Speed,©Courtesy of Disney
MoMI announces 25-film series See It Big at the ’90s Multiplex, highlighting a transformative decade of daring, diverse movies
Titles include Pulp Fiction, Hoop Dreams, and Speed—celebrating their 30th anniversaries—Clueless, The Thin Red Line, Princess Mononoke, Boomerang, Defending Your Life, Joe Versus the Volcano, The Fisher King, Darkman, The Last of the Mohicans, Strange Days, and more
Summer series opens Memorial Day weekend: May 24–July 16, 2024
Kicking off Memorial Day weekend, Museum of the Moving Image presents the screening series See It Big at the ’90s Multiplex, a selection of 25 films that showcase the provocative and pleasurable diversity on offer at American movie theaters in the 1990s. This was a decade that changed the landscape of American cinema, bringing independent, idiosyncratic films into the mainstream. At any given moment, you could go to the multiplex and hop and skip among studio-financed movies of wildly varying budgets, from mid-range dramas to star-driven vehicles to eccentric auteur experiments. Audiences were guaranteed to get whisked away to somewhere transportive, whether the quiet backroads of Clint Eastwood’s Madison County, Iowa; the blinding white limbo of Albert Brooks’s Judgment City; or the future shock of Kathryn Bigelow’s Los Angeles at the turn of the millennium. See It Big at the ’90s Multiplex opens Memorial Day weekend with Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks!, Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (35mm), and Terrence Malick’s war drama The Thin Red Line (rare 35mm print). The series continues through July 16.
The series features a trio of films celebrating their 30th anniversary: the action spectacle Speed, starring Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves (July 6 & 13); Hoop Dreams, Steve James’s moving documentary epic about two young men trying to become professional basketball players (June 29 & 30); and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, the iconic auteur film of its era (July 12 & 14). Other generation-defining films in the series are Thelma & Louise (June 29 & July 5); Amy Heckerling’s endlessly quotable Clueless, starring Alicia Silverstone and Paul Rudd (June 28 & 30); the cult comedy Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion, starring Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino (June 28 & 30); Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, which introduced American audiences to Ewan McGregor (June 7 & 9); the Hughes Brothers’ uncompromising and revelatory Menace II Society (July 12 & 14); and the Coen Brothers’ beloved comedy The Big Lebowski (June 1 & 7).
In addition, the series includes the pre-Matrix Wachowskis’ neonoir Bound (June 29 & 30); Jackie Chan in the balletic actioner Rumble in the Bronx (June 7 & 8); Reginald Hudlin’s Boomerang, starring Eddie Murphy and Halle Berry (June 9 & 16); Michael Mann’s beloved romantic adventure The Last of the Mohicans (June 14 & 16); Agnieszka Holland’s screen adaptation of the classic The Secret Garden (June 16 & 21); Clint Eastwood’s The Bridges of Madison County, in which he stars opposite Meryl Streep (June 15 & 16); David Lynch’s deeply felt G-rated saga The Straight Story (June 9 & 22); Sam Raimi’s comic book–like Darkman (June 22 & 23), starring Liam Neeson and Frances McDormand; Warren Beatty’s adaptation of Dick Tracy, featuring Madonna (June 22 & 23); Kathryn Bigelow’s cusp-of-the-21st-century dystopian thriller-romance Strange Days (July 5 & 7); Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King, starring Jeff Bridges, Robin Williams, and an Oscar-winning Mercedes Ruehl (June 14 & 15); and the romantic comedies Defending Your Life by writer/director Albert Brooks (June 1 & 2) and Joe Versus the Volcano by writer/director John Patrick Shanley (June 1 & 2).
See It Big, the Museum’s signature series of classic films presented on the big screen, is organized by MoMI Curator of Film Eric Hynes, Associate Curator of Film Edo Choi, and Reverse Shot Co-Editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert.
“In this edition of See It Big, we invite audiences to recall the days of ’90s era multiplex cinema,” said Koresky, who is also the Museum’s Editorial Director. “These are movies that worked as jumper cables for an entire generation of ecstatic cinephiles—none of them tentpoles or sequels—and each deserves to be seen on the big screen.”
