Quentin Tarantino Says These Are The Top 20 Movies Of The 21st…

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20. West Side Story (2021)

Tarantino putting Spielberg’s West Side Story here is the kind of choice that immediately sends Film Twitter looking for a chair to throw. He praised it as proof that Spielberg “still has it,” and, yes, he even tossed in that Scorsese comparison like a man casually lighting a match near gasoline. The pick makes sense, though: it is huge, graceful, old-Hollywood muscular, and far stranger as a Tarantino favorite than it looks at first glance. | © 20th Century Studios

19. Cabin Fever (2002)

Eli Roth’s gross-out breakout apparently hit Tarantino right in the sweet spot where tension, bad taste, and nervous laughter all shake hands. He singled out the charm of Roth’s humor and gore, which sounds insane until you remember Cabin Fever really does start like a woods horror movie and gradually mutate into something closer to a diseased frat-house nightmare. It is messy, nasty, and weirdly social, which is probably why it stayed lodged in his movie-brain. | © Lionsgate

18. Moneyball (2011)

Of all the movies on the list, Moneyball may be the most quietly Tarantino-coded, not because anyone gets scalped with a baseball bat, but because it is built around people talking their way into a new reality. He praised Brad Pitt’s work as a movie-star performance that carries the film, and that is exactly the engine here: Pitt turns front-office math into bruised charisma, making spreadsheets feel like a last stand. Baseball nerd cinema, somehow, becomes gunslinger cinema. | © Columbia Pictures

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17. Chocolate (2008)

Tarantino’s love for Chocolate is less about prestige and more about the ancient cinematic pleasure of watching performers risk their bones for the shot. He described it as a movie where people get wrecked in spectacular ways, which is a very Tarantino way of saying the action has weight, danger, and no interest in looking polite. Jeeja Yanin’s debut still plays like a human special effect, and the film’s blunt-force fight choreography clearly scratched an itch few modern action movies reach. | © Sahamongkol Film International

16. The Devil’s Rejects (2005)

Rob Zombie turning horror into a sunburned outlaw road movie was never going to please everyone, which may be half the reason Tarantino respects it. He talked about Zombie fusing Peckinpah energy with sick backwoods horror, and that reading is sharper than it first sounds: The Devil’s Rejects is not just grimy, it is mythmaking for people who absolutely should not get myths. Ugly, abrasive, and perversely confident, it feels like a drive-in movie that stole the car afterward. | © Lionsgate

15. The Passion of the Christ (2004)

Only Tarantino could praise The Passion of the Christ partly through its extremity, treating Mel Gibson’s biblical ordeal like sacred text, endurance test, and splatter spectacle all at once. He has said Gibson’s direction pulled him into the period, which is hard to deny even if the movie remains one of the most combustible mainstream hits ever made. The selection is odd, yes, but very on-brand: he is responding to craft, intensity, and the nerve to push violence past comfort. | © Icon Productions

14. School of Rock (2003)

Tarantino’s affection for School of Rock seems to come from the simple fact that it works like a crowd-pleasing machine without sanding off its personality. He connected its magic to Jack Black, Richard Linklater, and Mike White all clicking at once, and that is the whole movie: a slacker comedy that secretly knows exactly what it is doing. Black storms through it like a man trying to teach fifth-graders and rescue rock history in the same breath. | © Paramount Pictures

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13. Jackass: The Movie (2002)

A lot of “serious cinema” lists would rather pretend Jackass: The Movie happened in another industry, possibly another species. Tarantino, naturally, went the other way, calling it one of the funniest moviegoing experiences he had in that stretch. It belongs here because the filmmaking is crude but the comic timing is not; every terrible idea has setup, escalation, and payoff. It is silent comedy with shopping carts, concussions, and absolutely no shame about its life choices. | © Paramount Pictures

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12. Big Bad Wolves (2013)

Tarantino famously championed Big Bad Wolves, and the attraction is easy to spot: it is a revenge thriller that keeps twisting the knife while asking whether anyone holding it should be trusted. He praised the script and its willingness to go places a safer American version probably would not, which is the movie’s nasty little superpower. The humor is black, the morality is rancid, and the suspense keeps daring the viewer to pick the least terrible person in the room. | © United King Films

11. Battle Royale (2000)

Tarantino’s Battle Royale placement comes with one of his loudest side arguments: he has bluntly accused The Hunger Games of lifting its basic idea from the Japanese cult classic. Ignore the calendar debate for a second and the pick makes total sense, because Kinji Fukasaku’s film has the exact pressure-cooker cruelty Tarantino loves: kids, weapons, pop music, institutional madness, and social satire running around with a grenade. It still feels dangerous in a way imitators rarely do. | © Toei Company

