Reservoir Dogs (1992)

“Great artists don’t borrow—they steal.” Picasso said that. And he was right—but he wasn’t as great as Quentin Tarantino. At least, not as a filmmaker.

This re-release, which marks my first trip to a movie theater since the abomination that was The Irishman (2019), offers a way not to hate the whole business of trying to entertain oneself. In it, Tarantino channels Godard, Kubrick, Scorsese—Boorman, even—and everyone who came before who contributed to the development of film technique, all the way back to Eisenstein.

He takes these influences, and countless others, and, like all geniuses, makes something new, adding stuff no one thought of before: like Steven Wright’s hilariously languid disc jockey narrative inserts, movie-obsessed hardened criminals-within-the-movie talking about movies, and Harry Nilsson, singing offbeat, unclassifiable pop over the closing credits.

Yet, he is way more than a director’s director, or writer’s writer: he is a moviegoer’s director, and an…