Mostly it’s all in the headline, as we’ve yet to get much in the way of truly solid info on Quentin Tarantino’s 10th and final feature, The Movie Critic, since it was announced just under a year ago. But Deadline have revealed that (once more with feeling) Brad Pitt will star, and with it comes speculation he’ll be the film’s lead––a slight surprise given Tarantino’s claim it would feature “somebody in the 35-year-old ballpark” and “definitely be a new leading man.” But I have spent my entire cinephilic life hearing Tarantino promise one thing before doing another, and Deadline seem to think he’s done “quite a bit of rewriting since then.” Consider, too, that the number of complaints made about Pitt’s work in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, from fans and detractors and AMPAS alike, are near-zero, and suddenly this all seems quite plausible.
Further into the rumor rabbithole: Sony may reunite from Hollywood (sure, why not), and a 2025 release is anticipated (zero points for predicting it’ll debut at Cannes). Tarantino’s said time and again the film is based on a real, unidentified figure, about which I don’t feel like speculating; much more interesting is his claim Hollywood served as climax of his feature-filmmaking career and the 10th picture would be more of an epilogue. Bringing a major player of his career’s back half fuels the elegiac fire.
And as Paul Schrader revealed in December:
“Quentin will insert extracts from films from the 1970s. And he will also make his own versions of films from that era. He asked my permission to shoot the ending of [Rolling Thunder], by John Flynn, as I had written it in the original screenplay––before it was completely rewritten and watered down.”
Expect this film to completely dominate film discourse, for better and for worse, over the next, oh, two years.