Quentin Tarantino Movies, Ranked

Let’s escape into movies for a week.

Things have been getting pretty heavy of late, in the world and in this newsletter. So I wonder if it’s time for a bit of a mental health break for everybody — myself very muc included. So let’s take a nice big deep breath, make sure we are fortified for the fights ahead … and do some fun movie rankings.

Tim Grierson and I, in addition to our award-winning Grierson & Leitch podcast (note: No awards have yet been won), regularly do movie rankings for Vulture — you can find a seemingly endless scroll of them here. We do get paid for doing them, but it never feels like work. Ranking movies sounds crass — how do you “rank” art?” — but I never think of it that way. Rankings are just an excuse to think about movies, to watch them again, to revel in them, to truly reflect on your experience with them and your emotional reaction to them. Movies are a central driver of how I see the world; Roger Ebert famously called movies “a machine that generates empathy,” and that’s how I’ve always approached them. They’re a way to escape, sure, but they’re also a way to be transported: An opportunity to see the world through someone else’s eyes, to visit a place you’d never be able to go otherwise, to learn about a life outside your own … and maybe learn a little bit about yourself along the way. I consider going to movies…