A couple weeks ago, at a 100-year-old theme park in Pennsylvania, I met a nice bulldog. The owner explained how his paws were big when he was just a puppy. So the dog was named Maximus. Gladiator echoes in eternity — it’s why so many guys my age think so much about Rome — but the phenomenon was the man. This sequel tries to grave-rob its grandeur, splitting the persona of Russell Crowe’s absent warrior between Paul Mescal’s rebel aristocrat and Pedro Pascal’s weary commander, two bores adrift in dodgy digital effects, overlit sets and plot beats repeated wholesale from the first film. Sometimes Scott just lets his biggest stars do whatever the hell they want, so at least Denzel Washington has fun as the impresario with violent plans for politics — or, to quote his most lysergic line reading, “politicssssssss-sah!”

As the London banker culture-clashing through sunny Provence, Crowe comes off like a toff pretending to be a posh who’s really just a knob. Filmed near Scott’s own vineyard, so write this off as a paid staycation. 

The dying monarch wishes General Moses could take the throne instead of his anointed, whinging heir. Moses flees the princeling’s cruel imperium — then returns with insurgency and popular uprising. Replace “Moses” with “Maximus” and you’ve got the Gladiator arc shamelessly stapled onto The Ten Commandments.

Exodus is dour even when crocodiles attack. At least this medieval Gladiator redux is goofy enough to cast Oscar Isaac as the King of England. Crowe’s archer cons his way back from the Crusades in a dead knight’s armor, only to find himself between a civil war and a French invasion. This is a good time to mention that, whenever eligible, my ranking will only consider approved director’s cuts. Except I will throw in one unrated extended cut. And I can’t keep the Blade Runner cuts straight. And sometimes the theatrical cut is better. In conclusion, watch the longer Robin Hood where Cate Blanchett’s Marian gets stuck in a mudpit and declares, “I can’t move me legs!”

Buried in the Exodus score is an homage to Wagner’s “Das Rheingold,” the same opera that later bookends Alien: Covenant. This HBO Max oddity plays like a more direct mash-up of Scott’s religion-flavored battle epics and his science-fiction creation allegories. There’s the pregnant android with white blood, flavors of Crusader zealotry, a broken future Earth and a murderous Space Eden. Scott directed the first couple episodes, where multiple cute kids die and their atheist robo-mommy goes on a blood-vapor rampage. Not streaming now, so a necessary Blu-ray for anyone hungry for more Prometheus-y birthing body horror. 

Wrapped before original star Kevin Spacey’s disgrace, this kidnapping thriller reshot fast with Christopher Plummer as oil billionaire J. Paul Getty. The seams show, but not how you’d expect. Plummer’s scenes are the only good parts, this whole mini-biopic of self-imprisoned grandeur trapped an indifferent true-crime thriller. Scott loves a powerful man alone in a great room, and pays careful attention to Getty’s Rome obsession and his art collection. “There is a purity to beautiful things that I’ve never been able to find in another human being,” the tycoon says. Maybe an old hand in the advertising game can relate.

As the first female soldier in a SEAL-ish Navy program, Demi Moore shaves her head, does one-armed push-ups and practically spits blood yelling “Suck my dick!” The first part of a very loose trilogy about the American war machine, Jane deserves a rewatch since the preening male superiors retroactively sound like Pete Hegseth. Only down this low for a silly late swerve to armed conflict in Libya.

The downbeat third chapter of the USA combat trilogy, with Leonardo DiCaprio as the secret agent tracking Muslim extremists from Iraq to Jordan. DiCaprio’s in overly effortful Revenant mode, so I prefer Russell Crowe’s stateside CIA chief, a malevolently cheerful bureaucrat Crusader conducting forever war from a perpetual cell phone. Sometimes in his bathrobe.

Casual Scott obsessives theorize whether Deckard is a replicant. Next-level enthusiasts hope for Prometheus 3. True Ridley heads desire the four-hour version of this Columbus farrago, a near-mythic cut the filmmaker teased to The Hollywood Reporter just a couple years ago. Gérard Depardieu acts like he’s headlining colonialism’s rockstar biopic: Flirting with Sigourney Weaver’s Queen, fighting monks, chill-vibing with Indigenous tribes. While you’re questioning the fuzzy facts, don’t forget Michael Wincott as the Spaniard of Evil, a proto-goth with Ozzy hair and studded pants that sparkle in firelight. Offensive, ludicrous, gorgeous. Like, Columbus fights a hurricane.

