Jackie Brown

Jackie Brown starts off at a langorous pace, with flashes of Quentin Tarantino brilliance, including an excellent soundtrack, Samuel Jackson's unforgettable Uzi speech and great dialogue.

Then after 20 minutes things start to crawl. It's during this time that the main characters take you by the scruff of the neck and thrust you into their low-rent lifestyle.

It centres on the eponymous airline money runner (Pam Grier), bail bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster) and murderous gun runner Ordell Robbie (Jackson) all wound up in a money-laundering scam. When Brown is busted for carrying cash and coke for the duplicitous Ordell, the 44-year-old stewardess decides she's tired of being on the garbage heap of life and attempts to pull off a sting of staggering complexity, outwitting Robbie and the feds.

With a little help from Cherry (the delightfully weary and watchable Forster), you sit back, jaw slack as the sting is carried out. Aside from his performance, don't miss a well-toned Michael Keaton as Ray Nicolet, the FBI agent who later popped up again in sexy George Clooney/Jennifer Lopez offering, Out of Sight.

What separates this from the dozens of other movies debuting on Sky this week is Tarantino's love of his characters.

You get the feeling after the credits have rolled both Brown and Cherry are still out there, living and breathing in LA. And just to prove truth is stranger than fiction, one of the casting directors is called none other than Jaki Brown.

Although a lot less violent than Tarantino's previous offerings, the movie proved to be incendiary for different reasons.

Director Spike Lee certainly wasn't too keen on the amount of racially offensive references in Jackie Brown - but then again, Tarantino has angered about as many people as he's delighted over the last five years. Millions of them.

Such controversial behaviour is not a recent development in the life of Tennessee's most famous export. As a kid, Tarantino used to get told off by his mother for swearing while playing with his GI Joe dolls.

"But mom, it's the guys. It's what they'd say," he recalls.

At 15, he was caught trying to pinch an Elmore Leonard novel from the local shop - 20 years later and he lifted Leonard's Rum Punch plot instead for this movie premiere.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about Tarantino in 1999 - a multi-millionaire whose last film before this grossed over $250million - is his reluctance to go for the huge names and big studio deals.

Tarantino is obviously, in the words of Harry Enfield's flush Brummie: "considerably richer than yow," - and most lottery winners come to that. But while his bank balance may be haemorrhaging, he's refused to follow many a director's course of action and go for the big-budget, low-brow route of film-making.

While the moral majority 'tut' at the film's content, many fans are delighted that Jackie Brown still has lots of swearing, a little blood, no Mexican stand-offs, two-and-a-half hours of witty dialogue, guns, more swearing and a soundtrack to die for.