Quentin Tarantino Says These Seven Films are Perfect

If there was any film obsessive whose ideas about what constitutes a perfect movie are worth taking seriously, it’s probably Quentin Tarantino, who’s long been one of the culture’s most beloved filmmakers and has lately become one of filmmaking’s most opinionated and highly-regarded armchair critics. Although he’s made headlines lately for a series hot-take shots at actors he can’t stand, including Paul Dano (who he singled out as the weak link in There Will Be Blood), Tarantino has always been an enthusiast and a champion of cinema at heart.

While promoting his first book of film criticism, Cinema Speculation, in an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live a few years back, the director gave Kimmel a short, definitive list of the films he thinks can be safely classified as “perfect” movies.

But before anyone sharpens their metaphorical Twitter pitchforks, he did hasten to make a disclaimer that, ultimately, taste is subjective, though a perfect film may not be a person’s particular “cup of tea” there still isn’t really anything within it to bring it down.

“Well, there’s not many [perfect films], that just bemoans that the film art form is hard,” he said. “Look, when you say perfect movies you’re talking about any individual person’s aesthetic, but even trying to account for all aesthetics, perfect movies kind of cross all aesthetics to one degree or another.”