Quentin Tarantino's Favorite Movies: His Top 20 Since Becoming a Director

This is not a ranking of Quentin Tarantino's own films. It is the list he gave of other people's movies — his favourite twenty from the years after he became a director.

The source is a 2009 Sky Movies conversation, recorded around the UK opening of Inglourious Basterds. He limited the field to films released since 1992, the year of Reservoir Dogs. He named one number-one title. He read the other nineteen in alphabetical order. That is the list below. It is not a top ten, and it is not a later "perfect movies" clip unless a separate interview is cited.

If you want his films in release order, use the Tarantino filmography. If you want our editorial ranking of those films, that is a different page.

The film he put first

1. Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000). In the Sky Movies intro he called Fukasaku's film his favorite of the previous seventeen years. The Comcast write-up of that conversation quotes him: "If there's any movie that's been made since I've been making movies that I wish I had made, it's that one."

Places 2–20, as he listed them

He did not rank these. Alphabetical order is the method, not a slight.

2. Anything Else (Woody Allen, 2003). A late Allen comedy about a writer who cannot get out of his own head. On a Tarantino list it is a reminder that he watches talk, not only carnage.

3. Audition (Takashi Miike, 1999). A courtship that becomes a trap. Useful next to Battle Royale if you are building a Japanese-genre shelf from this list.

4. The Blade (Tsui Hark, 1995). A ragged wuxia revenge film. If Kill Bill is the remix, this is one of the records on the counter.

5. Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997). A family forming inside an industry that will not last. PTA's ensemble is a different kind of chapter structure.

6. Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993). The hangout movie as a complete form. Linklater trusts time the way Tarantino trusts a booth conversation.

7. Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003). Almost no set; the town is chalk on a floor. He has praised the script as among the great ones of that period. Watch it when you want to see how little furniture a moral argument needs.

8. Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999). Fincher's most quoted film. It is here because Tarantino named it, not because it is a secret key to his own work.

9. Friday (F. Gary Gray, 1995). Ice Cube and Chris Tucker, one neighborhood, one very long day. Proof the list is movies he loves, not a canon exam.

10. The Host (Bong Joon-ho, 2006). A monster movie that is also a family film. Bong appears twice on this list, which is the real recommendation.

11. The Insider (Michael Mann, 1999). Al Pacino and Russell Crowe in a whistleblower thriller. Mann's procedural heat sits next to Tarantino's talk: two ways to make information feel dangerous.

12. Joint Security Area (Park Chan-wook, 2000). Soldiers on either side of a border who cannot stay in their assigned story. This is the Park title he named — not Oldboy, which people often search when they hear "Tarantino" and "Korean cinema" in the same breath.

13. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003). Two people killing time in a city that will not belong to them. The quietest film on the list.

14. The Matrix (Lana and Lilly Wachowski, 1999). He told Sky Movies there was a time he would have called it the official number two after Battle Royale, before the sequels, in his words, "ruined the mythology." It stayed in the twenty.

15. Memories of Murder (Bong Joon-ho, 2003). Bong's second entry: a serial-killer case that refuses a clean ending. If you only know Parasite, this is the earlier film that explains his patience.

16. Police Story 3: Supercop (Stanley Tong, 1992). Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh. He called its stunts — including Yeoh putting a motorcycle on a moving train — among the greatest ever filmed, Buster Keaton included.

17. Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004). He called it his favorite British film of the period. Wright's comedy is edited like action; the joke and the set piece use the same muscle.

18. Speed (Jan de Bont, 1994). Easy to take for granted now. He asked people to remember the bus in a theater: few "exhilaration movies," he said, have matched that specific ride.

19. Team America: World Police (Trey Parker, 2004). Puppets, bad taste, and a political cartoon that knows it is a cartoon. It is on the list because he said it is.

20. Unbreakable (M. Night Shyamalan, 2000). A superhero origin told like a ghost story. Shyamalan at his most hushed.

How to watch this list

Do not treat twenty titles as a sentence. Pick one cluster — Bong's two films, the Japanese genre pair, the American hangout movies — and mark the rest unseen. That is how you start a filmography without drowning.

On Diro, follow Tarantino for his features, then add the directors on this list you actually want to continue. The point of a favorite-movies page is not to finish someone else's taste. It is to steal a few doors.

Sources

• Sky Movies / Tarantino weekend introduction (2009): the Top 20 since 1992, Battle Royale first, remaining titles alphabetical.
• Comcast recap of that conversation, archived 26 August 2009: the Battle Royale "wish I had made" line, plus his comments on The Matrix and Speed.
• FirstShowing.net (16 August 2009) and Flicks: contemporary write-ups of the same Sky Movies list.

We have not folded later "perfect movies" clips into this page. If he publishes a new twenty with a named date, that is an update — not a silent rewrite.