What Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs says about the US midterms

When I first watched Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs in 1992, I was struck by its inventive opening. Tarantino launched a gritty crime thriller not with a gunfight or a heist but with eight mobsters in a diner, finishing breakfast while bickering over Madonna and tipping etiquette. By depicting hardened criminals as ordinary men carping about daily trivialities, Tarantino dispensed with the genre’s macho clichés, rendering the characters disarmingly authentic. Decades later, the subject of...