If artistry and entertainment had a baby, that would veritably look like Quentin Tarantino. There is an innumerable list of reasons that make Tarantino one of the most celebrated and highly influential filmmaker of all time, though his films only contribute 50% of it. The other half derives from his contagiously inspiring passion for cinema. From working in a video archive store to sculpting cinematic masterpieces, Tarantino has illuminated the world with his trademark films that induce exuberance, inspiration, and adrenaline.
Starting from his path-charting Reservoir Dogs to his ambitious ode to ’60s cult and Hollywood cinema, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino has never failed to cast his esoteric spell on the world of cinema. With blood, brains, words, and themes as his allies; actors, stuntmen, cars, and music as his weapons; historical fiction, feet, and controversial happenings as his ponies, Tarantino made sure to conquer the world with his peculiarly pedantic style of filmmaking and paved the path for millions of filmmakers across the world who practically worship his films as much as they do his aura.
Tarantino has always been very vocal about emphasizing the importance of cinema and how film plays a key role in human life, especially in postmodernity. Every film of his is a driving force that swims against the meandering stream of conventional cinema. With fewer films, Tarantino has perpetually engraved his initials on the cinematic landscape as the most influential auteur whose films are therapeutically entertaining and inciting at the same time. Nonetheless, as a director, Quentin Tarantino is incorrigibly persistent in only making 10 films in his lifetime. With Once Upon a Time in Hollywood being his penultimate feature film, the whole cinema world is now high-strung for the announcement of his alleged last feature film (while hoping he’ll change his decision). Before that happens, here is a list of Tarantino-esque films to binge in the meantime if you are a die-hard fan of the director’s style, and on a constant search for similar films to scratch the itch Tarantino soothes so well.
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8 The Great Escape
United Artists
Quentin Tarantino himself has affirmed on many occasions that The Great Escape is one of his all-time favorite films, and many of his action sequences were inspired by it. Set during World War II, The Great Escape is a star-studded action-adventure film that chronicles the lives of prisoners of war in a German camp plotting to pull off the Great Escape from the prison. It is particularly imperative for Tarantino fans to watch this epic action movie that even plays a cameo in his most recent film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and inspired much of Inglourious Basterds.
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7 True Romance
Warner Bros.
Although the inclusion of True Romance in the list might feel a bit biased since the master himself co-wrote the screenplay of the film, True Romance is a wild romantic escapade of a frivolous but madly-in-love couple who’s on the run from pimps, gangsters, cops. The movie is wonderfully acted, and has one of the iconic Brad Pitt performances from his earlier years. Irrespective of the fact that Tarantino didn’t direct the film, True Romance is all things Tarantino-esque. It’s exuberant, racy, suspenseful, and funny, with one hell of a show-stopping climax.
6 Bound
Dino De Laurentiis Company
Bound might come as a surprise to many, for sure. This criminally underrated neo-noir ’90s crime thriller is about an estranged mistress of a gangster who becomes involved in a romantic relationship with Violet, the vivaciously attractive woman next door. Things soon take a dark, twisty turn when the mistress decides to rob the gangster for millions so she and her newly found fling can escape from the pit.
Now what makes this film (helmed by the Wachowski sisters pre-Matrix) Tarantino-esque is the tangible drama that’s stretched throughout the film, which feels taut and tense, and the surprising outbursts of violence. Bound is a film that feels like an extension of Hans Landa’s introduction in Inglourious Basterds. It’s intense, violent, stimulating, sexy, and unpredictable. If you enjoy movies with claustrophobic suspense, this one is for you.
5 Seven Psychopaths
Momentum PicturesCBS Films
The anecdote-filled masterpiece Seven Psychopaths is a gift custom-wrapped for Quentin Tarantino fans all over the world. Embellished with an extraordinary ensemble of actors like Colin Farrell, Christopher Walken, and Sam Rockwell, Seven Psychopaths is a ruminative, blood-splattering tale embodying seven psychopaths crossing paths with each other in very peculiar, rather quirky ways. To put a cherry on top, Woody Harrelson plays a deranged gangster who earnestly loves his dog more than people in this almost anthological film with infallible writing by the acclaimed auteur and playwright Martin McDonagh, director of In Bruges (another transfixing masterpiece).
