Like matching outfits for pop bands, the influence of Quentin Tarantino didn’t make it very far into the new century. “He is the single most influential director of his generation,” Peter Bogdanovich said, during an event at MOMA, in 2012, honoring the director, by which time it was customary to add the phrase “for better or worse.” To talk of Tarantino’s influence now is to do so with a wince or small cluck of nostalgia for that period, somewhere between the launch of the Hubble telescope and the impeachment of Bill Clinton, when you could barely find a coffee shop in Southern California that didn’t clatter with the sound of aspiring young screenwriters bashing out talky, violent, blackly comic shoot-’em-ups on their typewriters.

“I became an adjective sooner than I thought I was going to,” Tarantino noted, in 1994, when infatuation with his work was at its peak and a host of copycat films were in theatres. These days, with few exceptions, the trail of bickering hitmen, wild-card sociopaths, and hyper-articulate drug dealers arguing about the merits of “old” Aerosmith over “new” Aerosmith has gone cold. The twenty-fifth anniversary of Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs,” on October 8th, shapes up as an exercise in slightly nervous time travel, like a college reunion, or stumbling on a high-school crush on Facebook.

Nothing around “Reservoir Dogs,” though, has aged quite as badly as its original reviews. “The only thing Mr. Tarantino spells out is the violence,” Julie Salamon wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “This movie isn’t really about anything,” the Daily News said. “It’s just a flashy, stylistically daring exercise in cinematic mayhem.” These are the two canards that everyone seemed to agree upon, and they were the stances on which the Tarantino-bashing industry would be based. One, that his work was ultraviolent, and, two, that it was about nothing more than its own movieishness, with no connection to the real world. This was a myth partly abetted by the director himself, who often told the story of going to Harvey Keitel’s house to discuss the “Reservoir Dogs” script. “How’d you come to write this script? Did you live in a tough-guy neighborhood growing up? Was anybody in your family connected with tough guys?” Keitel asked. Tarantino said no. “Well, how the hell did you come to write this?” Keitel said. And Tarantino said, “I watch movies.”

Both of these metrics—how violent and how realistic a film is judged to be—are volatile commodities on the film-historical stock exchange. Nothing dates faster than “realism,” and today’s “excessive violence” is tomorrow’s cinematic aperitif. The first thing to strike a contemporary viewer of “Reservoir Dogs,” of course, is how comparatively nonviolent it is—we see a couple of shootouts, a carjacking, and a cop being beaten up, but nothing that you wouldn’t see today on an episode of “24.” To those coming to the film from the freewheeling mayhem of the director’s later work, it’s a remarkably disciplined feat of storytelling, featuring just as many departures from chronology as, say, “Pulp Fiction”—its structure is a nautilus-like series of boxed flashbacks, telling each character’s story in turn—but the flashbacks never feel like flashbacks. You’re never antsy to get back to the warehouse. Without an ounce of fat, at a trim ninety-nine minutes, the movie pierces like a bullet, leaving a clean hole.

The infamous ear-severing, which caused so many walkouts, is discreetly elided by a pan to a wall, and throughout he uses fade-outs to eerie, feline effect, with an implied tick-tock of an impervious fate. The first time it happens is the most powerful. From the sight of the Dogs walking in slow motion down the car lot, their banter about Madonna and tipping etiquette still ringing in our ears, the curtain comes down. We can hear the whimpering of Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) before we see him, squirming in bloody agony in the backseat of a car, with Mr. White (Keitel) at the steering wheel. The perennial theme of the heist movie—“the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley,” in the words of Robert Burns—is laid bare in a single cut.

So many great filmmakers have made their débuts with heist films—from Woody Allen’s “Take the Money and Run” to Michael Mann’s “Thief” to Wes Anderson’s “Bottle Rocket” to Bryan Singer’s “The Usual Suspects”—that it’s tempting to see the genre almost as an allegory for the filmmaking process. The model it offers first-time filmmakers is thus as much economic as aesthetic—a reaffirmation of the tenet that Jean-Luc Godard attributed to D. W. Griffith: “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.” A man assembles a gang for the implementation of a plan that is months in the rehearsal and whose execution rests on a cunning facsimile of midmorning reality going undetected. But the plan meets bumpy reality, requiring feats of improvisation and quick thinking if the gang is to make off with its loot—and the filmmaker is to avoid going to movie jail. “An undercover cop has got to be like Marlon Brando,” the detective, Holdaway, tells Mr. Orange. He goes on:

The things you gotta remember are the details. The details sell your story. This particular story takes place in a men’s room. . . . You gotta know every detail there is to know about this commode. What you gotta do is take all them details and make ’em your own. While you’re doing that, remember that this story is about you . . . and how you perceived the events that went down. The only way to do that is keep sayin’ it and sayin’ it and sayin’ it.

This is as close to an aesthetic credo as Tarantino ever got, from the intense focus on subjectivity that would turn the structure of “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction” into Swiss cheese; to his fascination with commodes as the ultimate arbiter of gritty reality; to, above all, his deep, disciplined devotion to spoken English—his dialogue “part Robert Towne, part Chester Himes and part Patricia Highsmith,” as the critic Elvis Mitchell put it. Critics who complain about the lack of reality in Tarantino’s films aren’t listening: reality in his films is received, represented, and reproduced through the ear and the mouth and, in particular, the filthy, propulsive rhythms of black street vernacular soaked up by the filmmaker when he was a teen-ager in Los Angeles’s South Bay area, and to which he would return when he shot “Jackie Brown,” some twenty years later: