Quentin Tarantino Shares His Pick for the Best Movie of the 21st Century

As the end of 2025 approaches and the 21st century rounds into its second quarter, Quentin Tarantino is assessing his favorite movies of the last 25 years.

Tarantino, 62, appeared on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast on Tuesday, Dec. 2, to go over his favorite movies with host Bret Easton Ellis, an author and screenwriter best known for writing the 1991 novel American Psycho. The Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood director picked a movie that some cinephiles may find surprising as his top movie of the century so far: director Ridley Scott’s 2001 ensemble war drama Black Hawk Down.

“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 the movie. Black Hawk Down costarred Ewan McGregor, Josh Hartnett, Eric Bana, Tom Sizemore, Jason Isaacs, Tom Hardy, Orlando Bloom and more as a crew of American soldiers whose helicopter is shot down during a pivotal battle in the Somali civil war in 1993. (The movie won two Oscars in 2002 for Best Sound and Best Film Editing.)

Tarantino described Black Hawk Down as “the only movie that actually goes completely for an Apocalypse Now kind of sense of purpose and visual effect and feeling.”

“I watched it again recently… my heart was going [pounding noises] through the entire running time of the movie. It had me and it never let me go,” he added.

Tarantino also named two beloved movies (if not similar curveballs) as his second and third favorite movies of the last 25 years: Toy Story 3, the third entry in Pixar’s beloved Toy Story franchise, and director Sofia Coppola’s 2003 drama Lost in Translation.

“That last five minutes ripped my f—— heart out, and if I even try to describe the end, I will start crying and get choked up,” Tarantino said of Toy Story 3. As far as the later film went, Tarantino said, “I hadn’t really seen that girly a movie in a long time, and I hadn’t seen that girly a movie be so well done,” when it came to Coppola’s Lost in Translation.

Beyond Black Hawk Down, Toy Story 3 and Lost in Translation, Tarantino named the following movies as the rest of his top 10 films of the 21st century so far: Dunkirk, There Will Be Blood, Zodiac, Unstoppable, Mad Max: Fury Road, Shaun of the Dead and Midnight in Paris. 

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Tarantino himself last released a movie with 2019’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, starring Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Leonardo DiCaprio. Pitt will reprise his role from that movie as fictional 1960s stunt man Cliff Booth in an upcoming spinoff written by Tarantino and directed by David Fincher (The Killer, Se7en), set for release sometime in 2026.

During a January 2025 appearance at the Sundance Film Festival, the Pulp Fiction director said he likely will not make his long-awaited 10th (and apparently final) film until his son Leo, 5, “is at least 6” years old. “That way he’ll know what’s going on, he’ll be there, and it will be a memory for the rest of his life,” Tarantino said at the time.