Director Quentin Tarantino seems to have put quite a weight on his shoulders through his long-held and self-imposed rule to make no more than ten films. He chose this limit to ensure an overall high quality of his filmography. “Most directors have horrible last movies,” he’s reasoned, “So to actually end your career on a decent movie is rare. To end it with, like, a good movie is kind of phenomenal.”
But it would seem that heavy rests the head that wears the bloodied crown: in April of last year, multiple media outlets broke the news that the auteur behind movies like Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill has canceled his planned tenth film, The Movie Critic, which was already in pre-production. Alleged insiders claim that he has done so under the enormous pressure to make a perfect final film, and the decision has revived the argument that to self-impose one’s legacy will inevitably lead to failure.
This past January, Tarantino stated he was in no hurry to retry, so to tide us over until he has determined his cinematic swan song, I took a look at the tenth movies of ten other famous directors of the world, to gauge what their final note would have been if they had stopped at number X like Tarantino intends to, including what masterpieces we would have missed.
1. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)
In the spirit of Tarantino, I will count Fritz Lang’s previous two-parters as single films, much like Tarantino does Kill Bill—so by this count, the German auteur’s tenth silent film was indeed his magnum opus Metropolis, perhaps the most influential film of all time. The Expressionist science-fiction epic would not only trailblaze special effects and visuals like the utopian/dystopian split of towering Metropolis society—later mirrored in classics like Blade Runner, Star Wars, and the famous Apple Macintosh commercial that launched the computer that would start the tech age and our current-day technology dependency—but also herald the accompanying evils of hypercapitalism and technocracy. Taking place in the then-envisioned year 2000, the film has come uncomfortably close to our current reality. While it is without question Fritz Lang’s greatest work, had the director stopped here we would have never gotten his masterpiece M, which I regard as one of the most chilling narratives ever told. As for Metropolis’s unprecedented innovations: if you’d like to discover them yourself, the film is still shown almost every week in Berlin’s Babylon cinema, accompanied by an excellent live orchestra. 10/10
What we would have missed: Masterpieces like the chilling M and the film-noir trailblazer The Woman in the Window.
2. Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929)
The master of suspense’s film X was a milestone not only for him but for all of Great Britain, for Blackmail was simultaneously the country’s very first talkie and Hitchcock’s last silent film. Initially shot silent, the producers eventually made Hitchcock shoot a sound version: the result is a fascinating crime thriller on the subject of attempted rape and extortion, where silence is used to carry our heroine Alice’s terror and isolation, whereas the sparing sound expresses her dissonance with a reality shambled. This tension between silence and sound perfectly incarnates the difficult decision victims of sexual assault often have to make: speaking out at enormous risk, or taking it to the grave. While the sound version of Blackmail suffers some from the clearly hurried decision to make it a talkie (like when Czech star actress Anny Ondra had to be clunkily dubbed, and some wonderful scenes that were deemed too obviously “silent era” in their visuals were cut), the film shows both the peak of Hitchcock’s German Expressionism-inspired silent work and his first clever uses of the sound toolbox, foreshadowing his future brilliance with it—including a star curtain in a pivotal scene! I leave you to a moment of terrified silence imagining he had stopped here. 7/10
What we would have missed: Masterpieces like Lifeboat, Vertigo, and Psycho.
3. Ingmar Bergman’s Summer Interlude (1951)
The Grandmaster of Swedish Cinema’s tenth, Summer Interlude, was and remains a critical banger, holding 100% approval on Rotten Tomatoes, and is considered Bergman’s breakthrough (take note, Tarantino!). With his now trademark structural complexity, the film follows an emotionally unavailable ballerina who, through the diary of her long-dead summer love, realizes how a father figure had taken advantage of her in her grief and willfully manipulated her into becoming her now-detached self. Unlike most of Bergman’s later films, though, Summer Interlude is hopeful, with the ballerina rising from the shadow of her past through confrontation, and shedding the cold mask that held her in a glittering ice cage. It remains a timeless watch with a strikingly modern lens. 10/10
What we would have missed: Masterpieces like Persona and Scenes from a Marriage
4. Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
The second part of the original Indiana Jones trilogy is its most divisive one; even the iconic director himself did not like it very much, stating that the only good thing he got out of it was meeting his future wife. However, Quentin Tarantino counts it as his favorite of the series, praising its badassery and “a comedy aspect as gruesome as the cinema is,” which is, well, as amusing as it’s unsurprising. I agree with him and other fans of the film that it upholds a remarkable energy throughout, and as an action film it is as good as it gets—its mine-wagon chase is perhaps the greatest in cinematic history. And of course, it gave us Ke Huy Quan’s wonderful Short Round! However, while I support viewing films from their contemporary lens, Temple of Doom’s horrifyingly racist portrayal of Indians eating monkey brains and eyeball soup was inexcusable in the year ‘84, which sadly mars the film. But no director makes only great films, and terrific Spielberg classics such as Schindler’s List were thankfully yet to come. 6/10
What we would have missed: Masterpieces like The Color Purple, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Schindler’s List.
5. Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (1985)
Styled “one of the Gods of Cinema” by Martin Scorsese, the only female member of Tarantino’s much admired French New Wave,Agnés Varda, pioneered naturalistic filmmaking, using non-professional actors and handheld cameras and focusing on marginalized members of society. While her influential Cléo from 5 to 7 is no doubt her greatest legacy, her tenth film Vagabond is perhaps the pinnacle of her work. Varda was suspicious of a distinction between documentary and fiction film, as well as the concept of objectivity, and after opening on a dead young woman in a trench, we learn through her innovative to-camera testimonies—now a staple of films such as When Harry Met Sally and shows like The Office—how vagabond Mona, after leaving normal life in Paris behind and becoming an aimless drifter of the French countryside, came to her end. Objectivity on her journey for freedom without a plan is erased through our limited view of her character and by only seeing how she is assessed by others. Through this, Varda reveals humanity’s and film’s obsession with subjects having a clear object. That powerful commitment sometimes robs Mona of her agency, though perhaps that was also the point. But even if Mona is an enigma, she is as real and human as any film character ever was. While she made many more fascinating documentaries, Vagabond was Varda’s zenith as a feature film director, a powerful introspection on freedom and solitude, to which later acclaimed films like Into the Wild and Nomadland owe everything. 9/10
What we would have missed: Varda by Agnès and the one-of-a-kind One Hundred and One Nights, an ode to the first century of film.
6. Pedro Almodóvar’s Kika (1993)
Spanish auteur Almodóvar, famous for his irreverent yet tender films exploring complex relationships, was still finding his mastery with his décima: Kika follows a makeup artist who gets entangled with a murderous writer, his voyeur stepson, and the latter’s stalker ex Andrea Caracortada (“Scarface”), who now is the host of an exploitative TV show broadcasting violent events with breathtaking disregard for the victims. Here, Almodóvar’s sharp lens veers decidedly too much into voyeurism in my opinion, but while Kika’s irreverence perhaps goes too far even by his standards, the film was an intellectual herald remarkably ahead of its time, exposing humanity’s ugly thirst for watching real-life violent stories to a degree that was unthinkable then but sadly proven true by today’s media’s rampant exploitation of true crime. The great director’s later work would thankfully combine his curiosity and acuity for human abyss with much more respect and tenderness. 5/10
What we would have missed: Masterpieces like All About My Mother and Volver.
7. Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
Oscar winner Kathryn Bigelow has always been a brave director, tackling uncomfortable topics with unflinching zeal, so it is no surprise that her number X, a political action thriller on the CIA hunt for bin Laden, is the most controversial film on this list. Unlike many a pompous and self-aggrandizing American war film, Zero Dark Thirty is like its protagonist, the CIA analyst Maya: tenacious, monomaniacal, and unsentimental. It’s devoid of the genre’s usual pathos and centers on the naked, gritty, ugly work that was done to bring the Svengali of 9/11 to justice. Therein lies both its genius and its fault: perhaps Maya truly had to be without a life of her own to fulfill her mission. But even in a real events-based film, it is a dramatized one and we thirst for a glimpse into the soul of its main character. Maya, however, remains a ghost, albeit a highly captivating one by virtue of a sublime Jessica Chastain. She, Bigelow, and writer Mark Boal command an intelligent epic without heroes, one that immerses us in the ghastly reality of terror and war, set to an excellent, somber score by Alexandre Desplat. The film’s controversy, an alleged pro-torture stance, is a sensitive topic, too complex for this space—but in short, I believe that an honest film should show the monstrosities America has committed in its fight for justice for 9/11, rather than leave them out in favor of a sanitized hagiography. While Zero ends up slightly behind Bigelow’s masterpiece as of yet, The Hurt Locker, her last work, Detroit, continues the director’s quest for dissecting the crossroads of humanity, and promises there is more greatness yet to come. 8/10
What we would have missed: The underrated historical crime drama Detroit and a much-anticipated current Netflix production.
8. Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster (2013)
Hong Kong master of human misconnection Wong Kar-wai’s tenth (and so far last) feature was also meant to be his masterpiece. In a production that lasted a gruesome five years, during which the main actors were breaking bones, Wong set out to tell the story of Kung fu master Ip Man—who popularized Wing Chun globally—but also those of the other grandmasters caught at the crossroad of destiny in the last days of the Chinese Republic, between the almost religious past of the martial arts world and looming modernity. The result is an enormously ambitious, deeply philosophical, but sometimes muddled narrative, one where Wong’s fictional Grandmaster Gong Er steals the show from Ip Man and emerges as the voracious heart of the film with an unexpectedly transcendental storyline, where she turns herself into the avatar of a vanishing world. Western critics have often dismissed this film with what I believe was a critical neglect to engage with the Eastern history and philosophy that makes up the film’s DNA. Whatever The Grandmaster’s faults, its powerhouse writing, breathtaking cinematography, and perhaps the most extraordinary performance of Ziyi Zhang’s life elevate the film to one of Wong’s most powerful, while giving some warning to Tarantino about the pressures of the aspiration of mastery. 8/10
What we would have missed: Wong’s first foray into TV, the epic Blossoms Shanghai series. It remains to be seen if Wong will return to cinema, but at least in my mind there is absolutely no doubt.
9. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (2021)
No matter what you think of Denis Villeneuve’s number ten, as the first entry in Hollywood’s current biggest franchise, Dune, it had the unenviable task of setting up one of the most complicated and vast stories there is in literary history. While Villeneuve does a fantastic job of centering the mystical and primal elements of Paul Atreides’s story in creating a world that recalls the gritty but mythical splendor of Lawrence of Arabia, I found he cowered from what I personally consider the most crucial theme of Dune: imperialism. His approach favors the visual over narrative depth, and in that regard the movie truly deserved its Oscar for Greig Fraser’s breathtaking cinematography, which combines painterly subtlety with elemental might. However, it misses the intelligence and elegant storytelling of Villeneuve’s previous and vastly superior science-fiction film, Arrival. While its sequel, Dune: Part Two, improved by delving deeper into the stories of its fascinating characters, it remains to be seen if Villeneuve will dare to really tackle the uncomfortable intellectual heart of the books that gave them their legendary status. 6/10
What we would have missed: To be seen!
10. Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog (2021)
Here is a New Zealand master who, like Tarantino, intended to make her tenth feature her last: after a 12-year hiatus, the first female director who ever won the Palme d’Or (for her groundbreaking The Piano), Jane Campion took the world by storm with The Power of the Dog, a frighteningly intelligent psychodrama on family power dynamics, corrosive machismo, and internalized homophobia. Bringing the Western to fresh heights through a modern and unfaltering lens—which is, notably, just as present in the original 1967 Thomas Savage novel the film is based on—this film is indeed the Olympus of Campion’s career, repeating the sharp psychological introspection and compassion of The Piano and adding an astounding thematic complexity bundled in Benedict Cumberbatch’s striking performance. His Phil is one of the most fully-fledged and complicated characters I have ever experienced, a subject worthy of Campion’s meticulous work. This film would indeed have been a deserving crowning jewel of one of history’s greats. But to my great joy, Campion, after seeing the long-awaited rise of female directors in Hollywood and her own recognition following The Power of the Dog, announced she was working on another film last year. Time will tell whether it can uphold the level of her number X, but this writer is sure it will be worth the wait either way. 10/10
What we would have missed: To be seen!
So, Mr. Tarantino: while three of these tenth films perhaps truly are the crowning jewels of their respective directors, you will find that the majority had their best yet to come after the big X. Considering that we would have never gotten masterpieces like Persona, Psycho, M, Schindler’s List, and Volver if they would have followed your legacy rule, perhaps it is time to free yourself from it and throw yourself into your next film with the intention of making it your best, no matter what comes after. Like Hitchcock has said: “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.” It is also a privilege to get to make ten movies; great directors like Steve McQueen, Debra Granik, Bong Joon Ho, Alfonso Cuarón, Céline Sciamma, and many others have not had the chance yet, and some never will.
So while we look forward to your X, Quentin, who knows how good XI could be?
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