Quentin Tarantino’s hotly-anticipated final film will be called The Movie Critic. After a fantastic career that has seen the director oversee ten feature-length movies and direct segments in two others, his eleventh feature-length offering will be followed by his retirement.
The film will tell the story of a disdainful critic in 1970s California who reviews mainstream films for an adult magazine called The Popstar Pages. Brad Pitt is said to have joined the movie’s cast as its lead, but, as things stand, only BlacKkKlansman’s Paul Walter Hauser is confirmed to star alongside him.
Tarantino will want to end his directorial career with a bang; to do so, he’ll need a phenomenal cast. These five actors should join Brad Pitt – whom Tarantino has worked with before – to make The Movie Critic memorable.
Samuel L. Jackson
Samuel L. Jackson is a regular collaborator with Quentin Tarantino, having appeared six times under the director in 1994’s Pulp Fiction, 1997’s Jackie Brown, 2004’s Kill Bill Vol. 2, 2009’s Inglourious Basterds, 2012’s Django Unchained, and 2015’s The Hateful Eight. A Tarantino movie wouldn’t be the same without him at this point, and his performances are ever reliable, so he must appear prominently in the director’s swansong – and giving him a burger to eat as a nod to his most iconic Tarantino appearance would be the icing on the cake.
Margot Robbie
Margot Robbie is arguably the biggest movie star in the world at the moment, having just starred in the $1.446 billion-grossing Barbie. She already appeared in a Quentin Tarantino movie when she played actress and model Sharon Tate in 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and it would be great to see her under his direction again in The Movie Critic. She’s a two-time Academy Award-nominated actress, and her performance as Tate was excellent. Tarantino’s final film needs considerable talent and big names, and Robbie would provide both.
Cillian Murphy
One actor who’s never worked with Quentin Tarantino but who definitely should is Cillian Murphy. Murphy is best known for regular collaborations with Christopher Nolan, but thinking what he’d achieve under Tarantino’s eccentric direction is mouthwatering. He’s incredibly versatile and would nail whatever Tarantino threw at him. Barbie and Oppenheimer were the most talked-about movies of 2023, and uniting the two film’s leads for Tarantino’s swansong would be quite something – especially given his support for the “Barbenhimer” phenomenon.
John Travolta
John Travolta has only worked with Quentin Tarantino once. Of course, that collaboration came in 1994’s Pulp Fiction, which is arguably the director’s best film. Reuniting Travolta with Tarantino for the latter’s final movie would be nostalgia overload – especially if his casting reunited him with his Pulp Fiction co-star, Samuel L. Jackson. Unfortunately, Travolta has recently appeared in many direct-to-video films and commercial failures, so top directors aren’t prioritizing him. Maybe appearing in Tarantino’s last movie before retirement could trigger a career revival.
Nicolas Cage
It beggars belief that Quentin Tarantino and Nicolas Cage have never worked together before. In an interview with Jim Hoberman, Tarantino named Cage as one of the best three actors of his generation, along with Tim Roth and Sean Penn – the former who has worked with him multiple times. Cage’s frantic, often maniacal acting could work like magic in a Tarantino offering. The director would allow him to express himself freely. Cage has seemingly accepted any role that would pay him in recent years. Still, a return to the form that won him an Academy Award for Best Actor for the dramatic 1995 film Leaving Las Vegas might be possible with Tarantino’s guidance.
