Anyone with even a passing interest in the works of Quentin Tarantino will be aware that the Academy Award winning filmmaker has a virtually encyclopedic knowledge of cinema, from big budget blockbusters all the way down to some of the most obscure movies ever made. When the 56 year-old isn’t busy making or promoting his own flicks, he tends to devour as many as possible in his spare time, and the Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs director has now revealed his somewhat surprising favorite three movies of 2019.
Awards Ace editor-in-chief Erik Weber stated on Twitter that he’d asked Tarantino to name his top picks from this year, and while he unsurprisingly named Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman as his favorite, with the legendary filmmaker’s latest crime epic positioned alongside Tarantino’s own Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as one of awards season’s frontrunners, his second and third choices are a little more out of left-field.
Spoke with Quentin Tarantino last night, wanted to know his top films of 2019, here they are:
1) #TheIrishman
2) #Crawl
3) #DoctorSleephttps://t.co/znrHDKkwvh pic.twitter.com/hPZEdpV0BZ— Erick 𝕄𝕄𝕋 Weber 🎥 (@ErickWeber) December 3, 2019
Alexandre Aja’s low-budget yet incredibly atmospheric and effective genre thriller Crawl came in as Tarantino’s runner-up, with the filmmaker naming Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep as his third-favorite movie of 2019. While Doctor Sleep scored generally solid reviews from critics, the Shining sequel never really caught on with audiences and disappointed at the box office, which also caused the studio to abandon their plans for an already in-development follow-up once the numbers came in.
Despite this, Tarantino’s praise for the latest in Hollywood’s long line of Stephen King adaptations might cause more people to seek out Mike Flanagan’s horror flick in the coming weeks. Getting endorsed by one of the biggest names in the industry is a feather in the cap for any movie regardless of how it performed commercially, and Doctor Sleep is just the latest example of Hill House creator Flanagan’s mastery of the genre.