See It Big at the ‘90s Multiplex is supported by a Market New York grant awarded to Museum of the Moving Image from Empire State Development and I LOVE NY/New York State’s Division of Tourism through the Regional Economic Development Council initiative.
Schedule and descriptions are included below and available online at movingimage.org/series/see-it-big-90s-multiplex.
SCHEDULE FOR SEE IT BIG AT THE ‘90S MULTIPLEX, MAY 24–JULY 14, 2024
All screenings take place at Museum of the Moving Image in the Sumner M. Redstone Theater or the Celeste and Armand Bartos Screening Room, 36-01 35 Ave, Astoria, NY, 11106. More information at movingimage.org.
Mars Attacks!
Friday, May 24, 7:00 p.m.
Sunday, June 2, 5:30 p.m.
Dir. Tim Burton. 1996, 106 mins. U.S. With Jack Nicholson, Pierce Brosnan, Danny DeVito, Annette Bening, Glenn Close, Jack Black, Lisa Marie, Sarah Jessica Parker, Natalie Portman, Michael J. Fox. On the heels of his loving comic biography Ed Wood, Burton amassed a star-studded cast to gleefully riff on 1950s sci-fi schlock in this delightful goofball satire about an invasion of ray gun-wielding Martians. The ingenious production design by Wynn Thomas is a marvel of deliberate tackiness. It’s the kind of gaudy, self-aware multiplex fare that, in its skirting of all pretensions to narrative coherence and seriousness of intent, Hollywood wouldn’t be caught dead making anymore.
Princess Mononoke
Sunday, May 26, 1:00 p.m.
Saturday, June 1, 12:45 p.m.
Dir. Hayao Miyazaki. 1997, 134 mins. 35mm. In Japanese with English subtitles.
One of Miyazaki’s masterpieces, Princess Mononoke was released in the U.S. by Disney subsidiary Miramax in 1999 into a mainstream culture that thought of animated films as children’s fare with easily defined heroes and villains. Mononoke defied that expectation with a complex, often violent tale that pitted warring clans and creatures against each other in 14th-century Japan. Its flawed, human characters were headed by Ashitaka, a cursed prince, fated to wander the land; San, a fierce “princess” raised by wolves; and Lady Eboshi, a woman warrior driven to build an iron-clad sanctuary in a chaotic world.
The Thin Red Line
Sunday, May 26, 4:00 p.m.
Friday, May 31, 6:30 p.m.
Dir. Terrence Malick. 1998, 170 mins. U.S. 35mm. With Sean Penn, Adrien Brody, Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplin, George Clooney, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Elias Koteas, Nick Nolte, John C. Reilly. Malick’s World War II epic marked not only a professional comeback after 20 years of silence but also a major turning point in the filmmaker’s art. Adapting James Jones’s novel about the 1942 Guadalcanal campaign, a treatise on the dehumanizing and deterministic nature of modern war, Malick fashions a freeform work of overflowing humanity, of men adrift in the awesome spectacle of the natural world and the horrific theater of a human-made cataclysm.
Defending Your Life
Saturday, June 1, 3:30 p.m.
Sunday, June 2, 3:15 p.m.
Dir. Albert Brooks. 1991, 112 mins. U.S. With Albert Brooks, Meryl Streep, Rip Torn, Lee Grant. After a stupid, split-second mistake, a Los Angeles advertising executive in his late thirties is killed after his car crashes into a bus. He soon wakes up in Judgment City, a way station through which the recently deceased must pass before moving on to the next plane of the afterlife. All souls here must defend their life decisions in a trial. While fretting over the bleak prospects summoned by a life ruled by fear, Daniel falls for Julia (Streep), whose generosity and good nature would seem to make her future undeniable. Brooks’s captivating romantic comedy is a perfect showcase for the inimitable writer-director-star’s mix of caustic social observation and emotional warmth.
Joe Versus the Volcano
Saturday, June 1, 5:45 p.m.
Sunday, June 2, 1:00 p.m.
