SOURCE: "A Thugfest," in New York, October 3, 1994, pp. 96-9.

In the following review, Denby offers favorable evaluation of Pulp Fiction.

It's not hard to see why actors have been eager to work with the young writer-director Quentin Tarantino. A bad-boy entertainer, "dark" but playful, Tarantino writes an American gutter rant—golden arias of vituperation interlaced with patches of odd, hilarious formality (the formality functions like an outbreak of classical movement in the middle of a modern-dance concert). His latest, Pulp Fiction, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes last spring and just opened the New York Film Festival, is an ecstatically entertaining piece of suave mockery. Tarantino serves up low-life characters and situations from old novels and movies, and he revels in every manner of pulp flagrancy—murder and betrayal, drugs, sex, and episodes of sardonically distanced sadomasochism. But the language pours forth with a richness never heard...