Didn't it blow your mind this time

Rating: Null/10 (16 February 1999)

Quentin Tarantino finally knocks the ball out of the park. Widely seen as a "disappointment"--or a "raunchy doodle," as Time's Richard Corliss put it--on the time of its release, JACKIE BROWN now looks like one of the key movies of the decade, an alternately wrenching and thrillingly lowdown work wrought out of real feeling. If a seance could summon the spirits of Jack Hill, Howard Hawks and Don Siegel, this is the picture they'd make. Amplifying all Tarantino's skills--stunningly insightful casting, indelible dialogue, a mastery of oddly static yet lustrous compositions--while shearing all his adolescent, in-joky flaws, JACKIE BROWN is like a 1973 drive-in movie that's as heartbreaking as VERTIGO. Only Tarantino would have seen the potential for trashy allure and crazy comedy in Bridget Fonda, and the performance of Robert Forster as the melancholy bailbondsman Max Cherry--simple as a Noh play, all information relayed through his impassive, age-worn face--ranks among the finest of recent times. Sadly, in 1997, only Roger Ebert and Film Comment's Kent Jones really got this one; a little while later, the near-meeting of Forster and Pam Grier seems a thousand times more harrowing than those teenagers who die on that yacht.