‘True Romance’
“You’re so cool.” As soon as Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs debuted at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, it launched a veritable gold rush of Hollywood producer-types looking to find ways to cash in on the hype of the Next Big Thing. The first of these movies to follow in Reservoir‘s footsteps was 1993’s True Romance, which took a previously unproduced Tarantino screenplay about two brazen young lovers (Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette) who get tangled up in a drug deal and elevated it by letting the late, visionary director Tony Scott steer the ship. The movie, even all these years later, remains an unquestioned triumph, albeit an extremely uncomfortable one, thanks its problematic characters and the stomach-churning physical abuse Alabama Worley (Arquette) suffers at the hands of a Mob enforcer (a young James Gandolfini). If you can get past that — I suppose I should type “trigger warning” for the easily offended of you out there — you’re in for a real throwback treat, a true apex of ’90s cinematic coolness.