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Quentin Tarantino’s 11 Favorite Movies Of All Time

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Ignacio Weil

Entertainment - January 23rd 2026, 23:55 GMT+1

Cropped Portada — About This Gallery:

For this gallery, we’re spotlighting 11 films Quentin Tarantino has called personal favorites over the years. One quick note before you dive in: this isn’t a definitive “best movies ever” ranking from Tarantino – just the titles he’s repeatedly praised in interviews and podcasts.

Now it’s your turn: which pick feels most essential to you, and which one surprised you? Drop your favorites in the comments. | © Miramax

Cropped Blow Out — Blow Out (1981)

Tarantino’s love for Brian De Palma isn’t abstract – he talks about craft the way a mechanic talks about an engine, and this one is pure precision. You can feel it in how *Blow Out* treats sound as evidence, mood, and weapon all at once, turning a simple “what happened?” mystery into a full-body paranoia spiral. He’s singled out John Travolta here as doing career-best work, because the performance isn’t just fear – it’s obsession, pride, and heartbreak colliding in real time. The filmmaking is showy in the best way: prowling camera moves, razor-sharp staging, and suspense that keeps tightening even when you already know where it’s headed. It’s also one of those favorites that explains Tarantino’s taste perfectly – genre cinema that plays like entertainment, then leaves you gutted on the way out. | © Viscount Associates

Cropped Carrie — Carrie (1976)

De Palma doesn’t soften the teen cruelty, and that’s part of why Tarantino keeps this one close – there’s no polite distance from the humiliation, the lust, the laughter in the hallway. *Carrie* moves like a high school nightmare that keeps changing rules, flipping from tender to vicious in the time it takes to cut to a new face. The prom sequence isn’t just iconic because of the shock; it’s iconic because De Palma makes you sit in the dread of it, stretching the moment until you’re begging for release. Tarantino has a soft spot for films that are both crowd-pleasers and formally daring, and the split-screen bravura here is exactly that: a director showing off while sharpening the knife. It’s horror with empathy, and then – no mercy. | © Red Bank Films

Cropped Taxi Driver — Taxi Driver (1976)

If you want to understand what Tarantino responds to in character-driven filmmaking, look at how he talks about loneliness as a genre all its own. He’s repeatedly held up Scorsese’s control here – how the city feels like a fever dream without the movie ever announcing it’s being “stylized.” The script’s voice is the hook: diary-like, funny in an uncomfortable way, and creeping toward violence with the logic of a man who thinks he’s cleaning up the world. Tarantino loves movies that trap you inside a point of view, and the way Robert De Niro turns small gestures into a whole psychology is exactly that kind of trap. It’s ugly, hypnotic, and weirdly seductive, the kind of classic that filmmakers don’t just admire – they measure themselves against: *Taxi Driver*. | © Bill/Phillips Productions

Cropped Jaws — Jaws (1975)

The “greatest movie ever made” line isn’t something Tarantino tosses around lightly, and he’s used it about *Jaws* with the kind of certainty that ends the conversation. What he’s really praising is timing – how every scene lands exactly when it should, how the suspense keeps escalating without feeling mechanical, and how Spielberg turns a simple premise into a perfect rollercoaster. The movie’s genius, in Tarantino terms, is that it plays for an audience: big laughs, big shocks, bigger tension, all without losing the characters in the machinery. He’s also drawn to the way it teaches you how to watch it – one ominous detail, one cut, one musical cue, and your brain does the rest. It’s filmmaking that looks effortless while doing something brutally difficult: making everybody in the room react together. | © Universal Pictures

Cropped Five Fingers of Death — Five Fingers Of Death (1972)

*Five Fingers of Death* isn’t on Tarantino’s all-time list as a quirky deep cut – it’s a formative obsession, the kind of movie that rewires a kid’s brain and never fully lets go. He’s told the story of seeing the trailer when he was young and feeling that early-’70s kung fu fever kick in like a switch flipping, because it promised a kind of on-screen intensity American movies weren’t delivering in the same way. What he responds to is the clean, mythic drive: a fighter tested, humiliated, rebuilt, and unleashed, with choreography that reads like storytelling, not just spectacle. You can trace the appeal straight to his own work – how revenge becomes structure, how music and movement lock together, how violence turns operatic. Beyond the punches, it’s the audience effect that matters: the communal rush of watching a hero level up and finally cash the check the plot has been writing. | © Shaw Brothers Studio

Cropped The Good the Bad and the Ugly — The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1966)

Tarantino has flat-out called this his favorite film, and you don’t have to squint to see why: it treats style as substance, and it turns waiting into a form of action. Leone’s world is dusty, funny, cruel, and strangely intimate – three men circling each other with shifting alliances, and every close-up feeling like a duel before the duel. He’s obsessed with how the movie builds rhythm: Morricone’s music, the pauses that stretch just past comfort, and the way a simple glance can land like a gunshot. For Tarantino, this is the gold standard of cinematic storytelling – big myth, sharp character definitions, and a finale that’s pure film language, no translation needed. Even the comedy is part of the violence: you laugh, then realize you’re laughing in a graveyard. That’s the spell *The Good, the Bad and the Ugly* casts, and it still works. | © Produzioni Europee Associati

Cropped Rio Bravo — Rio Bravo (1959)

