Who does not love movies? After watching the usual suspects such as the IMDB-Top-250 (https://www.imdb.com/chart/top/) and movies from famous directors (Coen Brothers, Kubrick, Nolan, Jarmusch, Ritchie, Tarantino, …), I have no idea what to watch. There are simply not that many good movies despite the industry producing hundreds of movies every year.

But I just found an interesting youtube video of Quentin Tarantino, where he lists his Top-20 from 1992-2009: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y4vII7-8o0

Let us check the IMDB-ratings for these movies via R and create a watchlist.

First, let us load tidyverse:

library(tidyverse)

You can get the data from https://datasets.imdbws.com/ and then need to merge ratings and basics:

df_ratings <- read_tsv('title.ratings.tsv', na = "\\N", quote = '')
df_basics <- read_tsv('title.basics.tsv', na = "\\N", quote = '')
df_ratings <- df_ratings %>% left_join(df_basics)

Now, the more interesting part. Let us search Tarantino’s recommendations and do some data wrangling.

quentin <- c("Battle Royale", "Anything Else", "Audition", "Blade", 
             "Boogie Nights", "Dazed and Confused", "Dogville", "Fight Club",
             "The Host", "Joint Security Area", "Lost in Translation", "The Matrix",
             "Memories of Murder", "Supercop", "Shaun of the Dead",
             "Speed", "Team America: World Police", "Unbreakable")

df_quentin <- xfun::cache_rds(df_ratings %>% filter(primaryTitle %in% quentin))
df_quentin <- df_quentin %>% 
  filter(titleType == "movie",
         numVotes > 1e4,
         startYear >= 1992 & startYear <= 2009) %>%
  arrange(desc(averageRating)) %>% 
  select(primaryTitle, averageRating, startYear, runtimeMinutes, genres)

The xfun::cache_rds is only to save time for knitting the Rmd-file.

And the final result sorted by Rating:

kableExtra::kbl(df_quentin)
primaryTitle averageRating startYear runtimeMinutes genres
Fight Club 8.8 1999 139 Drama
The Matrix 8.7 1999 136 Action,Sci-Fi
Memories of Murder 8.1 2003 131 Crime,Drama,Mystery
Dogville 8.0 2003 178 Crime,Drama
Boogie Nights 7.9 1997 155 Drama
Shaun of the Dead 7.9 2004 99 Comedy,Horror
Joint Security Area 7.8 2000 110 Action,Drama,Thriller
Lost in Translation 7.7 2003 102 Comedy,Drama
Dazed and Confused 7.6 1993 102 Comedy
Battle Royale 7.6 2000 114 Action,Adventure,Drama
Unbreakable 7.3 2000 106 Drama,Mystery,Sci-Fi
Speed 7.2 1994 116 Action,Adventure,Thriller
Audition 7.2 1999 115 Drama,Horror,Mystery
Team America: World Police 7.2 2004 98 Action,Comedy
Blade 7.1 1998 120 Action,Horror,Sci-Fi
The Host 7.1 2006 120 Action,Drama,Horror
Supercop 6.9 1992 96 Action,Comedy,Crime
Anything Else 6.3 2003 108 Comedy,Romance

The top 3 movies according to the rating form IMDB are actually already in the IMDB-Top-250 list. So you have probably already watched Fight Club and The Matrix. Also Shaun of the Dead, Lost in Translation and Speed are fairly popular. But the other ones I have not seen yet.

Update: After watching some of these movies, I am really suprised how good they are. I especially enjoyed the Korean ones (Memories of Murder and Joint Security Area). But I would recommend all of the ones I have seen (I still have to watch Dogville, Dazed And Confused, Battle Royale, The Host, Supercop and Anything Else).