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10. Midnight in Paris (2011)

A Woody Allen nostalgia fantasy landing in Tarantino’s top 10 sounds like a prank until you look at what he responded to: repeated viewings, an initially resisted Owen Wilson performance, and that airy, seductive structure where every midnight becomes a new temptation. Midnight in Paris is not aggressive in the obvious sense, but it is shamelessly movie-drunk, turning literary cameos into comfort food for people who romanticize the wrong decade. Tarantino falling for it is odd, but not random. | © Sony Pictures Classics

9. Shaun of the Dead (2004)

Tarantino respects that Shaun of the Dead is not just making fun of zombie movies; it is one, with jokes sharp enough to draw blood. He has pointed to Edgar Wright’s love for Romero and even singled out its quotability, which gets to the real trick: the movie’s comedy never cancels the horror, and the horror never ruins the hangout vibe. It is a pub crawl through emotional stagnation, undead collapse, and British denial at Olympic levels. | © Universal Pictures

8. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Tarantino apparently resisted Mad Max: Fury Road at first because, in his words, he wanted “Mad Mel,” which is both ridiculous and completely believable. Once he gave in, George Miller’s desert opera did what it does to most people: pinned him to the hood and hit the gas. The movie is pure movement, but not empty movement; every chase advances character, geography, and mythology. Even on this eccentric list, its inclusion feels like the least debatable explosion. | © Warner Bros. Pictures

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7. Unstoppable (2010)

Placing Tony Scott’s Unstoppable this high is where Tarantino’s list starts grinning directly at consensus culture. He reads the runaway train as a monster, which suddenly makes the whole movie feel less like a standard thriller and more like blue-collar creature cinema on rails. Denzel Washington and Chris Pine give it the human rhythm, but Scott’s style is the locomotive: loud, glossy, urgent, and allergic to dead air. It is not trying to be important; it is trying to move. | © 20th Century Fox

6. Zodiac (2007)

Tarantino did not immediately fall for Zodiac, which almost makes his praise more interesting. His appreciation grew through fragments on cable, until David Fincher’s obsessive procedural became the kind of movie he returned to every few years, eventually calling it a “mesmerizing masterwork.” That tracks, because Zodiac behaves less like a serial-killer thriller than a slow infection. The case never stops haunting the people inside it, and Fincher makes uncertainty feel as precise as a fingerprint. | © Paramount Pictures

5. There Will Be Blood (2007)

Tarantino’s take on There Will Be Blood is pure chaos: he adores the old-Hollywood craft, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s command, then turns around and blames Paul Dano for keeping it from the very top. Agree or not, the movie’s placement confirms the obvious: Daniel Plainview remains one of modern cinema’s great monsters, a capitalist vampire in a hat and mustache. It is severe, hypnotic, and somehow gets scarier every time someone talks about milkshakes. | © Paramount Vantage

4. Dunkirk (2017)

Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is another one Tarantino says he came around to through repeat viewings, which feels right for a movie that works more like a watch mechanism than a traditional war drama. The first viewing can be overwhelming; later ones reveal how carefully the land, sea, and air timelines squeeze together. Tarantino praised its mastery, and that is the key word here. Dunkirk is not built for speeches. It is built for pressure, breath, metal, and time running out. | © Warner Bros. Pictures

3. Lost in Translation (2003)

Tarantino’s reaction to Lost in Translation has always had a romantic haze around it, especially since he has connected his love of the movie with his real-life fascination with Sofia Coppola. Strip away the gossip and the pick still fits: Coppola’s film is delicate without being fragile, funny without begging, and melancholy without dragging a piano into the room. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson turn loneliness into a private language, and Tokyo becomes less a backdrop than a mood you can’t quite translate. | © Focus Features

2. Toy Story 3 (2010)

The funniest thing about Tarantino ranking Toy Story 3 this high is that it makes perfect sense once you remember he is a trilogy obsessive. He called it the “greatest end of a trilogy,” and the praise is not just sentimentality; Lee Unkrich’s film is structured like a prison-break movie, a retirement drama, and an existential crisis for plastic cowboys. The incinerator scene still bullies grown adults into silence, which is a pretty good argument for cinematic power. | © Pixar Animation Studios

1. Black Hawk Down (2001)

Tarantino naming Black Hawk Down the best movie of the century is the ranking’s headline grenade, but he made his case through pure direction: the sustained intensity, the sensory assault, and Ridley Scott’s ability to keep the whole nightmare moving without letting it collapse into noise. He called it a “masterwork,” and whether it is your No. 1 or not, the movie’s craft is ferocious. It plays less like a mission movie than a machine that traps everyone inside it. | © Columbia Pictures