Every Ridley Scott movie ranked, including Napoleon

There’s no denying that Ridley Scott can do spectacle. He’s been proving it since the 1970s, and he can still pour it on decades later. But in the case of Exodus: Gods And Kings, spectacle is just about the only thing the film has going for it. Sure, the cast is packed with talented actors, including Christian Bale in the role of Moses, but the ensemble, and Scott’s knack for alluring visuals, are wasted in a predictable, tedious, uneven Biblical epic that feels transported from another era, and not in a good way.

Perhaps the film in Scott’s filmography that has aged the most poorly, 1492: Conquest Of Paradise is exactly what it says on the tin, for good or ill. The story of Christopher Columbus’ (Gerard Depardieu) voyages to America and the resulting impact on Natives living there, the film is Scott’s first true historical epic, and makes wonderful use of gorgeous real-life locations. The cast is committed, the film feels grounded in a certain tactile realism, and it’s got the great Michael Wincott as a villain. So, what went wrong? Well, basically everything else. For all its ambition, it’s a film that plays like it’s constantly tiptoeing around the true horror of colonialism, which makes it both timid and unsatisfying.

Robin Hood is another one of those Scott films that seemed to have all the right ingredients in place: A reunion with Gladiator star Russell Crowe, a supporting cast led by the likes of Cate Blanchett, and all the trappings of a medieval epic. But Scott’s effort to deliver a more historically accurate vision of the life of the titular English hero still falls flat. The film treats Robin’s story with the appropriate gravity, but in the process strips away all the fun and adventure that made the character worth following in the first place, leaving us with something dour and self-serious that just doesn’t work.

One of countless post-9/11 films about counterterrorism agents working to root out evil, Body Of Lies is certainly a competent film. Scott knows how to shoot a thriller, and you can’t really go all that wrong with a cast led by the likes of Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s not that nothing in the film works. It’s that nothing amid all this solid work really jumps out and grabs you, leaving Body Of Lies feeling like a by-the-numbers entry in an already crowded subgenre.

A Good Year is not a great film, but audiences and critics alike were still far too unkind to it when it arrived back in the mid-2000s. Maybe expectations were simply too high for the project, which marked the first collaboration by Scott and Russell Crowe since the triumph of Gladiator. There’s something inherently predictable about this story of a businessman (Crowe) who heads to France to claim an inheritance and finds his workaholic lifestyle challenged by life in the countryside. But there’s also something more going on here. Together, Scott, Crowe, and co-star Marion Cotillard find an unassailable warmth in the narrative, marking a nice change of pace in Scott’s filmography, and a relatively successful little movie.

Scott’s lone collaboration with legendary writer Cormac McCarthy, The Counselor is a famously divisive film, and to this day you’ll find loud and passionate defenders of its crime cinema delights lurking online, waiting to pounce on a potential convert. It’s easy to see why. For all its scattered storytelling and sometimes perplexing creative choices, The Counselor is impossible to ignore. From the great cast led by Michael Fassbender and Javier Bardem to the unforgettable “catfish” sequence, it’s a bold, proud, creatively ambitious film that’s a must-see, even if you come away hating it.

The first of two neo-noir films Scott delivered in the 1980s, Someone To Watch Over Me tries to make something new out of a conventional plot: A police detective (Tom Berenger) is assigned to protect a socialite (Mimi Rogers), and falls in love with her along the way. There are certain big creative swings taken in the process in an attempt to inject freshness into that story, and Scott’s visuals are on-point, but it just never quite comes together into the film it so clearly wants to be. What’s left is more well-intentioned effort than polished final film.

Scott’s much-anticipated return to the Alien universe was hamstrung from the beginning by the hype surrounding it, but that’s not the only issue with Prometheus. A prequel setting up the discovery of the alien creatures in Alien, it’s got visual spectacle to spare, and if nothing else you’ll get sucked in by Scott’s 2010s depiction of alien landscapes first introduced in the 1970s. The plot, though, is a jumble, a jam-packed exercise with too many ideas colliding all at once, leaving us a little exhausted and not nearly as pleased as we were by the film’s source material.

The biggest problem with Hannibal is not the film’s fault: It just isn’t The Silence of the Lambs. Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’ bestselling novel was a near-perfect movie featuring an incredible lead performance from Jodie Foster, and the sequel was never going to live up to that. Julianne Moore turns in a great performance as Foster’s replacement, Anthony Hopkins is reliably good in the title role, and Scott does himself credit by never trying to replicate Demme’s gritty style, but it never works as well. Still, there are plenty of operatic, beautifully orchestrated flourishes of violence in this film, and that makes it more success than failure.

