Pulp Fiction Pulp Fiction Pulp Fiction is a 1994 American crime film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino; it is based on a story by Tarantino and Roger Avary. Starring John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, Tim Roth, Ving Rhames, and Uma Thurman, it tells several stories of criminal Los Angeles. The film's title refers to the pulp magazines and hardboiled crime novels popular during the mid-20th century, known for their graphic violence and punchy dialogue. Tarantino wrote "Pulp Fiction" in 1992 and 1993, incorporating scenes that Avary originally wrote for "True Romance" (1993). Its plot occurs out of chronological order.
Pulp Fiction sequences, especially one involving bondage harnesses and homosexual rape, have the uncomfortable feeling of creative desperation, of someone who's afraid of losing his reputation scrambling for any way to offend sensibilities." Some who reviewed it in the following weeks took more exception to the predominant critical reaction than to "Pulp Fiction" itself. While not panning the film, Stanley Kauffmann of "The New Republic" felt that "the way that [it] has been so widely ravened up and drooled over verges on the disgusting. "Pulp Fiction" nourishes, abets, cultural slumming." Responding to comparisons between Tarantino's film and the work of French New