The quickest way to clock Tarantino’s taste is to watch what he calls a “hangout movie,” and this is his gold standard. He’s praised the pleasure of simply living with these characters – waiting around, swapping jokes, holding the line – because the camaraderie is the point as much as the siege. The sheriff’s office becomes its own little ecosystem, where competence, loyalty, and stubborn pride bounce off each other like dialogue in a packed room. It’s also a masterclass in tone: funny without turning into a spoof, tense without acting self-important, and relaxed even when the stakes are life-or-death. That famous mid-film musical detour isn’t a detour at all in Tarantino terms – it’s Hawks understanding that audience pleasure counts as storytelling. You can feel why this one gets rewatched like comfort food, because the rhythm is so clean you stop noticing the mechanics and just enjoy the company in *Rio Bravo*. | © Armada Productions

Cropped Unfaithfully Yours — Unfaithfully Yours (1948)

Tarantino has a special radar for movies that treat editing like music, and he’s name-dropped this Preston Sturges oddity as a rare case where the film is essentially “cut to music.” That makes perfect sense once you’re inside the premise: jealousy hits, the orchestra starts, and the hero’s imagination begins conducting its own violent, romantic, and self-pitying fantasies. The fun isn’t simply that Rex Harrison can play smug and unhinged in the same breath – it’s how the movie weaponizes timing, letting classical cues steer the mood swings like a throttle. Then the rug-pull lands: the grand schemes collapse into humiliating physical farce, the kind of pratfall realism that punctures macho daydreams. Tarantino likes cinema that’s bold about form without losing the laugh, and the way *Unfaithfully Yours* turns highbrow concert pomp into a ticking comic engine feels tailor-made for that sensibility. | © Twentieth Century-Fox

Cropped Five Graves to Cairo — Five Graves To Cairo (1943)

He’s talked about being drawn to war movies that are story-first, and this one sits high on his personal shelf for exactly that reason. Tarantino has called it one of his favorite war stories, admiring how Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett aren’t interested in a dutiful history lesson so much as a pressure-cooker thriller with shifting identities. The desert hotel setting is classic Wilder: a tight space where power changes hands by the minute, and every conversation could get you killed. Tarantino has even singled out the film’s take on Rommel – saying it isn’t especially “credible,” but that it’s a fantastic screen version – because it understands character as dramatic function. It’s espionage you can follow, suspense that comes from choices rather than spectacle, and a reminder that wartime stakes don’t require wall-to-wall battle scenes. That blend of clean plotting and sharp tonal control is why *Five Graves to Cairo* keeps turning up in his references. | © Paramount Pictures

Cropped His Girl Friday — His Girl Friday (1940)

Tarantino has told the story of discovering Howard Hawks through this movie, and the punchline is simple: he thought it was the best thing he’d ever seen. You can hear why in the dialogue alone – overlapping, aggressive, flirtatious, and so fast it feels like a sport where nobody’s allowed to breathe. The newsroom isn’t just a setting; it’s a machine, and Hawks lets the whole place rattle and sing while Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell spar like they’re rewriting each other’s sentences in real time. That musical quality to the interruptions is the kind of “talk” Tarantino builds his own scenes around, where rhythm matters as much as wit. Beneath the fireworks, it’s also ruthlessly cynical about the press, politics, and human decency, which keeps the comedy from floating away. Screwball romance rarely feels this sharp-edged, which is exactly why he keeps *His Girl Friday* close. | © Columbia Pictures

Cropped Pandoras Box — Pandora’s Box (1929)

Silent cinema isn’t the first place people expect Tarantino to plant a flag, which is partly why this choice says so much about his eye. He’s ranked this film remarkably high on his personal all-timer list and has pointed to it as proof that “modern” screen magnetism didn’t start with sound – Louise Brooks already had it, devastatingly. The movie’s power is how quickly desire curdles into ruin, with Lulu treated as both an irresistible force and a person constantly punished for being one. It’s blunt about obsession, class, and hypocrisy, yet the staging stays elegant, almost casual, as if scandal is just another daily routine. Tarantino tends to love characters who light up a room and wreck it at the same time, and Lulu is that archetype in its purest form. By the time the story drifts into its darkest corner, the film feels less like an antique and more like a warning that never stops echoing – *Pandora’s Box*. | © Nero-Film A.G.

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Quentin Tarantino doesn’t hand out “favorites” the way most directors do. When he names the movies he loves most, he’s pointing to the engines behind his own filmmaking: the swagger of genre cinema, the snap of dialogue, the kind of tension that makes a crowd lean forward without realizing it.

These 11 picks aren’t just a cinephile’s brag list – they’re a crash course in what Tarantino values on screen, from gritty crime tales to audacious crowd-pleasers that still feel dangerous. If you want a clearer sense of what shaped his taste (and his style), this is the closest thing to a syllabus.

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Quentin Tarantino doesn’t hand out “favorites” the way most directors do. When he names the movies he loves most, he’s pointing to the engines behind his own filmmaking: the swagger of genre cinema, the snap of dialogue, the kind of tension that makes a crowd lean forward without realizing it.

These 11 picks aren’t just a cinephile’s brag list – they’re a crash course in what Tarantino values on screen, from gritty crime tales to audacious crowd-pleasers that still feel dangerous. If you want a clearer sense of what shaped his taste (and his style), this is the closest thing to a syllabus.