"Reservoir Dogs" Tarantino was a genius since day one.

All the screenshots in this post were taken directly from the movie by me.

Although the first Quentin Tarantino film I saw was Pulp Fiction (like many of you, probably), I don't think there's a piece of his filmography that I appreciate more than Reservoir Dogs.

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And despite it being his first feature, it's incredible how many hits he had, creating one of the most important crime dramas in modern cinema and laying the foundations that would later be mimicked by hundreds of filmmakers around the world.

While for many Tarantino is a director with a style where style prevails over substance, over the years I've learned that this isn't necessarily a bad thing, and I'm surprised at how well this film has aged.

The premise is simple: we follow a group of criminals (all named by a color, to protect their identities from each other) before, during, and after they carry out a diamond robbery. There's just one small problem, one of them was apparently infiltrated by the police and ended up making the whole heist a disaster.

Of course, in true Tarantino style, this story will be told with a non-linear structure, organically revealing the information before our eyes in an order where the emotional impact will be greater than if everything were told in chronological order. Sometimes we'll be seeing something that happened months or days before the heist, sometimes we'll see specific perspectives during it, or something that happened a couple of hours later.

And, while it may sound like a pretentious excuse to elevate a Simplon heist film, the reality couldn't be further from this, and I feel that Reservoir Dogs wouldn't work if it were constructed in any other way.

However, beyond its particular narrative structure, I feel that the greatest virtue of the film lies in its brilliant dialogue, where Tarantino demonstrates an impressive ability to create organic and interesting conversations that can keep us hooked while revealing vital information about each of the characters.

As if that were not enough, these characters are played by brilliant actors such as Tim Roth, Harvey Keitel and Steve Buscemi, actors whose roles here ended up catapulting them to absolute fame.

Reservoir Dogs remains a brilliant heist movie with impeccable pacing and several moments that have remained eternally imprinted in popular culture, it has a visually beautiful direction, it knows how to use the few musical pieces very well and it has one of the most iconic endings in the seventh art.

Score taken from my Letterboxd account.

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