Quentin Tarantino has named “the best movie of the 21st century,” and it may surprise you. The Oscar-winning director appeared on the two most recent episodes of The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast to name what are, in his opinion, the 20 best movies of this century; and true to Tarantino’s form, they’re a mix of high and low art.
‘Black Hawk Down’ Is ‘the Best Movie of the 21st Century’
Tarantino named Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001) as the best movie (so far) of the 21st century. Scott’s fact-based war drama follows a team of American soldiers (played by an ensemble including Josh Hartnett, Eric Bana, Ewan McGregor, and Orlando Bloom) as they venture into Somalia to apprehend the top lieutenant of a vicious war lord. But when the American troops find themselves in the center of a deadly ambush, they must put all of their skills to use in a hope to survive.
Black Hawk Down has been hailed as one of the most authentic and harrowing portrayals of combat on-screen. Earlier this year, Scott’s film re-entered the cultural conversation after the release of Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s Warfare, a similarly brutal picture which owes much to Black Hawk’s verisimilitude.
Sony Pictures
‘It Was So Intense’
“I liked it when I first saw it, but I actually think it was so intense that it stopped working for me, and I didn’t carry it with me the way that I should’ve,” Tarantino said of Black Hawk Down. “Since then, I’ve seen it a couple of times, not a bunch of times, but I think it’s a masterwork, and one of the things I love so much about it is…this is the only movie that actually goes completely for an Apocalypse Now sense of purpose and visual effect and feeling, and I think it achieves it,” he said.
“It keeps up the intensity for two hours 45 minutes, or whatever it is,” the Inglourious Basterds director continued, “and I watched it again recently, my heart was going through the entire runtime of the movie; it had me and never let me go, and I hadn’t seen it in a while. The feat of direction is beyond extraordinary.”
Tarantino’s Other Selections Run the Genre Gamut
Tarantino selected Toy Story 3 (2010) as his number two pick, calling the Pixar sequel “an almost perfect movie.” “That last five minutes ripped my f–ing heart out, and if I even try to describe the end, I’ll start crying and get choked up,” he said. “It’s just remarkable.”
Rounding out Tarantino’s top 10 were Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003); Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017), another war film owing a debt to Black Hawk Down; Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007); David Fincher’s masterful Zodiac (2007); train-chase actioner Unstoppable (2010), directed by Tony Scott, brother of Ridley; George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015); Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004); and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011). The bottom half of Tarantino’s top 20 included a higher volume of cult movies, such as Jackass: The Movie (2002); Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects (2007); and Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever (2003).
