Of course, Quentin Tarantino’s version of a 21st-century canon was never going to look respectable, but even by his standards, the first half of his list is wild. Unveiled on Bret Easton Ellis’ podcast, his 11–20 picks fold “Jackass: The Movie,” “School of Rock,” and “The Passion of the Christ,” alongside titles like “Moneyball” and “West Side Story,” a lineup that plays like equal parts grindhouse altar and sincere movie-love.
The rules are simple: only films from 2000 onward, and just one title per director. Tarantino’s 11–20 stretch runs, in order, through “Battle Royale,” “Big Bad Wolves,” “Jackass: The Movie,” “School of Rock,” “The Passion of the Christ,” “The Devil’s Rejects,” “Chocolate,” “Moneyball,” “Cabin Fever,” and “West Side Story.” It is a swing from cult extremity to Oscar prestige.
Some of the most eyebrow-raising entries are also the easiest to decode. Tarantino has spent years loudly backing Richard Linklater and Eli Roth, so seeing “School of Rock” and “Cabin Fever” make the cut feels less like a cold ranking and more like a nod to two filmmakers in his circle. At the same time, both choices track with his taste: a scrappy, performance-driven studio comedy and a grungy early-2000s splatter calling card of tension, gross-out gags, and punk energy.
Then there are the outliers that feel engineered to inflame Film Twitter. “Jackass: The Movie” lands here because Tarantino says it is the movie that made him laugh the hardest in the last twenty years, to the point that he screened it for the “Kill Bill” crew during production. “The Passion of the Christ,” meanwhile, hits the list not as a devotional endorsement but because its relentless, confrontational violence plays for him like a deranged endurance test that made him howl with perverse laughter.
If anything in the mix looks like traditional canon building, it is “Moneyball” and “West Side Story.” Tarantino has praised Bennett Miller’s baseball drama for its script architecture and one of Brad Pitt’s most quietly commanding star turns, while his take on Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” is even spicier: he calls it the most exciting film of the century so far and suggests Martin Scorsese has not made anything as electric in the same period (perhaps he’s forgotten that “Wolf Of Wall Street” came out in 2013).
Taken together, the 11–20 batch is semi-baffling if you are searching for respectability, but completely coherent as a map of what actually turns Tarantino on: sadistic genre exercises, outlaw horror, unapologetically lowbrow comedy, and a couple of big, polished studio swings that prove Hollywood can still knock him out when it wants to.
Here’s the final 11-20 list. Presumably part two releases on Easton’s podcast soon.
- “Battle Royale“
- “Big Bad Wolves“
- “Jackass: The Movie“
- “School of Rock“
- “The Passion of the Christ“
- “The Devil’s Rejects“
- “Chocolate“
- “Moneyball“
- “Cabin Fever“
- “West Side Story“
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
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