Has Quentin Tarantino already cast the star of his final movie?

Director set to reunite with ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ star

Quentin Tarantino will reportedly reunite with Brad Pitt for his final film, The Movie Critic.

The director has cast the 60-year-old star twice before, in 2009’s Nazi-hunting war film Inglourious Basterds and as a storied stuntman in 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Pitt won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as Cliff Booth in the latter film.

According to reports in Deadline, the new film could be set for release in 2025.

While details about the new project remain scant, Tarantino said last year at the Cannes Film Festival that it would be set in 1977, and would be “based on a guy who really lived but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag”.

It had previously been rumoured that the subject of the film could be Pauline Kael, the late New Yorker film critic who wrote for the magazine from 1968 to 1991.

Tarantino has praised Kael in the past and published a Kael-inspired book of essays titled Cinema Speculation.

Quentin Tarantino in Rome in 2021 (Getty Images for RFF)

Tarantino has long said that he would retire after his 10th movie. In 2021, the Pulp Fiction director reiterated that planned to call it a day after his next film.

“I know film history and from here on in, filmmakers do not get better,” he told Bill Maher.

“I don’t have a reason that I would want to say out loud, that’s going to win any argument in a court of public opinion or supreme court or anything like that.

“At the same time, working for 30 years doing as many movies as I’ve done, it’s not as many as other people, but that’s a long career. That’s a really long career.”

Tarantino, who lives in Israel with his wife Daniella Pick and their three-year-old son, Leo, said he’d given it “everything I have, every single solitary thing I have”.

In a three-star review of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey wrote: “What is there left for Quentin Tarantino to say in 2019? His work in the 1990s, from Pulp Fiction to Jackie Brown, sparked a minor revolution in the way we employ cinematic language.

“Nowadays, we see his influence everywhere – even his biggest critics won’t deny that. But how do you stay fresh in an industry when you’ve already become enshrined in its history? And what happens when cinema moves on without you?

“When 2015’s The Hateful Eight was met with mixed reactions from both critics and audiences, those seemed like fair questions to ask. Now, in his ninth (and supposedly penultimate) film, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Tarantino tackles those ideas of creative insecurity head-on.”