Quentin Tarantino screened footage from his tenth film at AFI Fest on October 25. The project centers on Cliff Booth, the stuntman Brad Pitt played in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It is the first time Tarantino has returned to an existing character.
That return has a context. Tarantino's filmography is not a loose sequence of genre exercises. It is a sustained argument about what movies can do: how they encode violence, memory, and the American mythology of cool. The thread that eventually reaches Cliff Booth runs through his career in traceable ways.
These four films are the path. They start with the debut that rewrote independent cinema, move through the quiet film that showed his range, then the war film that made Hollywood itself the weapon, and arrive at the direct predecessor. Start at the top and work down.