Near the end of this stoic thriller is the most insane thing that has ever happened in a Ridley Scott movie. Imagine if DiCaprio turned a wrong corner in Iraq and found a xenomorph mixing a moonshine martini. It’s amazing. It’s crazier than The Counselor. Until that mad veer, Dog Stars occupies the same forest of melancholy as The Walking Dead, The Last of Us and A Quiet Place. Jacob Elordi is the hottie Cessna pilot who misses his dead wife. Margaret Qualley is the hottie homesteader who misses her dead husband. They smooch and kill dozens. (Read David Rooney’s full review here.)

“Paradise and Hell can both be earthly,” Columbus says in 1492. “We carry them with us wherever we go.” That’s the core concept of these two very different curios. In the grimmest Alien prequel, stupid scientists discover our space-god creators want us dead. In Scott’s only fantasy, radiant youths learn (I quote the opening text) “there can be no good without evil … no love without hate … no heaven without hell.” Both films are awe-inspiring and wince-inducing in equal measure, with awesome set pieces and baffling character turns. Much as I love the squid-baby C-section, I give the edge to the late Tim Curry’s demonic Darkness, who is a much scarier tall-monster than than Prometheus’ bland Engineers.

We should note the great split in Scott’s filmography. The movies in the first half of his career are overwhelmingly beautiful even when they’re bad. In 2001, right between Hannibal and Black Hawk Down, the beauty fades, replaced by impeccable efficiency. The reasons for this transformation are personal and institutional: His emerging preference for multiple cameras per setup, a medium-wide shift from celluloid to digital, a globo-cultural evolution toward shakier photography and fast editing. Scott insists a speedy pace keep his actors loose. But the worst shot in Legend is prettier than anything in Prometheus’ 3D-shot murk.

In Paul M. Sammon’s Ridley Scott biography, the director sounds abashed about this adulterous cop drama. “I figured I’d better go down a route of being normal,” he explains, “after what happened with Legend and Blade Runner.” Tom Berenger, who my brilliant wife recently described as an “oaf,” plays a married policeman from Queens tasked with bodyguarding an Upper East Side murder witness. Mimi Rogers is the glamourous socialite wearing high fashion to the Guggenheim. Back in the borough, Lorraine Bracco rocks denim to fix the family car. The fact that the “boring” wife is still a knockout says a lot about Scott’s instincts. But there’s a warmth, and fire, in Bracco’s performance. Thelma & Louise starts early when this wronged woman lets out her jilted rage at a gun range, shooting a dozen bullets in the male-shaped target’s crotch region.

Remember how I said Scott lets his biggest stars do anything? In this family business docu-melodrama, Adam Driver’s prissy diffidence clashes off Lady Gaga’s ee-Tal-ee-yan operatics, and then there’s Jared Leto’s bald cap, Salma Hayek’s goony psychic, Jeremy Irons’ aristocratic affect and Al Pacino bringing Style Shakespeare. The effect is like pastels and browns together, more garish than stylish. But, just like in Someone to Watch Over Me, the wealth looks both intoxicating and corrosive.

He barely knew what a Macintosh was. The product wasn’t important. The ad needed to sell a feeling. A mass of skinheads march in gray-blue conformity under Big Brother’s eye. There is a hammer-throwing woman, her blonde hair and red shorts as incongruously colorful as the stewardess uniform Allison Janney wears in Dog Stars. Marketing computers with Orwellian imagery was quite a prophecy. But I think even the most fervent socialist can enjoy a couple hours watching Scott’s commercial work. Today, advertising is the bleeding edge of the slop revolution. “1984” was an artful mainstream Super Bowl sensation when Blade Runner was still just a mangled failure.

