You never know quite what sort of film you’re going to get next with director Ridley Scott, but you almost always know it’s going to be different to his previous one, and more often than not it’s going to be good. The British film-maker has been at the top of the business for nearly 50 years and now, at the incredible age of 86, he has a new film, Gladiator II, that could be one of the biggest of 2024. See below for our ranking of the best Ridley Scott films and where to stream them in the United Kingdom.
Ridley Scott came out of the gate quickly in 1977 with the critically acclaimed historical drama The Duellists, and he soon had a couple of masterpieces in the bag. His second film, Alien, is still unrivalled in the genre it helped to create: creeping, monster-driven suspense horror, set in the black void of space. If creating the classic character of Ripley weren’t enough, Scott’s next film Blade Runner, a sci-fi neo-noir, made Harrison Ford equally iconic as Rick Deckard.
Scott’s career is not without its fallow periods - he had one after Blade Runner, making a few relatively forgettable films before roaring back with Thelma & Louise, a feminist road movie that has grown to become a highly influential classic. His next big hit, probably his biggest, came nine years later in the form of Gladiator, a Roman epic with the action of a blockbuster and the tight, simple story of a claustrophobic character piece.
The great director only became more unpredictable from there, working again with Gladiator star Russell Crowe but remoulding him as a romantic lead in the surprisingly gentle A Good Year, before pivoting into tough mobster drama with American Gangster. The Alien franchise was revisited, to decent effect if not to the standard of the stellar original, in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant.
By 2015 it seemed as if Scott’s career might finally be tailing off a little, but then he came back yet again with The Martian, starring Matt Damon as a man stranded on the Red Planet. Ambitious, witty and imaginative, it’s one of Scott’s finest blockbusters.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Scott’s most recent pictures is how talked-about they are: directors who keep going into their old age tend to churn out movies that are politely well received by their fans without making too much wider impact, but Scott still has a knack for cultural relevance. In 2021, after a long absence either side of the Covid pandemic, he delivered both the challenging period drama The Last Duel and the mischievous biopic House of Gucci, following them in 2023 with a wildly ambitious epic, Napoleon. You wouldn’t put it past him to come up with a couple more hits, and perhaps a couple more interesting duds, before he finally folds away his director’s chair.
Where to watch the best Ridley Scott movies streaming online
In the meantime there is a large back catalogue to enjoy - see below for our take on Ridley Scott’s films, ranked from best to worst, and how to stream them.
