Director Quentin Tarantino puts it “right up there with Fury Road.” To the point of having seen it twice in the cinema. For the filmmaker, the best film of 2021 is by Steven Spielberg, and it is a remake.
Quentin Tarantino is one of the most acclaimed directors and his reviews have been known to range from massive praise to complete dismissal of an entire artistic movement.
Revealing his favorite films each year, he has previously cited Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris in 2011 and Joey Soloway’s Afternoon Delight in 2013.
Recently guest of “The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast”, Quentin Tarantino was ecstatic, according to him, about the best of 2021: and no, it was not the first part of Dune which caused a sensation that year, nor the other feature films which competed for the Oscar for Best film in March 2022. No, it’s Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, with Ansel Elgort (The Fault in Our Stars, Divergent, Baby Driver) and Rachel Zegler (the future Snow White from Disney’s live-action).
“I loved West Side Story. The best movie of 2021, it should have won the Oscar and the guy who played Riff [Mike Faist] should have won the Oscar. It’s the only film I’ve seen, alone, in the cinema, twice. It was beyond beyond. It was right up there with Fury Road.”
20th Century Studios
As a reminder, West Side Story tells the legendary story of a love budding against a backdrop of brawls between rival gangs in 1957 New York. The film is the second adaptation of the famous 1957 musical of the same name, after Robert’s 1961 West Side Story Wise with Rita Moreno.
When it was released at the end of 2021, Spielberg’s version received excellent reviews and was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. That year, however, it was CODA, the American remake of La Famille Bélier by Siân Heder, which won the coveted prize.
Mike Faist, whom Tarantino mentions, was, for his part, not nominated for the Oscars but for the BAFTAs for the award for Best Supporting Actor – an award which he however lost to Troy Kotsur of CODA.
Among the other feature films in competition at the 2022 Oscars, we could find The Power of the Dog by Jane Campion, Licorice Pizza by Paul Thomas Anderson, Nightmare Alley by Guillermo del Toro, Don’t Look Up: Cosmic Denial by Adam McKay, Belfast by Kenneth Branagh, Drive My Car by Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, The Williams Method by Reinaldo Marcus Green and finally Dune by Denis Villeneuve – who caused a sensation and whose second part (even better than the first?) is currently to be seen in the cinema.
Tarantino’s love of Fury Road
As for the Mad Max: Fury Road reference made by Quentin Tarantinoit’s no secret: the director of Pulp Fiction – and the next The Movie Critic, his long-awaited tenth and final film – is an absolute fan of the George Miller film with Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron that he once named as the best of 2015.
“I resisted seeing it for a while, because I was like, ‘Mad Max? Without Mel Gibson? Forget that.’ In a world where Mel Gibson exists, how can you choose Tom Hardy? Then I saw the film. ‘Okay, that’s great.’ And he’s pretty good at it, I have to admit,” declared the director at Première that year.
Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story is currently available on Disney+. Mad Max: Fury Road is available on VOD.