Ridley Scott: Ranking His Films From Worst To Best

7. Gladiator

This is it, the big one, the film that scored Scott his second Best Director Oscar nod, yet despite Gladiator winning five Oscars including Best Picture, the director lost out to Steven Soderbergh for Traffic (which is fair enough really). Gladiator may sit alongside Crash as one of the weaker Best Picture winners of the last 15 years, but it's still a terrifically entertaining epic and one of Scott's better films. Every aspect of the film's production is top-notch: the production design, visual effects, cinematography, sound design and Scott's direction all conspire to give the likes of Russell Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix a marvelous canvas on which to play out this action-packed tragedy. It's certainly a good 20 or 30 minutes too long and, again, a strange pick for Best Picture, but it's an endlessly quotable story of one bada** taking sweet vengeance, entertaining accordingly to that end. Just don't think about the historical inaccuracies for the sake of your sanity...