Tarantino's Top 10 Movies of the 21st Century

Revealed on a podcast yesterday.

10. Midnight in Paris

"I can’t stand Owen Wilson in Woody Allen movies. The first time I saw it, I was like, ‘The movie’s great, but I don’t like that guy.’ The second time, I was like, ‘You know what, let me not be so hard on him. He’s not so bad.’ And the third time, I was watching him, and I wasn’t watching the movie. I was watching Owen Wilson."

9. Shaun of the Dead

"It's my favorite director's debut. He has another, low-budget debut that he doesn't like to talk about. [...] I love how much he loves George Romero’s world that he re-created. The script is fantastic, and it has one of the best lines of dialogue in this entire list. I still go around saying, ‘Dogs can’t look up.’ This isn’t a parody of a zombie movie. It’s a *real* zombie movie. And I appreciate that."

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8. Mad Max: Fury Road

"I didn’t want to see it. Mel Gibson is out there. He’s not Max! I want Mad Mel! And I was like, ‘No.’ Weeks go by, and people are still going, ‘It’s killer.’ And my editor, Fred, is going, ‘Seriously, you have to see it.’ So I saw it. And the killer scenes are killer. I’m watching a truly great filmmaker at work, and he’s spent all the money and all the time in the world to do exactly what he wanted to do."

7. Unstoppable

"One of my favorite Tony Scott movies. I’ve seen it four times, and I like it more each time. A few years ago, I would have said *Man on Fire*, but *Unstoppable* is the purest vision of Tony Scott’s action aesthetic. The two actors are fantastic together, and it just keeps building and building. It’s one of the best monster movies of the 21st century. The train is the monster. The train becomes the monster. It's one of the great monsters of our time. More powerful than Godzilla or King Kong movies."

6. Zodiac

"I didn’t like *Zodiac* the first time I saw it. But I saw it on TV again, and I watched 20 minutes of it, and then 40 minutes, and it was so much more compelling than I remembered. It was pulling me in so many different ways that I decided I had to watch this motherfucker again, and do it right. And from that point on, it was a completely different experience. I’ve seen it every six or seven years, and it’s a treat for myself. It’s a hypnotic masterpiece."

5. There Will Be Blood

"Daniel Day-Lewis. And the old-fashioned craftsmanship that permeates the movie. It’s not imitative old-fashioned craftsmanship; it’s *real* old-fashioned Hollywood craftsmanship. It’s the only movie he’s made that doesn’t have a set piece. The oil derrick fire is as close as it gets. This was a story and character movie, and he did it with Johnnie To–like brilliance. *There Will Be Blood* could have been my number one or two. If it wasn’t for the one big, huge flaw… and that flaw is Paul Dano. It’s a two-hander, and you can’t tell it’s a two-hander because he’s so fucking bad. He’s so weak. He would have been fantastic with Austin Butler. He’s just too weak and not interesting. He’s the weakest actor in the Screen Actors Guild."

Seriously, he said this.

4. Dunkirk

"I didn’t like this movie the first time I saw it. The reason I love it now is that I’ve seen it a number of times, and the mastery of the filmmaker is palpable. I wasn’t unmoved the first time I saw it; I was just too fucking overwhelmed. I was overloaded. I just didn’t know what I was seeing. The second time, my brain started to catch up, and the third and fourth times, I was like, ‘Wow, this just blew me away.’"

3. Lost in Translation

"I fell in love with *Lost in Translation*, and I fell in love with Sofia Coppola and made her my girlfriend. I courted her publicly. I wooed her. It was like a Jane Austen novel. I wasn’t personally acquainted with her enough, but I kept showing up at events. I talked to Pedro Almodóvar about this, and we agreed that this is a really *girly* movie. In the best, most delicious way. I hadn’t seen a girly movie like that for so long, and I’d never seen one that was so well-made."

2. Toy Story 3

"The last five minutes absolutely ripped my fucking heart out. I can’t even talk about the ending without tearing up and my throat getting choked. It’s just wonderful. It’s a near-perfect movie. Not to mention the constant flow of comedy. It’s very hard for a third movie in a trilogy to succeed. The other one for me is *The Good, the Bad and the Ugly*, and this is the *Good, the Bad and the Ugly* of animation. It’s the greatest conclusion to a trilogy."

1. Black Hawk Down

"I liked it the first time I saw it, but it was almost too intense for me to fully process. I couldn’t hold the feelings I should have held. I’ve seen it a few more times since then, and it’s a masterpiece. One of the reasons I love it so much is that… it’s the only movie that perfectly pursues the intention and the visual and the feeling that *Apocalypse Now* showed, and it actually achieved it. It sustains that intensity for the entire 2 hours and 45 minutes. I watched it again recently, and I was like, my heart is pounding the entire time. It grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. I hadn’t seen it in quite a while. The direction is beyond extraordinary."