Dir. John Patrick Shanley. 1990, 102 mins. U.S. With Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Lloyd Bridges, Dan Hedaya, Robert Stack, Ossie Davis, Abe Vigoda. After winning the Oscar for writing Moonstruck, Shanley got the greenlight for his ambitious, surreal comedy about a workaday schlub (Hanks) who finds out he has a fatal “brain cloud” and, with mere months to live, dumps his office job to embark on a final adventure to a tropical island. There, he will toss himself into a volcano for a slam-bang farewell. Nothing quite works out as it’s supposed to, and Shanley fashions a romantic comedy out of this eccentric material that’s as warmly funny and visually inventive as it is delightfully performed by Hanks and Ryan, the latter appearing in three different roles.
The Big Lebowski
Saturday, June 1, 8:00 p.m.
Friday, June 7, 3:00 p.m.
Dir. Joel and Ethan Coen. 1998, 117 mins. U.S. With Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Peter Stormare. Some movies are cultural touchstones for a reason. The Big Lebowski, the Coen brothers’ funniest film, is a scene-to-scene blast, expertly folding an endless array of visual jokes and verbal gags into an absurdly convoluted plot that casts unemployed, eternally stoned Los Angeles bowling bum Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski (Bridges, in one of the movies’ great comic performances) as a loser Philip Marlowe, reluctantly investigating the kidnapping of the trophy wife of a wealthy local with whom he shares a name.
Trainspotting
Friday, June 7, 6:00 p.m.
Sunday, June 9, 6:00 p.m.
Dir. Danny Boyle. 1996, 93 mins. With Ewan McGregor, Kevin McKidd, Ewan Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Robert Carlyle, Kelly Macdonald. Boyle’s adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel about heroin addicts in Edinburgh is a film of provocative incongruities—an upbeat, exhilarating entertainment about grim subject matter that managed not just to become a hit movie stateside but spawn an iconic cultural moment. McGregor was forever a star after his explosive turn as Mark Renton, an unemployed twentysomething whose potential is constantly thwarted by the quality of the friends he keeps. Charting Renton’s recurring attempts to get clean and sober, Trainspotting courses on the spasmodic rhythms of characters always looking for the next transcendent fix, a city in freefall, and, of course, a killer soundtrack featuring Iggy Pop, Blur, Brian Eno, and other legendary Britpop rockers.
Rumble in the Bronx
Friday, June 7, 8:00 p.m.
Saturday, June 8, 6:15 p.m.
Dir. Stanley Tong. 1995, 87 mins. Hong Kong. With Jackie Chan, Anita Mui, Françoise Yip, Bill Tung. Already a superstar in his native Hong Kong, Chan officially broke through to the American mainstream with this perfect showcase for the action icon’s breathtaking talent. Rumble follows Chan’s cop from his home country to New York for an uncle’s wedding, where he gets unwittingly involved in gang warfare. The plot is negligible, and Vancouver awkwardly stands in for the Bronx, but that’s all beside the point for a movie that provides such a dazzling mix of raw fight scenes and balletic stunts, all best experienced in a theater with a cheering, awestruck audience.
The Straight Story
Sunday, June 9, 1:00 p.m.
Saturday, June 22, 1:00 p.m.
Dir. David Lynch. 1999, 112 mins. U.S. 35mm. With Richard Farnsworth, Sissy Spacek, Harry Dean Stanton. The story is pure and beautifully simple: a septuagenarian named Alvin Straight buys a John Deere tractor and drives it from Iowa to Wisconsin to see his estranged, ailing brother. Featuring vast amber vistas of the American heartland courtesy of the great cinematographer Freddie Francis, The Straight Story is one of Lynch’s most uncharacteristic and undoubtedly best films.
Boomerang
Sunday, June 9, 3:30 p.m.
Sunday, June 16, 12:30 p.m.
Dir. Reginald Hudlin. 1992, 117 mins. U.S. With Eddie Murphy, Robin Givens, Halle Berry, David Alan Grier, Martin Lawrence, Grace Jones, Eartha Kitt, Chris Rock, Geoffrey Holder. In classic battle-of-the-sexes fashion, Eddie Murphy’s Marcus Graham is an executive in a high-profile New York advertising firm who meets his match in a serious-minded colleague, Jacqueline (Givens), who gets the job promotion he feels he was entitled to. Everything about this ribald comic confection from director Hudlin—knocking it out of the park in his follow-up to sleeper smash House Party—still breaks the mold, most spectacularly it is absurdly stocked supporting cast of actresses. This wildly funny, sophisticated vehicle for Murphy’s too-infrequently tapped skills as a romantic leading man was among the biggest hits of 1992, and all but set the template for the modern-day Black romantic comedy.
