(Photo by Neon/Courtesy Everett Collection. ANORA.)

All 98 Best Picture Winners, Ranked by Tomatometer

Every year, after the fracas of awards season and studio campaigning, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hands out the ultimate prize in cinema, the explicit recommendation that if you’re only going to watch one movie, make it the one we picked. We’re talking the Oscar for Best Picture. Less than 100 of these have been handed out through the centuries. But ever wonder how the movies of this exclusive golden club would fare against each other?

Welcome to our countdown of every Best Picture winner ever, from the Certified Fresh (Casablanca, Schindler’s List, Argo, Lawrence of Arabia, The Godfather, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King…most of them, fortunately), the kinda Fresh (Out of Africa, Forrest Gump), to the ‘HUH? HOW?’ Rottens (The Broadway Melody, Cimarron).

See where all the films place in our guide to Best Picture Winners, Ranked by Tomatometer!

(Photo by (c)Touchstone Pictures/ Courtesy: Everett Collection.)

Every ’90s Blockbuster Movie Ranked

Armageddon celebrates its 25th anniversary!

Thirty years on, the 1990s has solidified its stature as one of the magical decades in filmmaking, much like how we view the ’30s and the ’70s. Precisely, this Gen X-decade pulled together the Hollywood studio power of the ’30s and the groundbreaking creativity of the ’70s, crocheting commercialism and art into the movie behemoths we speak of in legend as the ’90s blockbuster — which we’ve now ranked all by Tomatometer!

First off, in putting together this list, we didn’t want no scrubs: We defined the ’90s blockbuster as any film that made over $100 million at the box office in the ’90s — movies that had people literally lining up around the block to spend their easy-earned cash. (The economy was booming after all.) This, of course, ushers in all those films synonymous with ’90s blockbusterism, including Jurassic Park, Speed, Twister, Independence Day, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The Phantom Menace, Armageddon, Wild wild West, and Batmans with three different guys.

But the ’90s blockbuster was more than just fast buses, exploding White Houses, and bat nipples. Audiences opened up wallets and handbags (they’re European!) on brazen independent films (Pulp Fiction, Good Will Hunting, The Blair Witch Project), big comedies (Sister Act, The Nutty Professor, The Waterboy, Dumb & Dumber, The Birdcage), and romances both funny and dramatic (Pretty Woman, Shakespeare in Love, Jerry Maguire, Ghost).

It was the era of the Disney renaissance (Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King), special-effects breakthroughs (Toy Story, Total Recall, The Matrix), and where the most popular movies of the year could reasonably expect a Best Picture statue come next February (Unforgiven, Titanic, Dances With Wolves). A scintillating ’90s blockbuster can transport us to that moment before cinematic universes, before CGI overload, and before ubiquitous cell phones and Internet; today, Lloyd Christmas can just DM Mary Samsonite and say “Hey, I have your briefcase :)” if he weren’t still illiterate.

Now, relive the rush of the decade without the searing sting of slap bracelets, or shotgunning Fruitopia, with our guide to every ’90s blockbuster ranked by Tomatometer!

(Photo by Warner Bros)

Warner Bros: 100 Years, 100 Essential Movies

Warner Bros. turns 100! To celebrate, we’ve partnered with the studio (along with our friends at Vudu) and dug through their iconic library, checked behind the matte paintings on the soundstages, and even rummaged through the water tower (Yakko certainly has a fascinating collection of film negatives) to select the 100 essential Warner Bros. movies!

The films date back to the early days of cinema and are listed here beginning with the most recent release. The earliest film included is the 1938 swashbuckler The Adventures of Robin Hood. The 1940s are Bogie and Best Pictures: Casablanca, The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

In the 1950s, we see Marlon Brando redefine acting in A Streetcar Name Desire, one of the best of the creature feature era (Them!), and the finest among Alfred Hitchcock’s works (Strangers on a Train, Dial M for Murder).

The 1960s were a decade of cultural revolution, and Warners was the first major studio to embrace it, starting with 1967’s iconic Bonnie & Clyde before 2001: A Space Odyssey redefined what was cinematically possible the next year.

In the New Hollywood era of the 1970s, where creative expression was absolute, Warners sought to work with the rising generation, including Martin Scorsese (Mean Streets), William Friedkin (The Exorcist), and Terrence Malick (Badlands). This gave Warner Bros. the longstanding reputation as the most director-friendly major studio; Kubrick worked with them for decades, aas have Scorsese (later directing GoodFellas and winning Best Picture for The Departed), Clint Eastwood (Dirty Harry, Unforgiven), and, until recently, Christopher Nolan.

