyone else counts ten.
- The defining technique is not the violence, it is making a conversation carry the tension an action scene usually would.
- Start with Pulp Fiction or Inglourious Basterds. Do not start with Death Proof.
Quentin Tarantino has been saying for years that he will stop at ten films. Depending on how you count, he is either there or one short, because he counts Kill Bill as a single work split into two releases and almost nobody else does.
Either way the filmography is small enough to rank properly, and it is unusually consistent: there is no genuinely bad film here, which is rare for any director with a decade-plus career. Below is all ten, worst to best, with a note on where to start.
10 to 6
Death Proof (2007)
- 1h 53m
- TMDB 6.8/10
- Action, Thriller
The only film here that does not work, and Tarantino has more or less said so. Originally half of a double feature, it is a slasher film where the weapon is a car, and it spends roughly seventy minutes on two separate groups of women talking in bars before anything happens.
The final car chase is genuinely spectacular, with stunt performer Zoë Bell riding the bonnet of a moving vehicle for real, and it almost redeems the whole thing.
The problem is proportion. The dialogue scenes that carry his other films are, here, largely doing nothing, and the film knows it is a pastiche in a way that gives it permission to be slack.
Watch it if: you have seen the other nine and you want the completist experience.
The Hateful Eight (2015)
- 3h 8m
- TMDB 7.8/10
- Drama, Mystery, Western
A three-hour chamber piece in a single room during a blizzard, shot on 70mm film, which is a genuinely funny contradiction: the widest format available, used for a story that happens indoors.
It works best as a paranoia machine. Eight people in a haberdashery, at least one of whom is lying, and a first half devoted almost entirely to working out who. Ennio Morricone's score, his first Western in decades, is superb.
It is also his meanest film, and the extended treatment of Jennifer Jason Leigh's character is genuinely difficult to sit with. Whether that discomfort is the point is a fair argument.
Watch it if: you like Agatha Christie structures and you can handle real nastiness.
Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004)
- 2h 16m
- TMDB 7.9/10
- Action, Crime, Thriller
The talking half. Where Volume 1 is almost entirely motion, Volume 2 is almost entirely conversation, and the shift disappoints anyone who wanted more of the first film.
It contains his best single sequence though: the Pai Mei training flashback, shot as a straight kung fu homage, complete with crash zooms. And the final confrontation is a conversation at a kitchen table, which is exactly the swap he always makes.
David Carradine's Bill is the best-written character in the two films, largely because he barely appears until the end.
Watch it if: you have watched Volume 1, which is not optional.
Django Unchained (2012)
- 2h 45m
- TMDB 8.2/10
- Drama, Western
His broadest and most crowd-pleasing film: a spaghetti Western about a freed slave hunting the man who owns his wife, with Christoph Waltz as a bounty hunter and Leonardo DiCaprio as a plantation owner.
Waltz and Samuel L. Jackson are the reasons to watch. Jackson's Stephen is the most genuinely disturbing character in the filmography, and the film is smart enough to make him more frightening than DiCaprio's Candie.
It is also the least controlled film here. At 165 minutes it has at least two endings, and the tonal swing between broad comedy and genuine atrocity is handled less carefully than in Inglourious Basterds.
Watch it if: you want the most straightforwardly entertaining film in the set.
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)
- 1h 51m
- TMDB 8.0/10
- Action, Crime
His most purely kinetic film and the best-directed action in the filmography. The House of Blue Leaves sequence runs roughly twenty minutes, moves through three distinct spaces, switches to black and white to get past censors, and then goes to a silhouetted fight against blue paper.
It is a film built entirely from other films: Shaw Brothers kung fu, spaghetti Western, Japanese samurai cinema, and anime, spliced together with no attempt to hide the seams. That magpie approach is either the appeal or the objection depending on your view.
Uma Thurman's performance is more physical than verbal, which is unusual here and works completely.
Watch it if: you want ninety minutes of sustained style and you do not need a plot.
The top five
Reservoir Dogs (1992)
- 1h 39m
- TMDB 8.1/10
- Crime, Thriller
The debut, made for around a million dollars, and it is astonishing how completely formed the voice already is. A heist film that never shows the heist, told almost entirely as men arguing in a warehouse about who informed.
The budget forced the best decisions. No robbery, one main location, and a structure that jumps in time because it could not afford to be linear. Every constraint became a technique he kept using.
The violence is the thing that has aged most uncomfortably, and deliberately so: it is slow, close, and inflicted on people who are already helpless. That is not a thrill, it is meant to be hard to watch.
Watch it if: you want to see a director arrive fully formed on almost no money.
Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019)
- 2h 42m
- TMDB 7.4/10
- Comedy, Drama, Thriller
His most relaxed and most personal film. An aging television actor and his stunt double drift through Los Angeles in 1969, and for most of the runtime nothing much happens, on purpose.
It is a hangout film about obsolescence. Rick Dalton is watching his industry stop needing him, and Cliff Booth is a man with no future who is entirely at peace. DiCaprio's breakdown in a trailer after fluffing his lines is the best acting in any Tarantino film.
The final twenty minutes are the most divisive thing he has done, and they are doing something specific about the function of fiction that the preceding two hours quietly set up.
At 161 minutes it is long and it is meant to feel unhurried.
Watch it if: you want the most mature and least plot-driven thing he has made.
