Peter Debruge: I like this movie more than most, and am fascinated by the fact that it exists in so many versions (including a new four-episode “extended version” available from Netflix), but admit it’s the one Tarantino movie I can live without. Tarantino grew fixated on the film’s 70mm cinematography, but that has to go down as an irony of film history, since the visual “largeness” is lavished on a single claustrophobically gloomy set, resulting in what feels like the world’s most lavish episode of “Gunsmoke.” The extended slow-poke stagecoach ride that gets things rolling seems to be planting the seeds for a tricky drama of one-upmanship, but once the film arrives at a giant log cabin in the middle of the wintry nowhere, it turns into a variation on “Ten Little Indians” that’s more malevolent than clever, with characters so ill-tempered that you’re only too happy to see them knocked off. Owen Gleiberman: The one Tarantino movie that never conjures Tarantino’s joy. Variety’s resident cinephiles, Peter Debruge and Owen Gleiberman, have done just that, ranking his filmography and weighing in on one another’s assessments. 1 and 2” as one film, but we’ve assessed them separately) and possibly just one more to come, Tarantino has crafted an oeuvre ripe for debate. But how do they stack up against one another? With nine features to his name (Tarantino counts “Kill Bill Vol. The way his characters talked - and more importantly, the subjects that preoccupied them - gave audiences permission to geek out about movies (and the meaning of Madonna songs), and each new project brought a fresh appreciation of some arcane corner of film culture. But it took a former video store clerk and B-movie savant to sift through genres that weren’t taken seriously in their time and reconfigure their DNA in such a way that made them hipper than ever. A few years later, Spielberg, Lucas and a generation of film-school brats riffed on what had come before. In the history of cinema, has any director done more to elevate the idea of movies as cool than Quentin Tarantino? Certainly, the idea that films could be made by fans dates back at least to the French New Wave, when a group of die-hard critics stepped behind the camera.
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