Cult and pop culture fandom as we know it started during the 1980s, and the WB logo felt inescapable across Batman, Blade Runner, Gremlins, Beetlejuice, The NeverEnding Story, and The Goonies. Warner Bros. would re-up their commitment to this space in the 2000s with the dominating duo of The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. In between, we just got some stuff like The Shawshank Redemption, Seven, L.A. Confidential, The Matrix, and Space Jam. Would this list even count if there were no Looney Tunes on it?

2008’s The Dark Knight still remains the comic book movie to beat, and it’s just one example of the abundant Nolan/Warners partnership that once yielded Interstellar and Inception. 2015 saw two series revitalizations: Mad Max: Fury Road and Creed. 2017’s Wonder Woman is a jewel of DC Comics superhero movies, and that same year, Paddington 2 was momentarily the best-reviewed movie ever on Rotten Tomatoes.

Rent or purchase any of the 100 essential Warner Bros. movies on Vudu, and celebrate a century of the most beloved entertainment ever! —Alex Vo

(Photo by Pablo Cuadra/Getty Images)

James Gray has won the affection of international film critics with New Hollywood throwback offerings like Two Lovers, The Immigrant, and The Lost City of Z, but with Brad Pitt suited up for space in Ad Astra, Gray gets his first major studio project off the ground. Like many of Gray’s films, there is a family story at the heart of his Heart of Darkness-esque space movie, with Tommy Lee Jones playing Pitt’s astronaut father who’s been missing for 20 years but might have just made contact from Neptune. Pitt embarks on a mission not just to find his father, but also to stop the electrical surge from an outpost near the distant planet, which has caused thousands of deaths on Earth.

The film debuted at the Venice Film Festival with high accolades for its thrilling sequences, Pitt’s performance, and the astounding visual effects (which the Fox-Disney merger granted Gray a few more months to fine-tune). Ahead of Ad Astra’s nationwide release — it’s Certified Fresh at 81% on the Tomatometer — Gray told us his Five Favorite Films and spoke about the gestation of his current film. That his choices come from Russian, Austrian, and Italian filmmakers, in addition to Hollywood, should surprise no one familiar with his work as a filmmaker who’s keeping the ’70s maverick spirit alive in modern American cinema.

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Brian Formo for Rotten Tomatoes: Something that’s constant through your work is family expectations and the suffocating weight of that. So I’m wondering, with Ad Astra, did you start with a father-son story in space, or did you want to make a movie in space and have these big set pieces, but then it became more natural to tether it to a father-son relationship?

An excellent question. I wish I could tell you that I came up with the story first, but it’s not how it happened. I was thinking very seriously about a childhood memory that I had. I grew up in New York, and you couldn’t see the stars. The sky had this kind of dull orange at night, because the city was so lit up. I remember there was a blackout that hit the city — this was 1977, in the summer of 1977 — and I remember, as all the lights went out, you could see the stars for the first time.

All of a sudden I had this weird memory back to that feeling — it was, like, 2011 and I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great to make a movie about what is out there?” I talked about it a lot with my friend and co-writer, Ethan (Gross), and I asked, “What it means to be out there, and are there aliens, or are we alone?” Well, there are a lot of movies about aliens, and good aliens and bad aliens. (Steven) Spielberg’s done incredible work about that, but his movies, they play like fables. E.T. is like a fable; Close Encounters, like a fable. Beautiful, beautiful films. (Stanley) Kubrick made a beautiful film, of course (in 2001). The alien is a black slab of granite, whatever it appears to look like. Is that a good alien? A bad alien? What does that mean? You can project anything you want on it. So he beats the trap of false gods, you know?

(Photo by 20th Century Fox)

But we thought, “Well, what does it mean if you find that there’s really nothing out there? And if there’s nothing out there, that poses its own set of existential questions.” So it started from that, really, and that was the chain of events. Then I tried to start getting the story as personal as I could, and we wanted to steal from — as pretentious as this sounds — we wanted to steal from The Odyssey, and tell the story, really, from Telemachus’ point of view. His father, Odysseus, goes away for 20 years; he doesn’t know what happened to him. What that would mean, and that sense of abandonment that Telemachus must have…

Now, of course, Homer’s story ends very differently. But that’s where that came from, a kind of mythic idea. Then, of course, you start to personalize it, you start to include things in your own life, and before you know it, you’ve got this tiny little story about a father and a son against the huge canvas, where you’re going out there, it’s the vast infinite. That’s really how it formed.

