In May 1994 Nelson Mandela was sworn in as South Africa’s first black president and the Channel Tunnel linking England and France finally opened. But another seismic event took place early one morning on the French Riviera when Quentin Tarantino’s crime drama Pulp Fiction was screened for the first time at the Cannes Film Festival.

“That would have been 8:30 in the morning,” recalls film critic Anne Thompson. She was inside the Palais des Festivals, as a senior writer for Entertainment Weekly, for what turned out to be a joyous screening. “I don’t remember anything but really enthusiastic applause. It was electric. There was a lot of expectation that this would be something remarkable – and it was,” she says.

The reaction was swift and very soon there were proclamations that Pulp Fiction had reinvented the gangster film in many dazzling ways.

At Cannes it won the Palme d’Or, the top award. In the weeks that followed, as the film travelled to other festivals and into general release, it was met with considerable praise, a little dissent and the odd bit of drama.

When the picture was shown as the opening night attraction at the New York Film Festival the screening had to be stopped. David Ansen, then film critic for Newsweek, recalls: “Someone fainted, a doctor was summoned. They restarted the movie just as they plunged the needle into the heart to revive [Uma Thurman’s character] and the crowd burst into cheers.”