In a powerhouse opening, The Bride (Uma Thurman) finds herself betrayed on her wedding day by her former employer, Bill (David Carradine)--her entire party slaughtered and herself, four months pregnant, with a bullet winging towards her brain. Kill Bill, Vol. 1 is a revenge fantasy presented as something of a shrine to the conventions of the Hong Kong and early Japanese epic tradition--the geyser sprays of Lone Wolf and Cub (and the end of Sanjuro) married to the wire-fu of master Yuen Wo-Ping and the katana-play of Sonny Chiba. More, a sting from Ennio Morricone's score for The Good, The Bad and The Ugly can be heard during a showdown between The Bride and one of her would-be assassins, O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), marking the picture as Tarantino's attempt to emulate Sergio Leone, the filmmaker he admires most.

There's a segment presented in animé, and another that jumps between colour and black-and-white in time with the pulse of the action. Kill Bill, Vol. 1 is audacious and cocksure, finding a moment in the midst of the bloodletting to honour the art of sword-making and the light comic interplay that marks most Asian action epics of the last four decades. It's more than a fabulous (and fabulously violent) action film, it's an exercise in cinema as high pulp art; like the golden age of the pulp art medium, the picture reflects the undercurrents and trends in American culture in what is arguably its most tumultuous period since the end of the 1960s. In the film are issues of gender identity, maternal duty, and Japanaphilia--an affection for the cultural artifacts of the Land of the Rising Sun on the rise since 9/11 provided for the United States its own dose of nihilism and technophobia, fixations that are the foundation of a Japanese culture born from the ashes of two nuclear attacks.

Fascinating and almost tactile, Kill Bill, Vol. 1 is marked by, above all things, a sense of vertiginous joy, a spirit of risk-taking mirrored by its two-part release that is not only not particularly distracting given Tarantino's built-in chapter-stops, but demonstrates a marvellous courage in the value of his product. Easily the most exciting filmmaker in the world right now, Tarantino is the real deal: a deceptively romantic author possessed of love for the medium and enough skill to know when to just let the power of his images and scenarios work for him. He works in film, as filmmakers should, and though a legion of Tarantino imitators strives to tarnish his films with knock-offs high on meaningless shutter-stop pyrotechnics (see: Robert Rodriguez), the truth is that the man is pure. Kill Bill, Vol. 1 isn't Tarantino's best film, it's just his next film, and it's been a long time since it was this difficult first to separate a director from his work, then to separate one work from the ever-evolving, ever-maturing oeuvre. See the film if you love the movies--it's the old iron for a new day.-Walter Chaw