Seven Psychopaths is a concoction of biblical references, satirical anecdotes, and absurd characters supplemented uniformly to create a ludicrous yet attractive dish, culminated by McDonagh’s absolute mastery of language that makes it a must-watch. The film starts on an interestingly bloody premise and continues to hold its atmosphere till the end with its interlinked characters’ conflicts and their sophisticated attires waiting to be soaked in blood. Seven Psychopaths feels like a Tarantino-written, Guy Ritchie-directed film that’s bloody, dark, silly, thought-provoking, anxious, and cretinous all at the same time. The film soars with great introspective details using its three-dimensional characters and heart-wrenching allegories, making it a modern cult classic movie with its eccentricity and crudity.
4 Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels
Gramercy Pictures / Columbia TriStar
Often considered the British equivalent of Quentin Tarantino, Guy Ritchie has made a few films matching the American director’s aesthetic. The boldest and best of these is arguably Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, which has a lot of similarities with Tarantino’s style, especially in earlier films like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. Although Guy Ritchie openly declared that the ’80s British gangster film Long Good Friday had inspired him to make a similarly taut film, there is plenty in the film that makes it an ideal watch for Tarantino lovers. Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels is a fun watch filled with gangsters, deceptions, guns, drugs, and dogs, and still exciting thanks to the crash zooms, seemingly involuntary camera moments, visual storytelling, wonderful needle drops, and profanity-filled dialogue.
3 Tucker and Dale vs Evil
Magnet Releasing
“A story is something that constantly unfolds — I’m not talking about a quick left turn, or a quick right turn,” Tarantino told Charlie Rose, “it unfolds.” The 2010 slasher comedy Tucker and Dale vs. Evil deftly pursues the footsteps of Tarantino’s assertion. In what appears to be a simple teenage-in-the-woods flick set in the wilderness of Western Virginia, the film unfolds into a disastrous slasher movie with a rare combination of comedy and carnage. Augmented by its eerie atmosphere and scary-looking protagonists played exceptionally well by Tyler Labine and Alan Tudyk (of Firefly fame), Tucker and Dale vs Evil is a film full of surprises and a gory depiction of what can go wrong in the woods. In other words, it’s a satirical interpretation of the saying, “Don’t judge a book by its cover”.
2 Revenge
Rezo Films
This raw and visceral 2017 French thriller film Revenge is akin to placing the vengeful Mia from Kill Bill in the desert with guns replacing swords. She will avenge her attempted death, much like in Kill Bill, but in her own brusque way. One of the best parts of Quentin Tarantino’s films is that they never undermine the capacity of women. As a filmmaker, Tarantino has never succumbed to the general stereotypes of women’s representation in movies. His iconic list of extremely strong female characters is a manifestation of how he represents women on screen, and the female lead in Revenge, played by the maliciously magnetic Matilda Lutz, inherits this. The extremely tense film about a woman with nothing to lose on a perilous crusade to avenge her own death is one of the best revenge movies of recent years.
1 The Nice Guys
Silver Pictures
There is no legitimate term that can accurately describe the amount of fun and fierceness that The Nice Guys holds as its prime ‘unique selling position.’ Writer/director Shane Black (Kiss Kiss Bang and The Predator) delivers an absolutely hilarious riot of a buddy cop movie set in 1970s Los Angeles. Black knocks it out of the park with a clever and nefarious plot complementing the extra dark comedy, with the acting genius of Ryan Gosling (a struggling private detective) and Russell Crowe (a brutal enforcer) in the lead roles, not to mention a bold opening scene.
The ‘buddy cop comedy’ is a tired trop by now and seldom funny and interesting, but there are only a few directors, the likes of Tarantino, who can pull the right strings and hit the right chords to create a harmonious tune, which is what Shane Black precisely mastered. Reminiscent of Jackie Brown and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Nice Guys is brimming with great dialogue, wonderful characters, surprisingly sudden violence, and a fun, Tarantino-esque energy.