Natural to assume Scott only cared about the storm. The titular tempest ravages the school-ship Albatross for 15 minutes, a set piece accomplished with jet engines blasting gale-force winds into a water tank. But don’t underrate the lush sweetness of this historical seaquest’s first hour and a half. Crusty skipper-principal Jeff Bridges guides teen misfits to find themselves on the open water. The dudes fight, party, cry, catch STDs and learn teamwork. (The young cast includes pre-pinup Ryan Phillippe and John Paul Getty’s grandson Balthazar.) I worry Squall’s failure led Scott to cowboy up too much, ramping into hard-core action for his whole next phase. A certain plotless resplendence departs after White Squall, though you can spot it in Dog Stars whenever Jacob Elordi flies his sad plane.

Scott’s first tale of wandering teen self-discovery was his first anything ever. His little brother Tony stars in this short film as the boy skipping school to ride around Hartlepool. The younger Scott also grew into a filmmaker, with his own pop-kaleidoscopic style, before dying by suicide in 2012. All of which makes this family self-portrait (Mum and Dad appear, also) unbearably poignant. “I will remember now when I’m 80,” Tony says, reading dialogue written by Ridley. “I’ll look back at this day, this very minute, and remember that I said I would, and it’ll all be like yesterday.”

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Duel’s duel is the main event here, just like Squall’s squall. The climactic knight-on-knight trial-by-slaying runs eight grueling minutes, the most brutal fight Scott has ever staged. By the time that face-off starts, you understand that Matt Damon’s stern husband and Adam Driver’s malicious flirt are both dumb maniacs. Jodie Comer is the woman caught between them, assaulted by men and the male-dominated system. Scott often downplays his apparent themes of female empowerment, though he basically made his first #MeToo movie in 1991. Even more than G.I. Jane, Duel is a tense showdown between Macho Ridley and Feminist Ridley, a muscular tale of warriors too pitiful to notice the woman they think they love despises them.

Michael Fassbender’s David is the great achievement of Scott’s later years. True, in Prometheus, he’s an obvious mix of previous androids. He lab-rats his colleagues, like Alien’s Ash, while exuding the Luciferian patricidal sorrow of Blade Runner’s Roy Batty. Covenant evolves him into a full-blown inventor-artist. The leaner, meaner sequel has its predecessor’s problems: boring gray planet, blackfuzz effects, a bizarre inability to find a halfway-decent Ripley replacement. Things turn hallucinogenic as David takes the spotlight. When he creates his new life form, it’s an authorial confession. Didn’t Ridley Scott make an alien, too?

Or maybe I’m wrong about that. The xenomorph was H.R. Giger’s design, after all. A good director must delegate. Plan well, hire smart, manage, collaborate. So maybe Scott’s real stand-in is his other stranded star-man, disco-hating astronaut Mark Watney, who responds to the unfathomable dangers of space with an iterative workflow. “You solve one problem,” he explains, “and then you solve another one.” Matt Damon’s can-do Crusoe is never really alone, and this interplanetary rescue can meander whenever it leaves Mars to check in with ever-helpful support staffs. I have to admit, though, this crowd-pleaser is the Ridley Scott movie that makes me cry most uncontrollably. The final set piece — when Mark’s fellow astronauts, NASA’s scientists and everyone on Earth seems to extend a collective hand to bring our lost brother home — is as hopeful as Scott ever gets.

Because he has always been cool, it’s easy to miss how eccentric some of Scott’s choices are. Like the snowy “floating fluff” he introduced in Legend, cool-looking air particles of uncertain origin that recur in Gladiator’s Germania. Or the Hans Zimmer-Lisa Gerrard song that ends this Roman bloodbath, its lyrics written in an invented language. Consider the unlikely casting. Russell Crowe was L.A. Confidential’s brute and The Insider’s rumpled whistleblower, not obvious material for a sword-and-sandal protagonist. Joaquin Phoenix was an indie-looking weirdo fresh off the porno-noir 8mm. Scott put them in togas, told them to talk British, minted two new movie stars, and got the comeback hit of his lifetime. There are issues. Crowe has no chemistry with Connie Nielsen. The once-landmark CGI has aged poorly as any CGI. Maximus reveals his true identity with an hour left in the runtime, and I will never understand why Commodus doesn’t instantly assassinate him 10 times before breakfast. The films left on this list feature more of Scott’s unique flair. But Gladiator kept him in the arena.