So, the opening in the film, and I’m not a take-a-notepad-to-the-film person, mostly because High Fidelity scarred me for life…

Oh when his girlfriend clicks her pen throughout the movie to take notes?

Yes!

Ha, what a nice aside.

So I’m not sure if I got the two words correct, but the movie opens with something like, in the near future, there’s hope and fear about humanity’s future. In presenting the future, what is something that you discovered in your research that gives you hope about the future, and what is something that terrifies you?

It’s an easy question to answer. Easy. Hope: the mapping of the human genome, hospital cures for diseases, the specialized treatment of things like different kinds of cancer, that’s fantastic. And fear, I think, is obvious. The fear is climate change and the end of civilization, the civilized world.

If you look at Mars… By the way, the NASA people I’ve worked with on this film, who are great, their hair’s on fire. The f—ing world is ending and, I mean, I understand that it’s a slow burn, but it’s not that slow. In fact, the permafrost is going worse up there than we think, you know? Greenland, large sheets are melting faster than we think, or we thought — now we know. Already parts of New York are uninsurable.

And lots of Los Angeles, for fires.

Yeah. I’m extremely concerned. So, I think progress is a beautiful thing. I think that we’ll be able to do things that we couldn’t imagine in terms of human longevity. Maybe we’ll figure out what it means in the future, to maybe find an answer to not just longevity, but market economics, where five people don’t control all the wealth on the planet. That’s a problem.

If we could solve that, that would be great, but I have hope that we do, because the world moves in cycles, strange cycles. I feel like we’re itching for a new path forward on how to handle some of our problems. But climate change, that’s a tough one. That’s a tough one. There are things like taking CO² and making it into oxygen. Apparently, technologically, there are ways to do it, but it’s ridiculously expensive.  But we’re going to have to do it. I don’t see any other way around it. I hope I’m completely wrong.

(Photo by )

[Note: Mild spoilers below]

We can get morose for the whole interview, but this movie has a lot of very fun, thrilling sequences.

I hope so.

Like the moon pirates, the underground lake, or even just the opening, falling from space, et cetera. The mayday call for help and where that goes…

All of that was supposed to be thematically relevant, more than narratively relevant. The idea that, basically, unexpected horror is around every turn when you’re that far away from Earth. So we felt that it had thematic unity, if not narrative unity. Anything earthbound, it’s not meant to live out there. It’s not meant to be there. That’s not our friend, it’s different to us. We felt that the mayday response was an important sequence. Do people want to know about that beforehand?

I loved the surprise, so I think, where we’re at for filmgoers is people just want to know that there’s blood, there’s a confrontation, there’s excitement.

Well, there is blood. There is blood.

There are deaths and surprises.

We tried to do that. We wanted to deliver that stuff. The fall from the tower, the lunar-rover sequence, the [mayday] thing, the underground lake, certainly; he climbs up a rocket, he has a zero G fight, he flies through the rings of a planet. I mean, we wanted to deliver some red meat. We absolutely did. By the way, there is no shame in that. Shakespeare was broad and subtle; that’s good stuff. So, we tried, and we tried to do it in our own way, of course, make it weird, unique, strange; in the lunar rover you can only hear what’s inside his helmet. It’s very weird for a chase sequence.

Yeah, you have meat and potatoes, but you also have some asparagus.

Exactly. That’s what we’re trying to do.

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Ad Astra is in theaters September 20.

Thumbnail image: (c) Warner Bros.

(Photo by Columbia Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection)

All Morgan Freeman Movies Ranked By Tomatometer

Morgan Freeman. Read this sentence in his voice. That familiar sound of authoritative benevolence, that could make an intro paragraph soar like a songbird with world-weariest wings. Freeman has lent his sonorous gift for narration to dozens of documentaries, including March of the Penguins, and to several of his narrative films, like Million Dollar Baby and, to lasting generational effect, in The Shawshank Redemption.

