Outrageously violent, audaciously time-twisting, and in love with language, Pulp Fiction is surely the most influential American movie of the 1990s. Director and co-screenwriter Quentin Tarantino brilliantly synthesized such seemingly disparate traditions as the syncopated language of David Mamet; the serious violence of American gangster movies, crime movies, and films noirs mixed up with the wacky violence of cartoons, video games, and Japanese animation; and the fragmented story-telling structures of such experimental classics as Citizen Kane, Rashomon, and La jetée. The Oscar-winning script by Tarantino and Roger Avary intertwines three stories, featuring Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta, in the role that single-handedly reignited his career, as hit men who have philosophical interchanges on such topics as the French names for American fast food products; Bruce Willis as a boxer out of a 1940s B-movie; and such other stalwarts as Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Christopher Walken, Eric Stoltz, Ving Rhames, and Uma Thurman, whose dance sequence with Travolta proved an instant classic. Pulp Fiction has probably influenced more future filmmakers than any movie since Citizen Kane, a similarly energetic and rule-breaking project by a similarly young and fearless filmmaker.