On first sight, another failed comedy. Nicolas Cage is the head-case con artist teaching his trade to his long-lost daughter. Alison Lohman isn’t a convincing teenager, which makes her performance sneakily amazing, because the obvious twist I must spoil is she’s not playing a teenager at all. Cage is another lonely man in an empty house — not a tyrant this time but a parasite, smoking cigarettes in his living room, watching sunlight reflect off the pool he never uses. Scott observes all his long and short cons with wry exuberance. So it’s only on rewatch you understand you’re watching a scammer getting scammed — and that someone is trapping him in the replicant version of happiness. Intriguing right down to the final ambiguous fadeout.

A pinnacle product of the efficiency era, in part because it’s so dedicated to efficiency. Denzel Washington’s Frank Lucas can shoot a man in broad daylight, but his real genius is for economics. “My company sells a product that’s better than the competition,” he explains, “at a price that’s lower than the competition.” The most American thing about this gangster is his global operation, with imports from Thailand via the helpful infrastructure of the Vietnam War. Who knows if any of this really happened. The embroidered history gets fuzzier on the procedural side, with Russell Crowe as the cop who certainly did not arrest Frank in real life. It’s still riveting to watch the two stars finally stare down. And you know Scott admires the monastic rigidity of Frank’s lifestyle: Waking at 5 a.m., never being the loudest guy in the room, fussing like a Getty over bloodspots on his $25,000 alpaca rug.

Crowe tries for Serpico with his half of Gangster, all mumble-mouthed nobility in a corrupt NYPD. Cool authenticity, guy. Now marvel at Michael Douglas as Nick Conklin, a New York cop with perfect hair and rad bike skills, sent to Osaka when a Yakuza supervillain spoils Nick’s lunchtime scotch with bloody execution. “Sometimes you gotta forget your head and grab your balls!” is his investigative wisdom. Black Rain would be hilarious if it wasn’t ravishing. Filming in genuine locations before the troubled production had to find Japan in California, cinematographer Jan De Bont developed a grounded variation on Scott’s earlier dystopias, all industrial sparks and spotlight fans. As the doomed partner, Andy Garcia sings karaoke. One bad guy wields a sword from his Suzuki. Only the sheerest spectacle is welcome in this top 10, and Black Rain is the film for anyone who wishes Scott just kept making Blade Runners.

Reasonable to wonder if this technical achievement missed a moral point. Mark Bowden’s book reached for Somalian perspectives on the Battle of Mogadishu. This adaptation mostly sticks to the American soldiers, which is how Black Hawk Down exuded a whiff of hoo-rah nationalism a few months after 9/11. I think the main purpose was clarity. How to tell the massive story of an operation going wrong, following dozens of soldiers through a broken city? Given the onscreen tumult, the result is a feat of organization. You always remember which guy went deaf from gunfire and who lost a finger. (Helps that so many of the young actors became famous — and that the characters wear their last names on their helmets, definitely not standard operating procedure.) Kinetic momentum makes Black Hawk Down Scott’s ultimate pivot — his visuals would never be painterly again — but it also proved he wasn’t slowing down in middle age.

Three people who won Oscars for The Silence of the Lambs refused to touch this follow-up, revolted by the novel’s gory flamboyance. Scott had no qualms. On a gallop between Gladiator and Black Hawk Down, he embraced the Florentine adventures of Anthony Hopkins’ cannibal gourmand as an opportunity for elegant dark comedy. The grotesquerie of Alien and Legend finds an unexpected home here: Besides the man-eating Sardinian hogs, there’s Gary Oldman as Mason Verger, a skin-grafted wealthmonster (and possible old queen) seeking orgasmic vengeance on his onetime tormentor. The boys have all the fun, so Julianne Moore’s Clarice Starling can’t match Jodie Foster’s toughness. But the script (co-written by male artifact David Mamet) situates her in a Jane-scape of D.C. omni-predators. What happens to Ray Liotta’s brain is immortal, of course, but don’t miss the telling detail (not in the book) when Lecter buys Starling shoes. Of course, they’re Gucci.