Dick Tracy
Saturday, June 22, 3:30 p.m.
Sunday, June 23, 12:30 p.m.
Dir. Warren Beatty. 1990, 105 mins. U.S. 35mm. With Warren Beatty, Madonna, Al Pacino, William Forsythe, Glenne Headly, Seymour Cassel, Dustin Hoffman, Kathy Bates, James Caan. Beatty’s big-budget, color-drenched adaptation of Chester Gould’s classic mid-century comic strip is a visual delight from start to finish, featuring lovingly detailed noir photography by Vittorio Storaro. Dick Tracy is both summer blockbuster and a kind of personal memory piece, featuring a flawless song score by Stephen Sondheim (the Madonna-sung “Sooner or Later” won him his first Academy Award).
The Fisher King
Friday, June 14, 3:00 p.m.
Saturday, June 15, 5:45 p.m.
Dir. Terry Gilliam. 1991, 137 mins. U.S. With Jeff Bridges, Robin Williams, Mercedes Ruehl, Amanda Plummer, Michael Jeter. Gilliam balances tragedy and comedy, fantasy and realism, romance and adventure, in this extremely early-’90s Manhattan-set tale of a disgraced radio shock jock (Bridges) who finds redemption in both the friendship of a mentally ill, homeless man (Williams) who believes himself to be a knight on a quest for the Holy Grail, and the furiously conditional love of a video store proprietor (Ruehl, who won an Oscar for her deliciously animated performance).
The Last of the Mohicans
Friday, June 14, 7:15 p.m.
Sunday, June 16, 3:15 p.m.
Dir. Michael Mann, 1992, 112 mins. U.S. With Daniel Day-Lewis, Madeleine Stowe, Wes Studi, Russell Means, Jodhi May, Eric Schweig. This sweeping, feverish epic features some of director Michael Mann’s most hypnotic vistas and kinetic sequences. It is also one of his purest love stories, between Nathaniel “Hawkeye” (Daniel Day-Lewis), the adopted white son of a Mohican warrior, and Cora (Madeleine Stowe), an English general’s daughter. Adapted loosely from James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel, this Academy Award winner for Best Sound is a lean action spectacle of intrigue, violence, and romance that stands as one of Mann’s greatest achievements.
The Bridges of Madison County
Saturday, June 15, 3:00 p.m.
Sunday, June 16, 5:45 p.m.
Dir. Clint Eastwood. 1995, 135 mins. U.S. With Meryl Streep, Clint Eastwood, Annie Corley, Victor Slezak. Eastwood’s astonishingly beautiful adaptation of the best-selling novel by Robert James Waller moves to its own hushed rhythm, luxuriating in the exquisite human connection experienced by frustrated Iowa housewife Francesca Johnson (Streep) and photographer Robert Kincaid (Eastwood), who passes through town while her husband and children are away. Working from a script by Richard LaGravenese, Eastwood transforms the novel’s broader strokes into a series of delicately wrought revelations of character, patiently building a romance of equals between two middle-aged people. In one of her greatest roles, Streep is a marvel of subtle expressivity, and Eastwood has rarely been more appealingly down to earth.
The Secret Garden
Sunday, June 16, 1:00 p.m.
Friday, June 21, 4:00 p.m.
Dir. Agnieszka Holland. 1993, 101 mins. U.S. With Kate Maberly, Maggie Smith, Heydon Prowse, Andrew Knott, John Lynch, Irène Jacob. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic children’s novel comes to precious life in Holland’s exquisitely mounted gothic adaptation, one of the finest live-action family films of the nineties. Maberly unsentimentally plays the stubborn, sad Mary Lennox, who, after being suddenly orphaned, is cast out of her life in colonial India and sent to live with distant relatives at a gloomy English mansion. There, she finds herself exploring the shadows and crooks of the enormous house, unlocking its secrets and wonders. Perfectly evoking the magic of one of the most cherished books of all time, Holland’s beautifully mounted film features a marvelous score by Zbigniew Preisner and evocative cinematography by Roger Deakins.