Jackie Brown (1997)
- 2h 34m
- TMDB 7.4/10
- Crime, Drama, Thriller
His only adaptation, from an Elmore Leonard novel, and the most emotionally generous film he has made. It is also the one that gets closest to being about real adults with real problems.
Pam Grier is extraordinary as a flight attendant in her forties running a scheme because she has run out of other options. Robert Forster's bail bondsman is the most decent character in the entire filmography, and their restrained, unconsummated relationship is more affecting than anything else here.
It is the slowest of his films and the least quotable, which is why it was underrated for years. It has aged the best of any of them.
The split-screen money exchange in the mall, showing the same fifteen minutes from three perspectives, is a superb piece of construction.
Watch it if: you think you know what a Tarantino film is and want to be corrected.
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
- 2h 33m
- TMDB 8.2/10
- Drama, Thriller, War
His best-constructed screenplay and the clearest demonstration of what he actually does. The opening farmhouse scene runs roughly twenty minutes, consists almost entirely of two men being polite to each other at a table, and is more tense than most films manage in their entirety.
Christoph Waltz's Hans Landa is the best character he has written: charming, multilingual, and terrifying precisely because he never raises his voice. The film is structured as five chapters, and three of them are essentially one long conversation where someone is trying not to be caught.
The tavern scene is the other masterpiece, and the reason both work is a simple rule: the audience knows something one participant does not, and the film simply refuses to cut away.
The ending is an act of deliberate historical vandalism and it is the point.
Watch it if: you want the single best sequence in his filmography, and then four more.
Pulp Fiction (1994)
- 2h 34m
- TMDB 8.5/10
- Thriller, Crime, Comedy
Still the best and still the most influential American film of the 1990s. Its non-linear structure was not new, but its casual confidence that an audience could reassemble a timeline on their own changed what mainstream films were allowed to do.
What is easy to forget is how funny it is, and how much of the runtime is people discussing things that have no bearing on the plot. The hamburger conversation, the foot massage argument, the watch monologue: none of it advances the story and all of it is why the film works.
It also revived John Travolta's career, made Samuel L. Jackson a star, and turned a modest independent production into a cultural event that studios spent a decade unsuccessfully imitating.
154 minutes, and the structure means it rewards a rewatch more than almost anything else on this page.
Watch it if: you have not seen it, in which case start here.
The full list, by the numbers
| Rank | Film | Year | Runtime | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pulp Fiction | 1994 | 154 min | 8.5 |
| 2 | Inglourious Basterds | 2009 | 153 min | 8.2 |
| 3 | Jackie Brown | 1997 | 154 min | 7.5 |
| 4 | Once Upon a Time in Hollywood | 2019 | 161 min | 7.4 |
| 5 | Reservoir Dogs | 1992 | 99 min | 8.1 |
| 6 | Kill Bill: Vol. 1 | 2003 | 111 min | 7.9 |
| 7 | Django Unchained | 2012 | 165 min | 8.2 |
| 8 | Kill Bill: Vol. 2 | 2004 | 137 min | 7.8 |
| 9 | The Hateful Eight | 2015 | 168 min | 7.7 |
| 10 | Death Proof | 2007 | 113 min | 6.5 |
Where to start
- Never seen any: Pulp Fiction. It is the best and the most representative.
- Want the tension without the sprawl: Inglourious Basterds.
- Want something short: Reservoir Dogs at 99 minutes is the only one under 110.
- Do not like the violence: Jackie Brown is by far the gentlest.
- Want the action: Kill Bill: Vol. 1, then Volume 2 immediately.
The recurring habits
Watch four in a row and the patterns are unmissable. Chapter headings. Non-linear structure. Extended conversations where the tension comes from what one participant does not know. A sudden, short burst of violence that ends a scene rather than filling it. Music chosen from existing records rather than composed, usually against the mood of the scene. And a recurring interest in revenge as a fantasy that fiction is uniquely able to grant.
That last one is the most consistent thread. Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood all rewrite real events so that the people who deserved it get it, which is either the most satisfying thing he does or the most suspect, depending on your view of what films owe history.
For more, our Scorsese ranking covers the other great American director of criminals, best heist movies covers Reservoir Dogs in genre context, and the crime catalog has the wider list.
Frequently asked questions
How many movies has Quentin Tarantino directed?
Ten by the usual count, or nine by his own, because he counts Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2 as a single film split into two releases.
What is the best Quentin Tarantino movie?
Pulp Fiction, by most measures, and it is also the most influential. Inglourious Basterds has his best-constructed screenplay and Jackie Brown is the most emotionally mature.
Which Tarantino movie should I watch first?
Pulp Fiction. It is the most representative of what he does and the most immediately gripping. Inglourious Basterds is the best alternative if you want something more conventionally structured.
What is the worst Tarantino movie?
Death Proof, and he has largely agreed. The final car chase is genuinely spectacular but the seventy minutes of dialogue before it are doing far less work than in his other films.
Do I need to watch Kill Bill Vol. 1 before Vol. 2?
Yes, absolutely. They were written and shot as one film and Volume 2 begins mid-story. Watching them out of order or watching only the second makes no sense.
Tags
Ratings, runtimes, and artwork come from TMDB and can change over time. teasertrack is a free discovery site, not a streaming service: every pick links to its full movie page where you can check trailers, cast, and current availability.
