The year isn’t over yet, and there’s neither any context for the list nor any guarantee that it will stand the test of the busy holiday movie season, but film director Quentin Tarantino has put together a surprising list of his ten favorite movies of 2013 so far.On the list? Box office disaster and critical punching bag Lone Ranger; and Kick-Ass 2, the lowest-grossing comic book adaptation of 2013 (Yes, it made less than R.I.P.D. and Red 2). Both films have surface similarities (one’s a Western and one’s an ultraviolent film featuring characters in fetish gear and a bunch of pop-culture references) to work done by Tarantino over the years that make them seem somewhat more obvious choices for his list than if this were being compiled by, say, a professional critic or even most other filmmakers.Check out the full list below, courtesy the Tarantino Archives. In parentheses after the titles are the film’s directors. 1. Afternoon Delight (Jill Soloway) 2. Before Midnight (Richard Linklater) 3. Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen) 4. The Conjuring (James Wan) 5. Drinking Buddies (Joe Swanberg) 6. Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach) 7. Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón) 8. Kick Ass 2 (Jeff Wadlow) 9. The Lone Ranger (Gore Verbinski) 10. This Is The End (Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg)The list, while numbered, is in alphabetical order and not necessarily order of preference. A further notable addition is Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight, as Linklater is often talked about as being part of the same “school” of young, indie filmmakers who came into their own around the same time as Tarantino and Kevin Smith. Linklater’s now-classic Slacker and Dazed and Confused were both in theaters before either Smith or Tarantino had a hit, though, and so some see him as a bit of the godfather of the group. He, like Tarantino, has gone on to commercial success with movies like School of Rock but has also, like Smith, gone back to the same group of characters again and again–Before Midnight follows up on 1995’s Before Sunrise and 2004’s Before Sunset.