Darkman
Saturday, June 22, 8:00 p.m.
Sunday, June 23, 6:00 p.m.
Dir. Sam Raimi. 1990, 96 mins. U.S. With Liam Neeson, Frances McDormand, Colin Friels, Larry Drake. Just one summer after the mammoth success of Batman, Universal enlisted Raimi, known primarily for his delightfully impious Evil Dead films, for their own version of a comic book superhero movie. The result is among the wildest, most stylistically untamed popcorn movies of its era, featuring Neeson in his first action leading role as a scientist seeking vengeance against the gangsters who destroyed his lab and burned him nearly to death, but leaving him with supernatural strength. Raimi’s approach is swift, brutal, and endlessly entertaining, featuring carnival-colored cinematography by Bill Pope (Clueless, Bound, The Matrix) that lends everything the sense of a merry-go-round spinning out of control.
Clueless
Friday, June 28, 6:00 p.m.
Sunday, June 30, 3:30 p.m.
Dir. Amy Heckerling. 1995, 97 mins. U.S. With Alicia Silverstone, Paul Rudd, Brittany Murphy, Stacey Dash. The sleeper smash of summer 1995, set in a Beverly Hills high school, transcended its satirical take on SoCal privilege to become an iconic, ironic lexicon for nineties teen living. Loosely based on Jane Austen’s Emma, Heckerling’s hilarious and colorful romcom, following popular, rich, but somehow uber-lovable Cher Horowitz (Silverstone) as she tries to give fish-out-of-water Tai (Murphy) a status-altering makeover, while juggling her own love-hate relationship with her former stepbrother Josh (Rudd), is a perfectly balanced mix of sweet and sour, classical and cutting-edge. Quotable beginning to end, Clueless forever made Silverstone and Rudd exemplars of nineties teenage goofball beauty.
Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion
Friday, June 28, 8:00 p.m.
Sunday, June 30, 1:30 p.m.
Dir. David Mirkin. 1997, 92 mins. U.S. With Lisa Kudrow, Mira Sorvino, Janeane Garofalo, Alan Cumming, Camryn Manheim, Julia Campbell. Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion is the kind of mischievous Hollywood entertainment we wish we saw more often and among the most inspired cult comedies of its decade. Bedecked with singular comic talents, from its stars to its director David Mirkin (creator of the beloved Chris Elliott sitcom Get a Life) and writer Robin Schiff (member of the renowned improv troupe The Groundlings), the film uses the familiar comic premise of the high school reunion as a launching pad for an eccentric, at times genuinely surreal odyssey into the spirit and soul of two Venice Beach.
Hoop Dreams
Saturday, June 29, 1:15 p.m.
Sunday, June 30, 1:15 p.m.
Dir. Steve James. 1994, 170 mins. U.S. DCP. Called “the great American documentary” by Roger Ebert, and routinely listed among the all-time best films, Hoop Dreams is an intimate epic that follows two talented young men over six life-shaping years. William Gates and Arthur Agee are Black high-school students from inner-city Chicago recruited into a predominately white rural school with an excellent basketball team. They commute 90 minutes to school, where they struggle to adapt to the new social environment and shoulder expectations of family and friends back home. This portrait of two characters becomes a saga of two communities, the education system, sports, race, and poverty in the United States.
Thelma & Louise
Saturday, June 29, 5:00 p.m.
Friday, July 5, 4:00 p.m.
Dir. Ridley Scott. 1991, 130 mins. U.S. With Susan Sarandon, Geena Davis, Harvey Keitel, Brad Pitt. In this groundbreaking drama, fueled by righteous female anger, two close friends’ lives are forever changed after one of them is sexually assaulted in public and they decide to take matters into their own hands. Featuring career-defining work from Davis and Sarandon, and a fearless, Oscar-winning screenplay by Callie Khouri, Thelma & Louise struck a nerve with fed-up women everywhere and made an enduring impact in Hollywood.
Bound
Saturday, June 29, 7:45 p.m.
Sunday, June 30, 5:30 p.m.
