The minute Denzel Washington swaggers into Sir Ridley Scott’s 29th feature film, Gladiator 2, you know it’s fucking on. There’s that grin, several pounds of costume jewelry, a voice that sounds more like Alonzo Harris than Lawrence Olivier—and it takes nothing from his performance. I watched the film at the world’s greatest iMax/overall movie theater in Manhattan’s Lincoln Square with an audience full of hard-hearted critics, from whom Denzel elicited palpable joy just by entering rooms, because each time it happened we knew what we were in store for.
Joy was not always an emotion you’d associate with the now-86-year-old Scott. His early work is (largely) known for its technical mastery. As you might expect from a guy whose second film was Alien and whose third film was Blade Runner, he’s an elite, tough shot-maker, one of the all-time best at sustaining mood and executing a set piece, a director who reminds us that the heart of cinema has always been spectacle and always will be. He makes monster movies in space, Dickian sci-fi, feminist Westerns, sword-and-sandal epics, sequels to his own IP and sequels to IP that doesn’t belong to him, Napoleonic period pieces and biopics about Napoleon, the only throughline being his sturdy, unimpeachable skill. When it comes to cinematic action, he can execute it all, from intimate, quiet, suspenseful dread to grandly-scaled, 1,000-extra battle sequences composed with crystal clarity in terms of space, time, and stakes—and he often does both in the same film.
Over the last 25ish years of his career Scott has nearly doubled the output from the first 25ish. He has been to awards season what Jay-Z once was to summer—he owns this chunk of calendar near-annually and rarely disappoints. And while critics have long faulted him for prizing Swiss-watch craft over character and performance, one big difference between his first ten films (from 1977’s The Duellists to 1997’s G.I. Jane) and the work he’s done since—beginning with the original Gladiator, which we’ll discuss momentarily—is that he’s started giving his actors more space to cook. Scott has said, “Working with artists is a friendship and a partnership,” and in his latter-day films, you really, finally feel that. The director himself—a proud and stubborn auteur who stands by even his biggest misfires—has never acknowledged that anything has changed in his approach to his players, but the evidence is there on the screen.
In his work this century, we can see a draftsman learning to find beauty in coloring outside the lines, a perfectionist allowing the messiness and unpredictability of life to find its way into his work. A laudable old-guy “fuck it” attitude has crept in, as the great visual storyteller lets his actors steer. So let’s celebrate the performances that have made the last quarter century of Ridley Scott feel so different and so special—the bad accents, the intense emotions, the ugly-cry moments, and the bizarre line readings that have made Scott’s post-2000s filmography one of the wildest, wooliest and best that any director this century can claim. Friends, Romans, countrymen, splay your fingers and follow me through Sir Ridley’s immense field of 21st-century wheat—ranked in order of craziness. (One actor per film, repeat players only get to submit for one performance.)
Honorable Mentions
Let’s briefly shout out the few post-Y2K Scott films that didn’t make the list, because the reasons why they didn’t make it are instructive. Black Hawk Down (2001), about a contained US military operation in Somalia under the Clinton administration, is one of Scott’s most visceral films, a pure adrenalized showcase of all his spatial gifts (along with the talents of Pietro Scalia, who won a richly-deserved Oscar for his editing work). Scott is an iterative filmmaker, often referencing the matinees of his youth, and this is his gritty Sam Fuller behind-enemy-lines ensemble war flick. The film is well cast, full of the burgeoning heartthrobs of the era—and it had to be, because the story doesn’t give anyone anything overwhelmingly demanding to do, besides try out funny accents (shout to Eric Bana) and scream in pain, so you need to cast for face recognition.
It’s the opposite of Exodus: Gods & Kings, whose agonizingly long and slow dual narratives spend too much time watching one of our best living actors and Joel Edgerton paint by numbers, while confining a guyliner-Olympics-level squad (featuring Ben Kingsley, Ben Mendelsohn, and John Turturro as a fucking pharaoh) to the back bench. The point is in both cases, there was adequate room for fun and weird performance, and I think if either was made in the 2020s, we’d get more of that, because it’s now practically part of the master’s signature.
15. Albert Finney as Uncle Henry, A Good Year (2006)
“The kind of wine that will pickle even the toughest of men. I once saw a Castilian prizefighter collapse in a heap after drinking a single glass.”
