This will be remembered as one of Tarantino's best...

Rating: Null/10 (14 April 2008)

This one is Tarantino's wish-fulfilment movie (even though Tony Scott directed), written when he was still an unknown video store clerk, so we have a largely friendless comic-store clerk named Clarence (Christian Slater) winning over novice hooker Alabama (an impossibly cute and sexy Patricia Arquette) with his guileless charm and then putting one over on all manner of bad guys.
This is a good film. Everything Tarantino touched pre-1997 was fresh and new and entertaining, and back then he was only filling his films with references to his favourite movies instead of ripping them off under the guise of paying homage. Here, the film fairly bulges with these references, from movies playing on TVs in the background to posters on toilet walls to the wallpaper in the runaway couples' motel room and the Badlands-style voice-over and music. The dialogue isn't as hip as it would be in Dogs and Fiction, but it's still good and there are some stand-out scenes  two of which involve interrogations in which the person being interrogated turns the tables on their persecutor in different but equally effective ways.
The other thing that should be touched upon is the quality of the cast. This one really is a one-off: Slater, Arquette, Oldman, Walken, Hopper, Jackson, Gandolfini, Pitt, Kilmer  it reads like a list of who is, was, or is going to be. No doubt Tarantino can still assemble such a starry line-up, but whether he will ever again be able to fashion such a spirited, entertaining and unpretentious piece of work is open to question.