Considerable screen time is devoted to monologues and casual conversations with eclectic dialogue revealing each character's perspectives on several subjects, and the film features an ironic combination of humor and strong violence.

In 2013, Pulp Fiction was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Two hitmen, Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega, arrive at an apartment to retrieve a briefcase for their boss, influential local gangster Marsellus Wallace, from a business partner, Brett, and his friends.

At the diner from the film's prologue, Jules tells Vincent that he plans to retire from his life of crime, convinced that their survival at the apartment was divine intervention.

While Tarantino's short film similarly evolved into a full script, Rifkin never completed his contribution, leaving Pulp Fiction initially uncertain.

[32] Tarantino's script was produced as Reservoir Dogs, his directorial debut; Avary created the basis for the "Gold Watch" storyline of Pulp Fiction.

"[64] In at least one case, boxer Butch Coolidge, Tarantino had in mind a specific character from a classic Hollywood crime story: "I wanted him to be basically like Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer in Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly [1955].

[59][60][61] Two scenes originally written by Avary for the True Romance screenplay, exclusively credited to Tarantino, were incorporated into the opening of "The Bonnie Situation": the "miraculous" missed shots by the hidden gunman and the rear seat automobile killing.

[78] There were suggestions that TriStar was resistant to back a film featuring a heroin user; there were also indications that the studio simply saw the project as too low-budget for its desired star-driven image.

[85][86] Danny DeVito, one of the film's producers,[87] recalls that Weinstein suggested casting Daniel Day-Lewis, who had just won an Academy Award for My Left Foot.

[57] Tim Roth, initially interested in the role meant for Willis, suggested Amanda Plummer as a co-star, insisting she should have a gun as he thought it would be "terrifying" - a notion Tarantino later incorporated into the script.

[24] No film score was composed for Pulp Fiction; Quentin Tarantino instead used an eclectic assortment of surf music, rock and roll, soul, and pop songs.

[113] Pulp Fiction was the top-grossing film at the US box office its first weekend with a gross of $9,311,882, edging out a Sylvester Stallone vehicle, The Specialist, which was in its second week and playing at more than twice as many theaters.

"[120] Abroad, as well: in Britain, where it opened a week after its U.S. release, not only was the film a big hit, but in book form its screenplay became the most successful in UK publishing history, a top-ten bestseller.

Roger Ebert called it "a comedy about blood, guts, violence, strange sex, drugs, fixed fights, dead body disposal, leather freaks and a wristwatch that makes a dark journey down through the generations...

In The Washington Post, Donna Britt described how she was happy not to see Pulp Fiction on a recent weekend and thus avoid "discussing the rousing scene in which a gunshot sprays somebody's brains around a car interior".

[147] Pulp Fiction garnered four honors at the Independent Spirit Awards, held at the end of the month – Best Feature, Best Director, Male Lead (Jackson), and Best Screenplay (Tarantino).

[150] The February 2020 issue of New York Magazine listed Pulp Fiction alongside Citizen Kane, Sunset Boulevard, Dr. Strangelove, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Conversation, Nashville, Taxi Driver, The Elephant Man, In the Bedroom, There Will Be Blood, and Roma as "The Best Movies That Lost Best Picture at the Oscars".

Dole had not mentioned the film, instead citing two less-celebrated movies based on Tarantino screenplays, Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers and Tony Scott's True Romance.

"[161] Similarly, Nicholas Christopher calls it "more gangland camp than neo-noir",[162][163] and Foster Hirsch suggests that its "trippy fantasy landscape" characterizes it more definitively than any genre label.

"[172] The film's large financial return on its small budget transform[ed] the industry's attitude toward the lowly indies ... spawning a flock of me-too classics divisions ... [S]mart studio executives suddenly woke up to the fact that grosses and market share, which got all the press, were not the same as profits ... Once the studios realized that they could exploit the economies of (small) scale, they more or less gave up buying or remaking the films themselves, and either bought the distributors, as Disney had Miramax, or started their own ... copy[ing] Miramax's marketing and distribution strategies.

[161] Geoffrey O'Brien sees the result as connected "rather powerfully to a parallel pulp tradition: the tales of terror and the uncanny practiced by such writers as Cornell Woolrich [and] Fredric Brown ...

[208] In Alan Stone's view, the "absurd dialogue", like that between Vincent and Jules in the scene where the former accidentally kills Marvin, "unexpectedly transforms the meaning of the violence cliché ...

Many have assumed that the dance sequence at Jack Rabbit Slim's was intended as a reference to Travolta's star-making performance as Tony Manero in the epochal Saturday Night Fever (1977); Tarantino, however, credits a scene in the Jean-Luc Godard film Bande à part (1964) with the inspiration.

"[218] The pivotal moment in which Marsellus crosses the street in front of Butch's car and notices him evokes the scene in which Marion Crane's boss sees her under similar circumstances in Psycho (1960).

"[229] In Groth's view, the crucial difference is that "in Deliverance the rape created the film's central moral dilemma whereas in Pulp Fiction it was merely 'the single weirdest day of [Butch's] life.

"[131] Sharon Willis focuses on the way a television show (Clutch Cargo) marks the beginning of, and plays on through, the scene between young Butch and his father's comrade-in-arms.

[255] At Jack Rabbit Slim's, Mia goes to "powder her nose" – literally; she snorts coke in the restroom, surrounded by a bevy of women vainly primping.

"[257] The threat increases in magnitude as the narrative progresses chronologically, and is realized in the third instance: In the Brookers' analysis, "Through Vince ... we see the contemporary world as utterly contingent, transformed, disastrously, in the instant you are not looking.

Perched on the toilet with his book, Vincent is feminized by sitting instead of standing as well as by his trashy tastes; preoccupied by the anal, he is implicitly infantilized and homosexualized; and the seemingly inevitable result is being pulverized by Butch with a Czech M61 submachine gun.