Quentin Tarantino - 2007 - Scream Awards - Director - pinguino k

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The only movies Quentin Tarantino called perfect: “There’s not many of them”

Thu 22 May 2025 17:10, UK

Quentin Tarantino loves movies. In fact, he’s so passionate about them that he would probably be content to do nothing but talk about films for the rest of his life. His knowledge is encyclopaedic. He spent his childhood watching as many movies as he could get his hands on and his early adulthood working in a video store. It is quite possible that if he’d never picked up a movie camera or put pen to paper to write a script, he would still be famous through sheer passion for the cinematic medium.

Over the years, he has listed hundreds of movies that he loves, hates, or believes are underrated. His tastes are often niche. He’s a fan of exploitation movies, graphic violence, spaghetti westerns, and a trashy rom-com or two. He isn’t afraid to bash Oscar-winning movies, beloved directors, or revered classics. He pays homage to an untold number of obscure and lauded films in his own movies, and he’s usually giddy to give credit where credit is due.

Still, despite this overabundance of passion, Tarantino doesn’t toss around the word ‘perfect’ very often. During a 2022 interview with Jimmy Kimmel, the Pulp Fiction director was asked about which films he thought fit that lofty description. “Well, there’s not many of them,” he said. “That just bemoans the fact that the film art form is hard.” He also pointed out that the term is based on an individual’s aesthetic sense, but that a ‘perfect’ movie should transcend subjectivity.

On that basis, he named Steven Spielberg’s classic blockbuster Jaws, William Friedkin’s groundbreaking horror movie The Exorcist, Woody Allen’s anti-romantic comedy Annie Hall, Mel Brooks’s monster movie spoof Young Frankenstein, and Robert Zemeckis’s feel-good sci-fi comedy Back to the Future. He also noted that Sam Peckinpah’s revisionist western The Wild Bunch deserved a mention, even though it couldn’t strictly be described as perfect. “That’s kind of the point, though, right?” he said, adding, “Its imperfections are part of its glory.” Previously, he had also named Tobe Hooper’s gruesome cannibal horror movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as flawless.

Individual films aside, Tarantino has been open about his pure adoration for Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy. “I think there’s only one trilogy that completely and utterly works to the nth degree, and that’s A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” he said. “It does what no other trilogy has ever been quite able to do. The first movie is terrific, but the second movie is so great and takes the whole idea to such a bigger canvas that it obliterates the first one. And then the third one does the same thing to the second one, and that’s kind of what never happens.”

As for his own movies, Tarantino has only ever given one of them the ‘perfect’ label. “Forever, when people would ask me what my favourite film is of mine, it almost felt like sacrilege to say anything but Reservoir Dogs because it changed my life,” he said, adding that his 1992 directorial debut is “kind of a perfect movie for what it is.” Given how long ago he made it, he felt that he could say that without sounding too self-aggrandising. “It’s just what it is.”