Starring John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, and Bruce Willis. Rated restricted.

Now playing at the Granville 7, Oakridge, Park & Tilford, Richport, and others

A week or so into its North American run, Pulp Fiction is garnering the kinds of raves critics and film fanatics used to save for Martin Scorsese or Akira Kurosawa. Five minutes or so into watching it, you know why. Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs) is one of the very few Hollywood filmmakers making movies for the masses that don't look like they were made by committee. Some of his ideas and images are garishly ugly, but the former vid-store jockey pours love of cinema into every frame, wildly juxtaposing John Woo, Billy Wilder, and the French New Wave, while studio know-it-alls expect us to swallow reheated crime-genre tripe like Body of Evidence and The Specialist.

Much has been argued about Tarantino's empty ethic–"Have gun, will blow brains out" just about sums it up–but the most interesting thing about his landscape may be its moral vacuum. He's an expert observer, but his is an anthropology of movie behaviour, not human nature. In his self-contained world, pop culture provides all the history we need. A subject, after all, is only as good as the coffee-shop chatter it can inspire, and movies, TV, and rock 'n' roll (reverb-drenched guitar is the ambience here) are grist for his endlessly grinding mill, with sex and the Bible occasionally popping up for tonal contrast.

But if his characters and their situation are all rented (with extra charges for failure to rewind), Tarantino the director has a knack for casting actors who can put flesh on his cartoon bones. John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson (Fresh, Jungle Fever)–in black suits and hair grease, like Blues Brothers packing firepower–are riveting attractions as Vince and Jules, hired goons who always find time to philosophize about fast food or gangster etiquette on the way to their latest hit.

And one of the pleasures of Tarantino the writer is that you never know when a passing slice of conversational banter will blossom into a major plot point. When we first meet Vince, he's pondering whether it was appropriate for his employer, a huge bald mobster named Marsellus (Ving Rhames), to hurl another employee out a fourth-storey window just for having given the boss's wife a foot massage. It's just part of the general palaver until then we find out that Marsellus has asked Vince to take said wife, Mia (Uma Thurman), out on the town while he's away.

The hired gun is petrified, but when she drags him to a spectacularly kitschy nightclub where the waitresses look like Marilyn Monroe and the waiters (especially one played by an uncredited Steve Buscemi) resemble Buddy Holly, Vince can't avoid playing flirty games with the feral, coke-addled woman–any more than the director can resist putting Travolta on the dance floor to glory in his Saturday Night Fever persona.

Tarantino hurls just as many curves at the other characters, but as soon as you start to see how the game is going, he throws in fresh meat. Eric Stoltz and Rosanna Arquette play arrogantly hip coke dealers. Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer are stickup artists too in love to commit separate crimes. And then there's a marvellously controlled Bruce Willis as a boxer called Butch who can't follow orders; he runs off with his French girlfriend (Maria de Medeiros) and ends up in a hideously kinky situation with the very demon he's trying to escape.

The last is the most shockingly compelling of the oddly interwoven tales, but the director doesn't mind interrupting it for an elaborate flashback, with Christopher Walken as a marine with a flag-waving tale that turns into a silly joke. In a contrived way, the scene sets up Butch for a deep emotional conflict even as it makes fun of ancient narrative conventions. The risk pays off, but Captain Video pushes his luck by appearing in the penultimate sequence, a ghoulish suburban side step featuring Harvey Keitel as a suave mob cleanup man. It's the film's slightest moment–a false calm before a bravura, time-shifting climax–and Tarantino almost wrecks it with his aw-gee-I'm-in-a-movie presence.

Still, even that misstep serves to underscore the jolly artificiality at the core of his sick-o appeal. Everything he does draws attention to itself–and its influences–as surely as anything in Bertolt Brecht or, more pointedly, Jean-Luc Godard. Tarantino is a formalist with a smoking gat and a mile-wide smirk; it's no accident that his production company is called A Band Apart, a reference to Godard's classic tale of doomed criminals who take time out to dance. Clearly, all the brains in Pulp Fiction aren't splattered on the dashboard.