But before the voice of God got to play God (see: Bruce and Evan Almighty), Freeman had to humbly serve the silver screen in bit and seriously secondary parts for two decades. He got his big break performing the the lead villain in Christopher Reeve’s journalism thriller Street Smart, for which he was nominated for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. That was released in 1987 and is where we’ll start Freeman’s filmography for this guide. Just two years later, he was on the national radar with the Best Picture-winning Driving Miss Daisy, for which he was once more nominated. The Academy has recognized his work three times since: Shawshank, Million Dollar Baby (for which he won), and Invictus.

The Daisy prestige brought in a raft of memorable roles for Freeman, including in Glory, Unforgiven, and Seven. He also seems to have a knack for being in the right comic book movie at the right time: see Red, Wanted, and his turn as Lucius Fox in The Dark Knight trilogy. We’re taking a look back on a celebrated career with this list of all Morgan Freeman movies ranked by Tomatometer! —Alex Vo

(Photo by Stephane Cardinale-Corbis /Getty Images)

Jason Clarke isn’t quite a household name – yet. He is, however, poised to make the leap from talented character actor to leading man. After stellar performances in Certified Fresh favorites Mudbound, Zero Dark Thirty, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Clarke has become an integral piece of some of the most critically acclaimed properties of the past few years. Last year the Aussie actor was nigh unrecognizable as he perfectly embodied the late Ted Kennedy in Chappaquiddick, and while his earlier turn as John Conner in Terminator: Genisys didn’t relaunch the Terminator franchise, his post-Genisys choices have marked him as one of the most dynamic actors working today.

The chameleon-like actor seems untethered to genre or archetype, which makes him difficult to typecast. This week, he returns to theaters as the patriarch of the Creed family in a new adaptation of Stephen King’s iconic horror novel Pet Sematary. Dr. Louis Creed (Clarke) moves his family to a quiet town in Maine, where he finds out the neighborhood “Pet Sematary” is actually the last place you’d want to bury the family pet. Premiering at SXSW to positive reviews, the latest version still sits fresh at 80%. We chatted with Clarke just after the SXSW premiere about his horror favorites, why he’s kinda obsessed with Richard E. Grant, and his Five Favorite Films.

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Jacqueline Coley for Rotten Tomatoes: You have been quietly doing some amazing work recently. We loved Mudbound, and then there was First Man. But the one we loved that not as many people saw was Chappaquiddick. It was incredible and quite a transformation for you. 

Jason Clarke: Oh yeah, Chappaquiddick. Thank you. It got a bit lost, but at the same point, it made $18 million in the U.S. It was one of the highest grossing independent films of that year. People saw it. People didn’t talk about it, because it’s pretty difficult to talk about for a lot of the media in the current environment. It will stand the test of time.

RT: Moving to Pet Sematary — are you a scary movie person? A horror person?

Clarke: To be honest, not hugely so, although some of my favorite movies are. You know, I wouldn’t term them as horror, like The Hunt. That film terrorized me. It’s very creepy watching. It’s extraordinary but not “horror.”

RT: We just had the premiere here at SXSW. What was it like, seeing it last night? Because the audiences here are legendary for their reactions.

Clarke: It was insane. Really. It struck me as how rarely I go to a cinema now and watch a movie with a group of people. I’m always watching them by myself, with my wife, maybe with a couple of people, or with my child. To watch something with a thousand people was wonderful. You remember that’s what cinema is about. For an actor, it’s almost like the theater. You’re sitting in the same air. I was able to see people’s reactions. I could feel the love and enjoyment. I couldn’t help but think, “I need more of this.” Like, my God, I might need to do a play again. It’s the connection to the people, because acting [on film sets], you lose that.

RT: Do you think that is particularly because horror is such a reactive genre?

Clarke: You know, it’s cinema, it’s a director’s medium, and whatever anyone says, you know it’s their vision, particularly with horror. The audience watches it to feel it. And last night, I felt it, you know, but that’s not in every horror flick. I think horror’s not enough for this film. It’s not enough to say when it’s Stephen King.

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Pet Sematary opens on April 5.

(Photo by Cindy Ord/Getty Images)

It’s one thing to be a best-selling novelist, but it’s another to be a best-selling novelist whose books also easily translate into successful films. Nicholas Sparks has achieved both since he published his first novel, The Notebook, in 1996. While his two follow-up books, 1998’s Message in a Bottle and 1999’s A Walk to Remember, were adapted for the big screen first, it was the 2004 feature adaptation of that first novel that established him as pop culture’s foremost purveyor of romantic drama. The Notebook helped launch the careers of then up-and-coming actors Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, and it remains a cultural touchstone for thousands of fans.