Dirs. Lilly and Lana Wachowski. 1996, 108 mins. U.S. With Jennifer Tilly, Gina Gershon, Joe Pantoliano. Three years before The Matrix, the Wachowskis burst onto the scene with their gripping, intensely physical neonoir Bound, featuring knockout performances from Tilly as Violet, the frustrated girlfriend of Pantoliano’s small-time hood Caesar, and Gershon as Corky, the handyperson working on the apartment next door who seduces Violet. Sex leads to danger when the women hatch a plan to steal nearly two million dollars of embezzled money from Caesar. Rather than devolve into femme fatale clichés, Bound allows the audience to fully identify with its two brash leads as they try to make a better life for themselves—and the filmmakers brilliantly ratchet up the tension.
Strange Days
Friday, July 5, 7:00 p.m.
Sunday, July 7, 5:30 p.m.
Dir. Kathryn Bigelow. 1995, 145 mins. U.S. With Angela Bassett, Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Lewis, Tom Sizemore, Vincent D’Onofrio. Bigelow’s grandest cinematic vision, Strange Days is an anxiety-filled drama of near-apocalypse set in Los Angeles at the turn of the 21st century. With a screenplay by James Cameron and Jay Cocks (The Age of Innocence), Bigelow’s film stars Fiennes as a former LAPD officer who has turned into a black marketer of SQUIDs, virtual recordings of others’ experiences that attach directly to the viewer’s cerebral cortex, and a fierce Bassett as his bodyguard, who gets caught up in the investigation of a murder case following a snuff SQUID recording. Ambitious, brutal, and building in power to a frenetic climax, Strange Days is a singular take on the sci-fi dystopia genre that predicted anxieties around virtual technologies and Y2K panic.
Speed
Saturday, July 6, 8:00 p.m.
Saturday, July 13, 8:00 p.m.
Dir. Jan De Bont. 1994, 116 mins. With Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, Dennis Hopper, Jeff Daniels. An unbeatable premise—a city bus rigged with a bomb that will go off if it runs drops below 50 miles per hour—sent this modestly budgeted action spectacle to the box office stratosphere, kicking off the summer ’94 movie season with panache. The directorial debut of veteran cinematographer De Bont (Cujo, Die Hard, Basic Instinct), this relentless ride made a big-league star out of Reeves as the SWAT officer who climbs onboard to save the passengers; introduced the wider world to the charms of Bullock as the civilian enlisted to steer the lumbering vehicle when the driver goes down for the count; and gave a terrific late-career villain role to Hopper, whose menacing games (“Pop quiz, hot shot!”) quickly entered the cultural vocabulary.
Menace II Society
Friday, July 12, 5:30 p.m.
Sunday, July 14, 3:30 p.m.
Dirs. Allen and Albert Hughes. 1993, 97 mins. U.S. 35mm. With Tyrin Turner, Samuel L. Jackson, Larenz Tate, Jada Pinkett, Charles Dutton. Immersed in poverty and violence in the Los Angeles projects, 18-year-old Caine Lawson (Turner) wants a different kind of life. With the help of a mentoring teacher (Dutton) and his supportive girlfriend (Pinkett), Caine plans to leave the neighborhood for good. But thanks to a series of escalating and tragic events, he is caught in a deepening moral trap defined by loyalty and retribution, making escape seem more and more elusive. The first film from the Hughes Brothers, Menace II Society was a sensation at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival and remains an uncompromising and revelatory touchstone of 1990s American independent cinema.
Pulp Fiction
Friday, July 12, 7:30 p.m.
Sunday, July 14, 5:30 p.m.
Dir. Quentin Tarantino. 1994, 155 mins. 35mm. With John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, Ving Rhames, Amanda Plummer, Tim Roth. Tarantino became a household name with his surprise blockbuster, a film of elaborately intertwining stories that all but rewrote the rules of American narrative filmmaking. As loquacious hit men Vincent and Jules, Travolta and Jackson embodied characters who became almost instantly identifiable, yet nearly every detail of Tarantino’s astonishingly realized world still stands out: Travolta’s dance-floor duet with Thurman’s gangster’s wife to Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell”; the escalating, nightmarish scenario of Willis’s crooked boxer Butch; Plummer and Roth’s small-time hoods robbing a diner at just the wrong time. Pulp Fiction is the definitive film of its era, earning Tarantino a screenplay Oscar and igniting a career that remains essential to the landscape of American auteur cinema.