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Quentin Tarantino’s 11 Favorite Movies Of All Time

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Ignacio Weil

Entertainment - April 26th 2026, 17:00 GMT+2

Cropped Portada — About This Gallery:

For this gallery, we’re spotlighting 11 films Quentin Tarantino has named among his personal favorites over the years. One quick note before you dive in: this is not a definitive “best movies ever” ranking from Tarantino, just a collection of titles he has praised repeatedly in interviews, podcasts, and other conversations.

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

Cropped Blow Out — 1. Blow Out (1981)

A conspiracy thriller built from sound cues, panic, and pure movie craft, this is the kind of film that seems to tighten its grip every ten minutes. John Travolta plays a sound technician who catches evidence of a political murder by accident, and Brian De Palma turns that setup into a fever dream of paranoia, guilt, and split-diopter elegance. What lingers most is how cruelly it refuses comfort; *Blow Out* is not interested in tidy justice, only the awful price of seeing clearly too late. | © Filmways Pictures

Cropped Carrie — 2. Carrie (1976)

Teen cruelty usually gets packaged as harmless high-school drama, then *Carrie* arrives and reminds everyone that humiliation can feel apocalyptic. Sissy Spacek gives the story its bruised soul, while the film keeps shifting from awkward coming-of-age sadness to full nightmare without losing balance. The famous prom sequence still hits like a trapdoor opening beneath the genre itself, not just because of the blood, but because the whole movie has been quietly winding the spring for that one terrible release. | © United Artists

Cropped Taxi Driver — 3. Taxi Driver (1976)

Nothing about this descent is flashy in a comforting way; it just keeps getting nastier, lonelier, and more locked inside Travis Bickle’s head. Scorsese shoots New York like a city sweating through its own fever, and Robert De Niro turns alienation into something almost tactile. The reason *Taxi Driver* refuses to age out of the conversation is simple: it does not explain away violence with coolness or myth, even when the culture around it tries to do exactly that. | © Columbia Pictures

Cropped Jaws — 4. Jaws (1975)

The funniest thing about *Jaws* is that it is remembered as a shark movie when it is also a near-perfect machine about leadership, cowardice, class friction, and men improvising badly under pressure. Spielberg squeezes suspense from what you cannot see, and that restraint gives the attacks their nasty staying power. Then the film pivots into an almost hangout rhythm on the boat, where Brody, Hooper, and Quint feel so vivid you forget you are watching one of the templates for the modern blockbuster. Then the shark returns and reminds you why people checked the water for weeks. | © Universal Pictures

Cropped Five Fingers of Death — 5. Five Fingers Of Death (1972)

Long before kung fu became standard pop culture wallpaper, this one hit American audiences like a siren going off. The setup is classic martial-arts revenge territory, but the real charge comes from the speed, the snap, and the unapologetic showmanship of the fights. There is no embarrassed distance in *Five Fingers of Death*; it believes in every dramatic glare and every brutal strike, which is exactly why it works. You can also feel how much later genre filmmakers borrowed from that mix of velocity, swagger, and pure crowd-pleasing violence. | © Shaw Brothers Studio

Cropped The Good the Bad and the Ugly — 6. The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1966)

Dust, greed, war, and one of the greatest music cues ever dropped into a frame; some movies do not so much begin as announce themselves. Sergio Leone stretches every stare and every silence until tension becomes its own form of action, then lets Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach play off each other like three competing definitions of myth. What makes *The Good, the Bad and the Ugly* so durable is that beneath all the iconography, it is also funny, mean, and strangely aware of how absurd violence looks up close. | © United Artists

Cropped Rio Bravo — 7. Rio Bravo (1959)

A lot of westerns are built around movement, but this one gets its strength from people staying put and refusing to crack. The plot is wonderfully clean: hold the line, trust the right few, and wait for trouble to arrive. That simplicity leaves room for everything that makes *Rio Bravo* so beloved, from the easy camaraderie to the unforced confidence of its performances. It is a tough movie with a relaxed pulse, the kind that makes professionalism, loyalty, and quiet competence feel more exciting than a dozen louder films. | © Warner Bros.

Cropped Unfaithfully Yours — 8. Unfaithfully Yours (1948)

Jealousy has rarely looked this elegant or absurd. Preston Sturges takes a conductor’s suspicion of infidelity and turns it into a comic structure where fantasy and reality humiliate each other in turns. The brilliance of *Unfaithfully Yours* is in the contrast: the imagined revenge scenarios feel sleek, controlled, almost aristocratic, while real life keeps collapsing into chaos the moment the character tries to perform his own schemes. It is one of those comedies that gets sharper the darker it becomes, which helps explain why filmmakers with a taste for precision and cruelty keep circling back to it. | © Twentieth Century-Fox

Cropped Five Graves to Cairo — 9. Five Graves To Cairo (1943)

Set in a desert hotel during wartime, this one moves with the lean efficiency of a thriller that knows exactly how much tension to spend in each scene. Billy Wilder builds the story around deception, surveillance, and one bad mistake waiting to happen, while Erich von Stroheim gives Rommel a cool, unnerving authority. What keeps *Five Graves to Cairo* so alive is how stripped-down it feels; there is barely an ounce of waste on it. The film understands that suspense gets stronger when the room gets smaller and the lies get harder to maintain. | © Paramount Pictures

Cropped His Girl Friday — 10. His Girl Friday (1940)

Trying to keep up with this dialogue is half the fun and most of the thrill. Howard Hawks does not treat speed as a gimmick here; he uses it like a weapon, turning newsroom banter into a kind of romantic warfare between Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. *His Girl Friday* still feels modern because it never slows down to flatter the audience or underline the joke in red pen. It trusts performance, timing, and pure verbal velocity, which is why the film still feels light on its feet while so many comedies from later decades feel winded. | © Columbia Pictures

Cropped Pandoras Box — 11. Pandora’s Box (1929)

There is nothing dusty or museum-like about the pull of this silent classic; it feels dangerous in a way that plenty of newer films still cannot manage. Louise Brooks gives Lulu an almost impossible combination of innocence, sensuality, and total social disruption, so every scene carries the sense that someone is about to lose control. *Pandora’s Box* understands desire as a force that scrambles class, respectability, and reason, and G. W. Pabst films that collapse without softening it. Nearly a century later, it still plays like scandal preserved in perfect condition. | © Nero-Film A.G.

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Quentin Tarantino has never been shy about the films that shaped his taste, and that is part of what makes his personal favorites so interesting to revisit. This is not just a list of great movies, but a map of the obsessions, risks, and bold storytelling choices that echo through his own work. Some picks are expected, others feel wonderfully specific, and together they reveal the kind of cinema that still excites one of Hollywood’s most recognizable filmmakers. For movie fans, it is a chance to look at film history through Tarantino’s famously opinionated eyes.

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Quentin Tarantino has never been shy about the films that shaped his taste, and that is part of what makes his personal favorites so interesting to revisit. This is not just a list of great movies, but a map of the obsessions, risks, and bold storytelling choices that echo through his own work. Some picks are expected, others feel wonderfully specific, and together they reveal the kind of cinema that still excites one of Hollywood’s most recognizable filmmakers. For movie fans, it is a chance to look at film history through Tarantino’s famously opinionated eyes.