This week saw the release of Sparks’ 20th novel, Every Breath, a romance about a chance encounter between two strangers in North Carolina that forces them to reexamine their lives and make some difficult decisions. He took some time out of his schedule to speak with Rotten Tomatoes about his Five Favorite Films, a couple of which might surprise those familiar with his work.

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Nicholas Sparks’ new novel, Every Breath, is available in stores this week.

He’s gone from TV star to action hero to one of the biggest stars in Hollywood — on both sides of the camera. We’re talking, of course, about Clint Eastwood, and with his latest directorial effort, The 15:17 to Paris, reaching theaters this weekend, we at RT thought the time was right for a look back at the best-reviewed films of his career behind the lens.

You’ll find the expected entries here — no Eastwood list would be complete without Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby, for instance — but the length of his directorial résumé might surprise you. We’ve reached back to the beginning, set the Tomatometer for “Make My Day,” and come up with a list that’ll take you from the high plains to the sands of Iwo Jima. Do you feel lucky, punks?

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Use the arrows to rank the movies, or click here to see them ranked by Tomatometer!

Best Western Movies of All Time

Welcome to Rotten Tomatoes’ list of the 100 best-reviewed Western movies of all time, sorted by Adjusted Tomatometer with at least 20 reviews for each selection. Additionally, we picked only classical period films, so you get outta here with that Best Picture-winning neo-Western nonsense! Now, it’s time to put on your best pa-avenging chaps, slide a bad hombre down the saloon bar top, and ride on to see how the West was Fresh! —Alex Vo

The new Flatliners arrives in theaters this weekend, and with it a new crop of foolhardy young scientists determined to find out what happens after we die. Of course, many filmgoers found the answer in 1990, when the first Flatliners rounded up some of the hottest young actors in Hollywood (including Kiefer Sutherland, who makes a return appearance in this edition). Thinking back to that original outing has us feeling nostalgic for the ’90s, so we decided to dedicate this feature to a look at the freshest wide domestic releases of the decade by Adjusted Tomatometer (take a look at the year-by-year lists) — and invite you to rank your own favorites along the way. It’s time for Total Recall!

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Use the up and down arrows to rank the movies, or click here to see them in chronological order!

After close to two decades in front of the camera, most notably in the popular FX drama Sons of Anarchy, Taylor Sheridan turned his talents to writing and penned the script that would become Denis Villeneuve’s acclaimed thriller Sicario. A year later, he earned an Academy Award nomination for just his second screenplay, Hell or High Water, which also nabbed a Best Picture nod.

This week, Sheridan makes his feature directorial debut with another film he wrote called Wind River, which stars Elizabeth Olsen and Jeremy Renner as an FBI agent and a Fish and Wildlife official attempting to unravel a murder in rural Wyoming. Early reviews have Wind River pegged as another triumph for Sheridan, whose knack for gripping crime drama populated by complex characters is quickly becoming a trademark. Sheridan recently spoke to Rotten Tomatoes by phone to give us his Five Favorite Films, though he had trouble settling on a final choice. Read on for the full list.

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Ryan Fujitani for Rotten Tomatoes: You’re an actor, a writer, and now a director. Did your experience both in front of and behind the camera help to shape your directorial style on Wind River?

Taylor Sheridan: I don’t think it helped influence my directorial style consciously, as far as, “How do I shoot it?” You’re going to build a cinematic style, there’s decisions you have to make as a filmmaker about, “How do I convey a mood with image?” Where having been an actor was extremely helpful to me, was in casting. That’s where I think a director who has acted can really shine, and casting is the most important thing you do.

I hired people, and a couple of them said, “I can’t believe you hired me. It was one of the worst auditions of my life.” I’m like, “Oh, I’m aware of that, I saw it, but I also saw what I needed to see.”

I can recognize a good actor. I can recognize someone that can convey emotion, and that has the essence, and not get lost in the minutia of, “Well that person’s got red hair and so does the other.” Some of the decisions in casting that seem so important at the time, until you get on set and you’re starting to shoot. I don’t think a lot of times directors who haven’t acted understand that.

RT: Speaking of which, a lot of people are calling this your directorial debut, but I’m seeing that you’re actually credited as a director on what appears to be a horror film called Vile, back in 2011.

