Uma Thurman and Samuel L. Jackson were both in Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 masterpiece “Pulp Fiction,” but they didn’t share any screen time. A decade later, Jackson had a brief but memorable cameo as Rufus the keyboardist at the wedding of Thurman’s Beatrix in “Kill Bill: Volume 2.” In Nicol Panoe’s Tarantino-esque black comedy “The Kill Room,” we’re finally able to enjoy a feature-length showcase of the bloody good chemistry between Thurman and Jackson, who are magnificent together as a pair of schemers from very different walks of life whose money-laundering enterprise grows even darker — and funnier — as we go along.
The pretentious bubble of the contemporary art world practically begs for satire, as evidenced by films such as “Velvet Buzzsaw,” “Untitled,” “Intouchables,” “The Square” and the recent “Life Upside Down,” and “The Kill Room” follows in that tradition with a pointed screenplay by Jonathan Jacobson that skewers art dealers who claim to be above it all but are desperate to make a profit; narcissistic and petulant artists — and the sometimes clueless moneybag collectors who speak like overbearing graduate students but are mostly concerned with gobbling up works by the latest new name on the scene.