You know G.I. Jane even if you’ve never seen it, because the image of star Demi Moore trying to get through grueling military training with a shaved head was burned into the public consciousness in the late 1990s. Scott is responsible for that image, collaborating with Moore to achieve maximum impact, but in hindsight the impact of G.I. Jane only goes so far. It’s a solid enough drama, but you keep wanting more from it. You want Moore to take her grit into some deeper emotional resonance, you want Scott to push the story beyond the boundaries of its message of perseverance, and you want things to feel somehow less predictable. You never get that, which means that G.I. Jane’s achievement pretty much begins and ends with that same image we all know.

Best-known for its over-the-top Italian accents and the prosthetic-heavy transformation of co-star Jared Leto, House Of Gucci is full of wonderful Ridley Scott bombast. His tendency toward the operatic is on full display in this true crime story set amid the rise of one of the world’s most famous fashion houses, and that means that even at its worst, the film is thoroughly entertaining. What it lacks is the emotional depth that runs through many of Scott’s other films, leaving it in the realm of surface-level beauty.

Time has been very kind to Alien: Covenant, Scott’s Prometheus sequel, which tells the story of a new alien encounter in the years following the first prequel’s planting of the Alien seeds. At first brush, feels like a pale imitation of what Alien was, but look closer and you’ll see something more. Scott cleverly plays with our expectations in this film, delivering the familiarity of Alien while heaping on the gore of later franchise installments to create something pulpy, propulsive, and most importantly fun. It can never live up to Alien’s masterpiece status, but it’s a popcorn horror blast.

Black Rain, Scott’s other 1980s neo-noir entry follows an American cop (Michael Douglas) as he and his partner (Andy Garcia) escort a prisoner back to Japan, only to fall deep into the country’s criminal underworld. Stylish, moody, and steeped in rain-smeared neon, it’s arguably one of Scott’s finest visual achievements. His two American leads do a great job amping up the intensity of even the more formulaic scenes. Throw in some wonderfully executed Japan-set action sequences, and you’ve got an urban thriller that more people should see.

While it’s never been able to contend with fellow ’80s fantasy classics like Labyrinth and The Neverending Story in the realm of public imagination, there’s something inarguably gripping about Legend. A classic fantasy stuffed with great settings, creatures, and wardrobe choices, not to mention Tim Curry’s breathtaking “Lord Darkness” makeup complete with giant horns, it’s Scott having a blast on an immense canvas very early in his career. It doesn’t hold together as well as many other films in his output, but you’ll never be bored, and you’ll find it very hard to look away.

Based on the true story of U.S. servicemen getting pinned down during the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, Black Hawk Down is an all-out assault on the senses. It’s a brilliantly executed maelstrom of light, sound, and explosive pacing all geared toward showing us an unvarnished, hellish experience. Sadly, the film never manages to do more than that, so the emotional context of some of its better war movie peers is lost in the shuffle. Still, if you want a war drama that stays in high-gear from start to finish, you’ll find it hard to do better than this one.

If there’s a single prominent theme in Scott’s work, it’s driven people who are often undone by their own hubris, or pushed to their absolute limits in search of satisfaction. All The Money In The World, the true story of the Getty family kidnapping in the 1970s, is a beautifully done examination of that very idea, exploring how far one man (Christopher Plummer, a last-minute replacement who ends up owning the movie) will go to preserve his wealth, and how far one woman (Michelle Williams) will go to protect her family. It’s quietly one of Scott’s most ambitious films, and deserves to be seen by more people.

Napoleon is a sweeping historical drama that follows the spectacular rise and shuddering fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, played with idiosyncratic intensity by Joaquin Phoenix. The setpieces alone are worth the price of admission here, as Scott replays many of Napoleon’s most famous military engagements with style, brutality, and sheer awe. Sadly, the spectacle is offset a little by pacing that feels a bit stretched and a story that could be a bit more intimate, but the raw power of the images and the magnitude of the narrative is still undeniable.

A criminally underwatched Scott gem from the mid-’90s, White Squall tells the true story of a group of schoolboys who take a sailing trip with a tough instructor (Jeff Bridges), only to find disaster along the way. Scott shoots the film, particularly the challenging water scenes, with a confidence and intensity that gives it the pace of a thriller, but also never loses sight of the boys at the heart of the story, and the unlikely event that binds them all together for good and ill. It’s a minor masterpiece in the director’s output, but a masterpiece nonetheless.

