The video-store savant. Quentin Tarantino built an entire aesthetic out of loving movies too much — a video store clerk turned director whose 1992 debut kicked off a career defined by an encyclopaedic memory for genre and a refusal to tell a story in the order it happened. His films fracture chronology, splice genres that were never meant to touch, and treat dialogue as pure pleasure rather than plot delivery — characters talk about foot massages and fast food while the violence waits, unhurried, in the next scene. He is drawn to outsiders operating just outside the law, and to a very particular kind of justice: the kind delivered personally, with style, and usually far too late to undo what came before. Music cues, monologues, and a genuine cinephile's command of genre convention matter to his films as much as anything that happens in them.
Six strangers, fake names, and one very good snitch reveal. Tarantino's debut works the room backwards and never once loses its grip.
The whole package — acting, story, vision, humour, music, and a hero worth rooting for. Tarantino's favourite of his own filmography, and mine too.