Conventional wisdom had turned against director’s cuts, but you can’t understand Scott without them. It’s the dreamiest thing about him: This all-business craftsman who spends press tours promising an extra glistening hour of hidden runtime. We’re moving into that realm now, a holy land of rediscovered subplots where flops become masterpieces. To be specific, the Director’s Cut Roadshow Version of this Crusader chronicle adds almost 50 minutes. Yet it moves faster than the stale theatrical release. Orlando Bloom is still a blank as baby knight Balian, but further context makes it clear he’s dead inside — that he’s a zombie of grief, mourning his dead wife and killing his own corrupt brother before setting off for redemption in polycultural Jerusalem. The city is a dream that cannot last, a hothouse of inter-Abrahamic religious turmoil, with peace barely kept by leprous King Baldwin IV (voiced by Edward Norton behind a steel mask). Baldwin’s the Mason Verger of goodness, and Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud is his equally impressive opposing moral force as the legendary (yet pragmatic) sultan Saladin. Real-world extremist factions bristled at the suggestion that moderates get pulled to violence by extremists. It would be hard to make this movie today, was hard to make it then. Ridley Scott just did it, and wound up with his most soulful epic.

This borderland noir is the great bizarre colossus of Scott’s 21st century, his most enigmatic mystery since he gave up on unicorns. It is also the movie — written by one of the great American novelists! — where a woman fucks a Ferrari. Fassbender plays a lawyer without a name caught in a drug deal nobody explains. Loud-shirted Javier Bardem and cowboy-hatted Brad Pitt keep warning him horror is coming. Penélope Cruz is his girlfriend, perfect and saintly. Cameron Diaz owns cheetahs and may be part-cheetah? It’s possible Scott thought Cormac McCarthy’s screenplay was another No Country for Old Men. (A skeptical corner of Ridley Studies dismisses a dozen of his features as failed bites at the best director Oscar.) I think he just got swept away by the language. The longer Counselor cut doesn’t add in much story and doesn’t feature the script’s mind-expanding pregnancy reveal. It just makes the dialogues and monologues much longer. The effect is hypnotic, as close as Scott ever gets to a Richard Linklater movie. It’s a guys-sitting-around-talking chatfest, but on the edge of inconceivable violence. My god, what The Counselor does to human heads.

The Kingdom of Heaven director’s cut clarifies that historic tale’s tragic sincerity. Given an extra 48 minutes, Napoleon just gets nastier and funnier. (At last, we get the Emperor’s hemorrhoids!) Joaquin Phoenix plays Bonaparte as Scott’s ultimate matchstick man, a gifted strategist and political chancer driven by enough self-delusion to pull a country under his spell. Joaquin Phoenix’s frowny monotone — always starting a conversation as if waking up from nap — is a performance inside a performance. Watch closely to realize he’s a Commodus pretending to be a Maximus, desperate for everyone to keep telling him he’s the most important thing in the world. What cheek, to turn this Great Man biopic into a masochistic relationship two-hander! Vanessa Kirby’s Joséphine is Napoleon’s co-conspirator, victim, tormentor, chief critic and most adoring audience. Some history nuts rebelled against the air of farce. Come on. “You think you’re great because you have boats!” is a perfect line of dialogue, and so is “Destiny has brought me this lamb chop!”

This masterful debut intersects through Napoleon’s timeline, following two soldiers from the Bonaparte regime’s early highs through the Russian disaster into the royal restoration. Harvey Keitel is the mustached madman panting to challenge whoever affronts his honor. Keith Carradine plays the more sober gent, who gradually gets infected by his enemy’s mania. They keep meeting over the years, splitting each other open in duels that turn ornate and visceral. They hate each other, but there’s a companionship there, too, and a violent absurdity that gives order to their lives and chaotic times. Unbelievably spry for a costume drama, The Duellists also carries a satiric tone reflecting Scott’s early Kubrick fixation. Oddly enough, his first feature is also his most elegiac, tracking both men from the ambitions of youth to the disappointments of middle-age. The first defining Ridley Scott visual: When a woman realizes her man prefers his soldier-boy to a loving relationship, she writes “Goodbye” in lipstick on his sword.

