The moment Denzel Washington brags in Sir Ridley Scott’s 29th feature film, Gladiator 2You know it’s ridiculous on. There’s that smile, several pounds of jewelry, and a voice that sounds more like Alonzo Harris than Laurence Olivier — and it doesn’t take anything away from his performance. I saw the film in the world’s greatest IMAX movie theater in Lincoln Square in Manhattan with an audience full of harsh critics, to whom Denzel clearly delighted as soon as he entered the rooms, because every time it happened we knew what we were in for. to.
Joy wasn’t always an emotion that could be associated with the 86-year-old Scott. His early work is (largely) defined by its technical mastery. As you might expect from a man whose second film it was Alien It was his third film Blade RunnerHe is an elite shot-maker, one of the best ever at maintaining a mood and executing a set piece, and a director who reminds us that the heart of cinema has always been spectacle and always will be. He makes space monsters, whooping sci-fi, feminist westerns, sword-and-sandal epics, sequels to his own intellectual property, sequels to non-his own intellectual property, Napoleonic period pieces, and biographies about Napoleon, the only line shown being his unswerving skill. It is beyond doubt. When it comes to cinematic action, he can pull it all off, from intimate, quiet, suspenseful dread to a massive battle sequence featuring 1,000 extras composed with crystal clarity of place, time and stakes – and he often does both in the same film.
Over the last 25 years of his career, Scott has nearly doubled his production from the first 25 years. He’s been to awards season what Jay-Z was to summer, owning this part of the calendar almost annually and rarely disappointing. And while critics have long criticized him for privileging Swiss watchmaking craftsmanship over personality and performance, there is a significant difference between his first ten films (from 1977). Duelists To 1997 GI Jane) and the work he has done since then – starting with the original GladiatorWhat we will discuss shortly is that he began giving his actors more space to cook. “Working with artists is a friendship and a partnership,” Scott said, and in his latest films, you finally feel that. The director himself – a proud and stubborn auteur who stands by his biggest mistakes – has never admitted that anything has changed in his approach to his players, but the evidence is there on screen.
In his works of this century, we can see a painter learning to find beauty in coloring outside the lines, a perfectionist who allows the chaos and unpredictability of life to find its way into his work. A laudable old man “fuck it” attitude has crept in, as the great visual storyteller allows his actors to guide him. So let’s celebrate the performances that made Ridley Scott’s last quarter-century seem so different and so special — the bad accents, the intense emotions, the ugly crying moments, and the weird line readings that made Scott’s post-2000s films some of the wildest, coolest, best… What no director could claim in this century. Friends, Romans, fellow citizens, snap your fingers and follow me across Sir Ridley’s vast field of twenty-first-century wheat – sorted in order of madness. (One actor per film; recurring players may only participate in one performance.)
Honorable mentions
Let us briefly mention the few Scott films that do not appear on the list after 2000, because the reasons for their non-inclusion are instructive. Black Hawk Down (2001), about a confined US military operation in Somalia under the Clinton administration, is one of Scott’s most visceral films, an adrenaline-filled showcase for all his spatial talents (along with those of Pietro Scalia, who deservedly won an Oscar for his editorial work). A frequent filmmaker, Scott often refers to the matinee parties of his youth, and this is his gritty Sam Fuller film set behind enemy lines. The film is well-acted, and full of the era’s buoyant emotions – and it had to, because the story doesn’t give anyone anything significantly demanding to do, besides experimenting with funny accents (shout out to Eric Bana) and screaming in pain. , so you need to submit for face recognition.
It’s the opposite Exodus: Gods and Kingswhose long, painfully slow dual narratives spend a lot of time watching one of our finest living actors and Joel Edgerton paint by numbers, while relegating an Olympic-caliber cast (featuring Ben Kingsley, Ben Mendelsohn, and John Turturro as a silly pharaoh) to the backseat. The point is, in both cases, there was enough room for fun and outlandish performance, and I think if either of them had been made in the 2020s, we’d have gotten more of that, because it’s now practically part of the master’s signature.
15. Albert Finney as Uncle Henry, Good year (2006)
“The kind of wine that will pickle even the toughest of men. I once saw a Castilian boxer collapse in a pile of water after drinking one glass.”
