Recommendations of the Editorial team
Quentin Tarantino, who once worked as a video store owner, based his Hollywood career largely on preserving cinematic ideas and aesthetic tricks of the past. In doing so, he brought spaghetti westerns, blaxploitation and martial arts films to new life.
However, if you ask the director what he likes about contemporary cinema, you often get very monosyllabic answers. Most recently, Tarantino caused a stir when he chose the best films of the 21st century and, in doing so, also trashed Paul Dano’s acting performance in “There Will Be Blood”. That didn’t go down well with many colleagues.
In a detailed Essay for the film magazine “Sight & Sound” Tarantino wrote about a recent film that really impressed him. This is about “The Rip” by director and screenwriter Joe Carnahan with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. While the 63-year-old explained in detail what makes the Netflix thriller so special, he also criticized a large part of the cinema of the last few years.
“Flaws, implausibility, pandering to audiences, miscast actors, or just plain stupid crap tend to ruin any new film that comes out of that tasteless sausage factory that used to call itself Hollywood,” he wrote. “These days, the whole concept of what constitutes a film inspires in me more contempt than goodwill. In comparison, the films of the last six years make the ’80s seem like the ’30s.”
Quentin Tarantino prefers reading books
Of course, exceptions prove the rule, and that also applies to Tarantino. Several films escape his harsh judgment. In an interview on the “ReelBlend” podcast in 2022, he talked about loving “Top Gun: Maverick.” He also received honorable mentions in his text for “Sight & Sound”. “I’ve seen a few films lately that I liked – ‘West Side Story’ (2021, Spielberg remake of the classic), ‘Horizon: An American Saga’ Chapters 1 and 2 (both 2024), and a few others too, but nothing that really captivated me,” the director wrote.
Basically, there are hardly any films that would lure him to this mysterious country, which he used to visit regularly and which was the reason why he loved films about all other art forms. “These days I prefer to read a book,” Tarantino added.
A bitter judgment, but possibly also a small advertising reference to the artist, who now also works as an author, who has not made another film since “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood” (2019), although according to him, one more work is due before the announced retirement. A project with the working title “The Movie Critic” failed before the first shot was even released.