Sheridan: [laughs] Yeah. I would say this is my feature debut. A friend of mine raised — I don’t know what he raised — 20 grand or something, and cast his buddies, and wrote this bad horror movie, that I told him not to direct. He was going to direct it and produce it, and he started and freaked out, and called and said, “Can you help me?” I said, “Yeah, I’ll try.”

I kind of kept the ship pointed straight, and they went off and edited, and did what they did. I think it’s generous to call me the director. I think he was try to say thank you, in some way. It was an excellent opportunity to point a camera and learn some lessons that actually benefited me on Wind River.

RT: You’ve written a couple of great films already. Was there a reason why, when you wrote Wind River, you thought, “Okay, I’m going to do this one?” Or was it just a matter of circumstances coming together just right?

Sheridan: This subject matter, I couldn’t trust that someone else would have the same vision for it that I would. I had made promises to people in the native community, that this would be done a certain way, and the only way to guarantee that it was done that way was to direct it myself. I had to go, “Okay, look, even if it’s not good, at least it’s the way I promised I would do it.”

Hopefully, people think it’s good. That’s always the goal, because the aspirations for a bad movie don’t matter, because no one sees that.

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Wind River opens in limited release this Friday, August 4.

If you were asked to name one actor capable of playing ex-cons, hitmen, and God, you’d be hard pressed to do any better than Morgan Freeman — which is, probably not coincidentally, why he’s played all those characters (among many others) over the course of his distinguished career. Past the half-century mark as a professional actor, Freeman shows no signs of slowing down; in this weekend’s Going in Style, he updates the 1979 post-retirement comedy alongside Alan Arkin and Michael Caine. In honor of Freeman’s latest trip to the big screen, we’re taking a fond look back at some of his best-reviewed movies — and you know what that means. Hey you guys, it’s time for Total Recall!

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Use the up and down arrows to rank Freeman’s movies, or click here to see his top 10 movies ranked by Tomatometer!

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Kerr Lordygan for Rotten Tomatoes: And another great movie is Aftermath. It’s a different thing for you — hardcore drama —  and it’s very moving. What drew you to it?

Arnold Schwarzenegger: I was very much aware of the real story, because I read a lot about that and saw it on television. And then when I got the script about that story and kind of like — not exactly the story, but I mean, based on that story, I thought, “Wow, this is really interesting.” And it was one of the most sought after kind of scripts in Hollywood, and it read well; the character was really well developed.

And I said to myself, “Well, it gives me chance to do something again that I have not been able to do my whole life,” because in most action movies you just move from action to action — not really great character scenes to character scenes, you know? So it’s not written that way, and this movie was really just written that way; where you — from morning to night — you just work on a character and on a scene and then the drama and everything, and that gave me a good opportunity to do something that I haven’t done before. I really enjoyed doing that, challenging myself that way.

And it’s very very tough to do because emotionally, I’m used to doing things physically that are very tough to do, but not emotionally. So you kind of have to really push yourself and give it everything that you got.

RT: Did it come easy for you? To fall in to that dark place?

Schwarzenegger: I wouldn’t say easy; I had to work on it. Because I’ve never had this kind of trauma happen to me, so you really have to kind of get into someone else’s life, in a way. But I think that the locations sometimes are very helpful with that. You go on a crash site where you see dead bodies and all that, on trees, and inside the plane. It gets you into that kind of emotional stage. And also if you sit around body bags in the gymnasium — so it was all acted out or staged so real that when you go in there, when you hang out there long enough, you will get into that emotional state. And so that’s what I did, I was just always working on feeling like that in reality. That upset, that sad, and frustrating, and angry, and being in a state of despair. That’s the key thing.

RT: It’s a hard movie to say that you ‘enjoy’ because there’s not very much light in it at all.

Schwarzenegger: But the interesting thing is I did enjoy the work, because it was different in a way. And it was, in a way, satisfying that, even though you went through some emotional drama throughout the whole day — and if it’s crying, or being upset, or whatever it is, totally lost — at the end of the evening you felt like, “Wow that was really interesting, that I got to that place.” And you enjoy that you actually felt real. That it was real to you at that moment, when you did the scene. There’s something enjoyable about it that you’re able to do it, and in trying to stretch in acting and to do something different.

RT: And you look great; we got to see your butt.

Schwarzenegger: Thank You.

RT: No butt double for you?

