SOURCE: "Beaten to a Pulp," in Commonweal, November 18, 1994, pp. 30-1.

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

Maybe you have to be able to see through Quentin Tarantino before you can enjoy him. Like all his previous movies, Pulp Fiction is packed with violent larcenies, shootouts, drug deals, mob executions, gangland politicking, and (a Tarantino specialty) heavy-duty, sadistically gloating speeches made by hitmen to their victims just before the bullet to the brain is dispatched. No wonder that this latest Hollywood wunderkind has been labeled the "hot high priest of film ultra-violence," "the Sultan of Sadism," and so forth.

Yet Pulp Fiction has about as much to do with actual criminality or violence as Cyrano de Bergerac with the realities of seventeenth-century France or The Prisoner of Zenda with Balkan politics. I make these comparisons respectfully, for this movie gives us precisely what the...