Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11693 in DVD
• Released on: 1998-05-20
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, NTSC
• Original language: English, Spanish
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 154 minutes

Amazon.com
With the knockout one-two punch of 1992's Reservoir Dogs and 1994's Pulp Fiction writer-director Quentin Tarantino stunned the filmmaking world, exploding into prominence as a cinematic heavyweight contender. But Pulp Fiction was more than just the follow-up to an impressive first feature, or the winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival, or a script stuffed with the sort of juicy bubblegum dialogue actors just love to chew, or the vehicle that reestablished John Travolta on the A-list, or the relatively low-budget ($8 million) independent showcase for an ultrahip mixture of established marquee names and rising stars from the indie scene (among them Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis, Ving Rhames, Harvey Keitel, Christopher Walken, Tim Roth, Amanda Plummer, Julia Sweeney, Kathy Griffin, and Phil Lamar). It was more, even, than an unprecedented $100-million-plus hit for indie distributor Miramax. Pulp Fiction was a sensation. No, it was not the Second Coming (I actually think Reservoir Dogs is a more substantial film; and P.T. Anderson outdid Tarantino in 1997 by making his directorial debut with two even more mature and accomplished pictures, Hard Eight and Boogie Nights). But Pulp Fiction packs so much energy and invention into telling its nonchronologically interwoven short stories (all about temptation, corruption, and redemption amongst modern criminals, large and small) it leaves viewers both exhilarated and exhausted--hearts racing and knuckles white from the ride. (Oh, and the infectious, surf-guitar-based soundtrack is tastier than a Royale with Cheese.) --Jim Emerson

Customer Reviews

A Freak Occurrence
If somebody pointed a gun at me and said,"You gotta have an opinion -about what the best movie of the 90s is" I'd tell them to point that gun away from my head before it accidently goes off. And then for lack of a better answer to this impossible question, I would answer PULP FICTION. In anycase, anyone crazy enough to point a gun at somebody while asking their opinion about what the best movie of the 90s is might not like other answers I might come up with as much.

I think it is the funniest movie I've seen that actually doesn't go in the comedy section at the video store. There are no flaws in it. It's perfect. Quentin Tarantino cannot ever top it and will probably never even come close. When he dies they will refer to him first and foremost as the director of PULP FICTION. His place in history as one of the great directors of cinema is secured with this film.

High Art that Makes the Mind itch in Places that can't be Scratched
This supremely artistic vehicle designed obviously to showcase the many sides of Samuel L. Jackson's multidimensional talents, is a cinema-graphic triumph of a very high order.

Tarrintino has done it again: pulled off the impossible and the surreal and made it seem so imminently possible and real: This movie, more than any other, is truly a new metaphor of our hectic times. As is true with all of his work, the technical aspects of Tarrintino's work are so carefully worked out and put in place - the utter cleverness and darkness of the subtext, the casting, the scenery, the character development, the script, the writing, the directing, the brutal artistic honesty -- that the critic has no place to turn to "nitpick."

His art, as is the case with any truly good art, is "above critique:"
It just "IS." Period.

It's multi-sided vignettes are angular pegs that do not fit in any square holes, yet taken together, they add up to a whole much larger than the sum of their parts. Altogether the movie (or the book) shouldn't work, but the script and the writing are handled with such exquisite aesthetic balance and sensitivity that not only do they work, but in doing so, the movie sets a new standard of cinema-graphic possibilities: It is an aesthetic feast well ahead of its times; one that makes the mind itch in places that can't even be accessed, let alone be scratched.

This is the only movie I have watched twenty times and still see new things in it that speak to our hectic times. It does not come as a surprise, nor does it bother me that its primary appeal is worldwide, rather than domestic. It was especially an unexpected hit in Japan and Europe. Every actor in it should have won an academy award, especially Jackson, Travolta, Thurman and Willis. It is like a basketball team that wins the NCAA championship: It could not have been pulled off without all of the characters playing their respective parts and doing so at the highest level of their art. Amen.

Five stars

Classic Tarantino, Jackson and Travolta
A great weave of 4 seemingly unrelated tales which artfully tie together during the movie. Timeline shifts seem confusing at first but pull together in the end. Another one for your collection.