Schwarzenegger: No, no. I don’t need one.

RT: No, you don’t.

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Aftermath opens on Friday, Apr. 7, 2017 in limited release and On Demand.

(Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

Dolph Lundgren (Film: Universal Soldier, Rocky IV, A View to a Kill, The Expendables, Masters of the Universe; TV: Arrow, Justice League Dark) is a household name when it comes to studly bad-assery with a slight tongue in a cheek somewhere. Now Don’t Kill It — directed by Mike Mendez (The Gravedancers, Tales of Halloween) —  opens this week with Lundgren as a snarky demon-hunter trying to save a small Mississippi town. This one has a sense of humor a la Evil Dead 2 or Dead Alive and more than enough hilariously campy gore to please fans of the genre. Mr. Lundgren graciously spoke to us about the films that he has always loved. The list of his Five Favorite Films is here:

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Kerr Lordygan for Rotten Tomatoes: I saw Don’t Kill It, and I fell in love with it. I wasn’t expecting it to be so funny. You’re very funny in it. You had to learn a Missouri dialect there?

Dolph Lundgren: Oh, yeah. It was a funny movie. The whole thing: the guys talks a lot, the dialect, the fact that there’s so much verbiage. Usually in action movies — which is mostly what I’ve done, people don’t talk that much; you’ve got to do without dialogue. But that’s what I liked about it when I read it. The guy over-explains things, and I thought it was funny. I tried to make the guy funny. Make him comical.

I’m doing this arc on Arrow, and I was taking so many ideas there and used it for Don’t Kill It because the guy on Arrow talks quite a bit, too. It’s quite efficient sometimes, effective on screen. A big guy — I think no one expected it.

RT: It was great. Did anything surprise you about doing the movie?

Lundgren: I had a lot of fun. I had more fun than I thought. It was a little bit of a breakthrough because you are a slave to the material as an actor, and that one — because I talk a lot and because it’s funny — I felt much freer after that movie doing other things because it affected me a little bit — like I said — on Arrow. The kind of movies now, everything I’ve done recently, I have a little more fun in front of the camera.

RT: Did you expect it to be that funny when you agreed to do it?

Lundgren: Not really, no. I knew that the character was entertaining, the main character. I haven’t done many horror movies, and I’m skeptical to all that about demons and s— like that. But I read the script, and somehow it pulled me in enough about halfway through. I said, “If it could pull me in, then maybe it will pull the audience in,” because I’m sure they’ll be skeptical, too, of this thing — especially if I’m playing the lead in it. It worked, I guess.

RT: Lots of really fun gore in this one, too. Funny and well done.

Lundgren: Yeah, because Mendez, he doesn’t care. He’d have buckets of blood standing by all the time. He doesn’t care. I like that. There’s so many movies that’s, “There’s too much blood!” Did you ever get punched in the nose? Do you know how much you bleed when somebody breaks your nose? It’s like there’s blood everywhere down to your knees on your shirt. I used to do martial arts. I know how much blood comes out of a nose. But in movies, they don’t want to do that because people can’t take it anymore. People are a sanitized version of reality.

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Don’t Kill It opens on Friday, Mar. 3, 2017 in limited release.

It’s the first streaming column of the month, and you know what that means: subscription services have rolled out a ton of new selections. With that in mind, as usual, we’ve pared the list down to just the Certified Fresh options. Read on for the full list.

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When it comes to big summer movies, the opinions of critics and audiences are always out of sync. Right? Not so fast. Using our weighted formula, we at Rotten Tomatoes decided to spotlight the best-reviewed wide releases from each summer since 1975 — the year Jaws kicked off the blockbuster era — and it turns out that many of the big winners with the pundits have become perennial favorites with regular moviegoers as well.

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1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010s

This week on streaming video, Netflix added a good number of iconic classics to its catalog, as well as a few recent films worth checking out, a couple of underseen gems, and some fan favorites. Read on for the full list:

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(Photo by Getty Images / Mark Mainz)

 

For just over 20 years now, Matthew Fox has been a bit of a TV icon. On whichever six-year series you may have “met” him, be it Party of Five or Lost, chances are one of his characters was at the center of your pop-culture TV discussion at some point or another.  Bone Tomahawk, a new western/horror hybrid film, continues Fox’s significant on-camera travails through the industry. When asked what his Five Favorite Films were, Fox shed light on just a small handful of the movies that make him tick. Here are his responses:

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Bone Tomahawk opens Friday, Oct. 23 in limited release.

