JACKIE BROWN (68)

Directed by: Quentin Tarantino

Starring: Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Forster, Robert de Niro

The Pitch: An air stewardess schemes to sting a gun-running gangster for half a million dollars, aided by a middle-aged bail-bondsman.

Theo Sez: ...or, how a chop-socky-loving geek made the big time, found the pleasures of arthouse and nearly lost his audience. It's always been a bit surprising to see Tarantino's name in connection with Kiarostami or Wong Kar-Wei, but it's no longer a surprise - in its airy, limpid use of space and time, and the way it leaves acres of apparently empty space around everything, this is a gangster flick that plays like a Jacques Rivette movie. It's also, for someone who's never been to LA, a perfect evocation of the loping, spacy, deceptively languid vibe one associates with that city - and it's also a supremely confident piece of film-making, taking its sweet time and casually dropping in little bits of technique, a split-screen here and a fade-to-black-then-fade-back-into-the-same- scene-again there. It's all good stuff (especially on second viewing) ; the only problem lies with the characters. When it's concentrating on world-weary, over-the-hill small-timers, crime and violence merely a backdrop to the mundane detail of their everyday lives ("Oh no!" says Jackie. "The milk went bad while I was in jail!") - or, of course, whenever Forster's beautifully-modulated performance fills the screen - the film's content matches its tone, and everything's in sync ; when it turns to Jackson's flamboyant Ordell, however, riffing on reheated jive ("Who dat Mandingo-looking nigga there?") and actually pulling on a pair of leather gloves as a prelude to offing someone, it all feels tired and one-dimensional - the interest level goes way down. It's surely no accident that Tarantino opens the movie with the crowd-pleasing (and incongruous) "Chicks With Guns" segment, a sop to keep his fan-base from growing impatient - he's moved on, and he knows it. On this evidence, he's turning into a wittily humanistic film-maker of insight and compassion ; even if he's currently wasting his compassion on recycled modishness and ersatz-blaxploitation kitsch.