For all the time he spends making serious, heavily stylized dramas muscled with the weight of history, Ridley Scott is also a deft hand at more intimate, and even more comedic stories. Matchstick Men, his lone collaboration with Nicolas Cage, is proof of that and then some. Starring Cage and Sam Rockwell as a pair of con men who take on an unlikely pupil (Alison Lohman), it’s as funny and strange as it relatable and even heartbreaking, thanks to both the performances and to Scott’s witty pacing and slick visuals. If you want proof of Scott’s endless versatility, watch Gladiator or Black Hawk Down or Blade Runner, then throw this on right after.

House of Gucci got more attention upon its release in 2021, but the overlooked The Last Duel is the better film by a mile. Based on the true story of France’s last medieval trial by combat and featuring the triumph return of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon as co-writers, the film features commanding, breathless performances by Adam Driver, Damon, and Jodie Comer as the film’s true star, a woman caught in the center of a man’s world who claws for every scrap of agency she can find. Add to all that Scott’s brilliance in the historical spectacle space, and it becomes a triumph.

Ridley Scott and Denzel Washington were made for each other. They have the same drive, the same sense of boundless energy, and the same ability to make something feel natural while simultaneously squeezing out every ounce of bombast they can. American Gangster is a bombastic film, to be sure, a big exploration of American sin in the Vietnam era that packs a visual and thematic punch. Its real secret weapons, though, are the dual performances from Crowe and Washington, who bring raw, vulnerable humanity to Scott’s grand tale of cops and kingpins.

Scott’s debut feature, The Duellists, displays many of the tendencies that would eventually make him into one of the most prominent and respected filmmakers of his generation. The story of two men (Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine) who fight each other across medieval Europe, it’s a film about determination, relentless power, and an endless quest for meaning in a world that seems to be destroying itself. It’s also, even all these years later, one of the most beautiful things ever filmed by Scott, who also served as his own cameraman for this one.

Scott’s massive, complex, beautifully realized depiction of the fall of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem didn’t land well when it arrived in 2005, but time just keeps making it better. Featuring arguably the best cast Scott has ever assembled and perhaps the best grand-scale battle of his entire career, Kingdom Of Heaven is a masterpiece of scope, depth, and intellectual curiosity, made all the richer by its expanded, epic director’s cut. Both versions are great, but in this case the longer version really is worth your time. Either way, you get an epic worthy of the name.

Strangely, Gladiator gets a lot of retroactive grief from film fans who wonder if it’s overrated, something that happens to a lot of films which took home the coveted Best Picture Oscar. But the doubt, in this case, is thoroughly misplaced. Scott’s only Best Picture winner, Gladiator is every bit the epic people said it was when it was released more than two decades ago. The story of a Roman general’s (Russell Crowe) fall from grace and rise as a gladiator superstar, it features some of the most dynamic action in Scott’s career, a great lead performance, and a truly sumptuous visual palette laid out by Scott and cinematographer John Mathieson. In other words: Yeah, it really is that good.

With 2015’s The Martian, Ridley Scott was at last able to marry his knack for spectacle and scope with his gift for idiosyncratic comedy and thriller pacing, and the result is one of the best sci-fi movies of the 21st century so far. Matt Damon’s performance as the title character, a stranded astronaut trying to keep his head up through survival, might be the reason people come to The Martian, but Scott’s direction is the reason they stay. Together, they make an irresistible, constantly rewatchable masterpiece of action, comedy, and pure movie bliss.

The equivalent of a cinematic primal scream of agency and emancipation from the title women, played with vivid wonder by Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon, Thelma & Louise has lost none of its power in the last 30 years. Though it certainly has its share of setpiece magic, including the unforgettable finale, Scott’s road movie drama succeeds because the director knows exactly when to assert his influence, and when to pull back. More often that not, he lets the tremendous work of the two leads do all the talking, and more often that not, that’s exactly what Thelma & Louise needed.

One of cinema’s most famous redemption stories, Blade Runner flopped on its initial release, only to eventually grow into one of the most celebrated genre films ever made. That’s thanks in part to Scott’s frequent tinkering with the film’s original cut to deliver something closer to his vision, but even in its original form, there’s something magical here. Part neo-noir, part cyberpunk thriller, part gripping drama about a man (Harrison Ford) searching for connection in a world that’s growing colder, it’s a masterpiece in any form … but yeah, you should probably watch Scott’s preferred Final Cut to get the full effect.

It remains stunning that Alien is only the second feature film from Ridley Scott. The movie plays with the assuredness and vision of a filmmaker who’s been doing this kind of thing forever, and no matter how many times you watch it, it still finds things to show you. It’s been more than four decades, and Alien is still a masterclass in watching a director marshal every department under his care—from production design to costumes to sound design and, of course, creature effects—into making something breathtaking. Call it cosmic horror, call it a haunted house in space, call it a creature feature. The truth is that Alien is all of those things and so much more, making it not just a great film, but the greatest film in a great career.