For Fans of Reservoir Dogs

Reservoir Dogs never shows the robbery. That is not an oversight or a budget constraint. It is the argument the film is making: the planning and the fallout are more interesting than the act. Tarantino understood early that crime cinema had spent decades fetishising the job itself, and that the real drama was always in the room before and after. Heat, The Italian Job, and a hundred others put the heist at the centre. Reservoir Dogs puts trust at the centre and watches it fail.

The rapid-fire dialogue, the characters who talk in circles before getting to the point, the crime world treated as a workplace with its own bureaucratic absurdities: Tarantino has always been clear about the debt to Elmore Leonard. Rum Punch became Jackie Brown directly, but the Leonard influence runs through all of Tarantino's work. Readers who finish Get Shorty or Out of Sight will recognise exactly the same cadence, the same pleasure in watching people outmanoeuvre each other with words.

When Noah Hawley adapted Fargo for television in 2014, the result was the closest thing to a Tarantino film that has ever aired on a streaming platform. The same deadpan violence, the same Coen Brothers source material, the same instinct for revealing character through dialogue that seems to be about something else entirely. Each season is a self-contained crime story where the criminal plan unravels because human beings are unreliable. Reservoir Dogs fans will feel at home from the first episode.

At first glance, a fantasy detective RPG set in a ruined waterfront city seems far from a 1992 Los Angeles warehouse. But Disco Elysium runs on the same obsession: identity under pressure, men piecing together what went wrong from wreckage and partial memory, and the comedy and tragedy of people who perform toughness while falling apart. The game's combat is almost entirely optional. Like Reservoir Dogs, it trusts that the conversation is the action.