Reservoir Dogs is a 1992 American crime film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino in his feature-length directorial debut.

It stars Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi, Lawrence Tierney, Michael Madsen, Tarantino, and Edward Bunker as diamond thieves whose heist of a jewelry store goes terribly wrong.

The film incorporates many motifs that have become Tarantino's hallmarks: violent crime, pop culture references, profanity, and nonlinear storytelling.

[4] Although controversial at first for its depictions of violence and heavy use of profanity, Reservoir Dogs was generally well-received, and the cast was praised by many critics.

Despite not being heavily promoted during its theatrical run, the film became a modest success in the United States after grossing $2.9 million against its scant budget.

Pink has hidden the diamonds nearby and argues with White over whether to get medical attention for Orange, and the pair draw guns on each other.

Pink and producer Lawrence Bender playing both Nice Guy Eddie and a police officer chasing Mr.

[9] Keitel liked it enough to sign as a co-producer so Tarantino and Bender would have an easier job finding funding; with his assistance, they raised $1.5 million.

[2] Keitel also paid for Tarantino and Bender to host casting sessions in New York, where the duo found Steve Buscemi, Michael Madsen, and Tim Roth.

[12] Viggo Mortensen and George Clooney also read for roles,[13][14] while Tim Roth's agents originally wanted him to be Mr.

[17] Additionally, Joseph H. Lewis's 1955 film The Big Combo and Sergio Corbucci's 1966 Spaghetti Western Django inspired the scene where a police officer is tortured in a chair.

[22] The warehouse scenes were filmed in an unused mortuary filled with caskets, funeral equipment, embalming fluid, and a hearse.

[23] Tarantino's decision not to film the diamond robbery was twofold: for budgetary reasons, and to keep the details of the heist ambiguous.

[25] After being shown at several other film festivals, including in Cannes, Sitges, and Toronto,[25] Reservoir Dogs opened in the United States in 19 theaters on October 9, 1992, with a first week total of $147,839.

The site's critical consensus reads, "Thrumming with intelligence and energy, Reservoir Dogs opens Quentin Tarantino's filmmaking career with hard-hitting style.

[34] Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times also enjoyed the film and the acting, particularly that of Buscemi, Tierney and Madsen, and said "Tarantino's palpable enthusiasm, his unapologetic passion for what he's created, reinvigorates this venerable plot and, mayhem aside, makes it involving for longer than you might suspect.

Madsen himself reportedly had great difficulty finishing it, especially after Kirk Baltz ad-libbed the desperate plea "I've got a little kid at home.

[40] Baker later told Tarantino to take the walkout as a "compliment" and explained that he found the violence unnerving because of its heightened sense of realism.

[29][41][42] J. P. Telotte compared Reservoir Dogs to classic caper noir films and points out the irony in its ending scenes.

[2] Todd McCarthy, who called the film "undeniably impressive", was of the opinion that it was influenced by Mean Streets, Goodfellas, and Stanley Kubrick's The Killing.

[46] After this film, Tarantino himself was also compared to Martin Scorsese, Sam Peckinpah, John Singleton, Gus Van Sant, and Abel Ferrara.

Stanley Crouch of The New York Times compared the way the white criminals speak of black people in Reservoir Dogs to the way they are spoken of in Scorsese's Mean Streets and Goodfellas.

[47] In February 2012, as part of an ongoing series of live dramatic readings of film scripts being staged with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), director Jason Reitman cast black actors in the originally white cast: Laurence Fishburne as Mr. White; Terrence Howard as Mr. Blonde; Anthony Mackie as Mr.

Pink; Cuba Gooding Jr. as Mr. Orange; Chi McBride as Joe Cabot; Anthony Anderson as Nice Guy Eddie (Joe Cabot's son); Common as both Mr. Brown and Officer Nash (the torture victim of Mr. Blonde), and Patton Oswalt as Holdaway (the mentor cop who was originally played by Randy Brooks, the only black actor in the film).

Critic Elvis Mitchell suggested that Reitman's version of the script was taking the source material back to its roots since the characters "all sound like black dudes.

[57] Five years later, on August 27, 2002, Artisan Entertainment (who changed their name from LIVE Entertainment in the interim) released a two-disc 10th anniversary edition on DVD and VHS featuring multiple covers color-coded to match the nicknames of five of the characters (Pink, White, Orange, Blonde, and Brown) and a disc of bonus features such as interviews with the cast and crew.

[63] An unusual feature of the soundtrack was the choice of songs; Tarantino has said that he feels the music to be a counterpoint to the on-screen violence and action.

[70] On December 14, 2017,[71] Overkill Software added a heist to Payday 2 inspired by Reservoir Dogs in which the player is contracted to rob a jewelry store in Los Angeles with the Cabot family.

Kaante, a Bollywood film released in 2002, is a remake of Reservoir Dogs, combined with elements of City on Fire.

[74] Tarantino revealed in June 2021 that he had at one point considered remaking Reservoir Dogs as his tenth and final directed film, though he quickly iterated that he "won't do it".