Just what was the British poet of post-modern urban decay doing way out west, following a couple redheads on their green Thunderbird into the great wide open? Why, just making the most exuberant movie of his whole career. Callie Khouri won an Oscar for her righteous, angry, outrageously fun screenplay. Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis are the girlfriends whose vacation turns violent after an attempted sexual assault leads to an act of killing. They make for Mexico down the open highway, staying the hell away from Texas. Brad Pitt and Michael Madsen are convincing enough love interests in a motel interlude — one a golden rascal, the other a soulful sad sack. From there, Scott tracks the women through a complex transformation. They tuck sleeveless shirts into matching jeans, buy or steal hats from men, take on a cop, blow up a predator-driver’s truck, get sunburnt as the red rocks of Moab. “Something’s crossed over in me and I can’t go back,” Thelma says. “I don’t ever remember feeling this awake.” I would never say that living lawless turns them into lesbians — sometimes a kiss is just a kiss — but it’s undeniable that their doomed odyssey is also a grand transition to a more elevated state of being. Call it liberation.

Philip K. Dick was a very funny novelist who saw the true future where technology would make no one happy and turn humans less human. This first screen adaptation of his writing isn’t funny at all. Little properly happens. Harrison Ford was right to worry about his lead role, I think, this punching-bag detective with a square tie and a bad haircut. The film’s passion belongs with the replicants he’s hunting, especially Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty, desperate for more life, and Sean Young’s Rachel, realizing her own unreality on the fly. The mysteries are bottomless because the oft-reworked script scraped away context and clarity, a process completed when the director’s cut removed explanatory narration. It makes no sense that Deckard is a replicant, unless a lot of people are secretly replicants, which makes total sense, but why?

Blade Runner’s world invites so many theories, I think, because every frame feels so alive. Storms over noodle markets, exotic dancers in hockey masks, feats of Los Angeles architecture repurposed for metropolitan degeneration, the persistence of Coca-Cola. Here’s the cradle of life for so many aesthetics: music videos, cyberpunk, video games, retro-future. We’re seven years past the film’s 2019, and you could say Los Angeles isn’t quite so bad — except when it’s on fire, or out of water, or unaffordable, or perma-gridlocked, or invaded by masked jackboots, or doomed by artificial intelligence. Scott’s most impressive achievement is how Blade Runner’s bleakness offers a strange comfort, as dazzling as Vangelis’ synth-celestial score. The director can’t lie to us about our chances, but he promises splendor in the decline. Darkness thick as black rain, beauty infinite as the kingdom of heaven.

You have to remember that the Nostromo is just carrying a bunch of jobbers on a bum gig, towing ore roundabout Zeta Reticuli, before the bosses send them to a death planet for a salvage run. Note the professional coziness in the shipmates’ introduction. The gearheads played by Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton, both lovable instantaneously, bring up the bonus situation. Tom Skerritt’s captain is amused but withdrawn. Sigourney Weaver’s heroic final-girlism is a famously slow reveal, masked in part because Vanessa Cartwright’s Lambert is initially more endearingly laconic. (Told to suit up for a methane storm, Lambert deadpans: “Swell.”) I forget how capable John Hurt’s Kane seems before his face gets hugged, how Ian Holm’s Ash comes off more humane than protocol-mouthing Ripley. It’s true that James Cameron’s follow-up, also perfect, features a wilder bunch of jarheads. But the ensuing sequels always overthink the concept of their crews: prisoners, mercenaries, scientists, colonists, teens in love. Alien’s victims are just regular everyday space people. Want to love them more? They have a cat.

They’re also expendable meat for the corporate churn. The alien hunts them, but that’s just biological instinct. Far more predatory, it turns out, are the artificial intelligences that manage the ship, and the suits light years away. Two years after Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind brandished a bountiful universe full of ethereal good, here’s a movie where everyone — alien, human, robot — is coming to get you. Maybe Scott just wanted to freak you out. But the most wonderful thing about him is how old he has always been — how his movies, bad or great, are all grown up. (Even Legend is nightmare fuel.) Nobody loves him because they loved him when they were 4 years old. Some great directors of Scott’s generation still believe in childish things: That Good are Evil are color-coded, that someone out there will save us. No matter how slick his entertainments are, Scott’s truths are harsher. Here’s a happy ending for you. Ripley barely survives a day at work, and then, at last, she rests.

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