75 Best Summer Blockbusters of All Time

In defense of the blockbuster, Rotten Tomatoes offers you Best Summer Movies, a countdown of the highest-rated wide releases to hit theaters during the hot season since the release of Jaws in 1975. We’re using a weighted formula that takes the Tomatometer, the number of reviews, and the year of release into account. In order to qualify, each movie needs at least 20 reviews, and to have been released wide in the months between May and August. Enough talk: grab an extra large soda and a bucket of popcorn and dive into RT’s Best Summer Movies!

Ten years ago the AFI gave us a list of the Top 100 American Films Ever Made — and when that was done they churned out 15 other lists every few years. And then last night they updated the Top 100 … I guess because they ran out of lists.

Frankly I think all of these lists are a little silly, but they do spark a lot of movie discussion and therefore I’m all for ’em. Seems a bit unnecessary to update a list that’s barely ten years old, but hey, you do what you have to do to get the viewers interested. I’ll post the new list below, but if you’d like to compare it to the original Top 100, you can check our source below.

And definitely feel free to share your thoughts, opinions and outrage regarding the big list. There’s a lot of movies out there, so please do toss your lists out, too. (The one below came from a list of 1,500 filmmakers, writers, actors, critics, and "others.")

At the very least, this list should give you a good idea of how to fill up your Netflix queue.

1. "Citizen Kane," 1941.
2. "The Godfather," 1972.
3. "Casablanca," 1942.
4. "Raging Bull," 1980.
5. "Singin’ in the Rain," 1952.
6. "Gone With the Wind," 1939.
7. "Lawrence of Arabia," 1962.
8. "Schindler’s List," 1993.
9. "Vertigo," 1958.
10. "The Wizard of Oz," 1939.

11. "City Lights," 1931.
12. "The Searchers," 1956.
13. "Star Wars," 1977.
14. "Psycho," 1960.
15. "2001: A Space Odyssey," 1968.
16. "Sunset Blvd.", 1950.
17. "The Graduate," 1967.
18. "The General," 1927.
19. "On the Waterfront," 1954.
20. "It’s a Wonderful Life," 1946.

21. "Chinatown," 1974.
22. "Some Like It Hot," 1959.
23. "The Grapes of Wrath," 1940.
24. "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," 1982.
25. "To Kill a Mockingbird," 1962.
26. "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," 1939.
27. "High Noon," 1952.
28. "All About Eve," 1950.
29. "Double Indemnity," 1944.
30. "Apocalypse Now," 1979.

31. "The Maltese Falcon," 1941.
32. "The Godfather Part II," 1974.
33. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest," 1975.
34. "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," 1937.
35. "Annie Hall," 1977.
36. "The Bridge on the River Kwai," 1957.
37. "The Best Years of Our Lives," 1946.
38. "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," 1948.
39. "Dr. Strangelove," 1964.
40. "The Sound of Music," 1965.

41. "King Kong," 1933.
42. "Bonnie and Clyde," 1967.
43. "Midnight Cowboy," 1969.
44. "The Philadelphia Story," 1940.
45. "Shane," 1953.
46. "It Happened One Night," 1934.
47. "A Streetcar Named Desire," 1951.
48. "Rear Window," 1954.
49. "Intolerance," 1916.
50. "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring," 2001.

51. "West Side Story," 1961.
52. "Taxi Driver," 1976.
53. "The Deer Hunter," 1978.
54. "M*A*S*H," 1970.
55. "North by Northwest," 1959.
56. "Jaws," 1975.
57. "Rocky," 1976.
58. "The Gold Rush," 1925.
59. "Nashville," 1975.
60. "Duck Soup," 1933.

61. "Sullivan’s Travels," 1941.
62. "American Graffiti," 1973.
63. "Cabaret," 1972.
64. "Network," 1976.
65. "The African Queen," 1951.
66. "Raiders of the Lost Ark," 1981.
67. "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", 1966.
68. "Unforgiven," 1992.
69. "Tootsie," 1982.
70. "A Clockwork Orange," 1971.

71. "Saving Private Ryan," 1998.
72. "The Shawshank Redemption," 1994.
73. "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," 1969.
74. "The Silence of the Lambs," 1991.
75. "In the Heat of the Night," 1967.
76. "Forrest Gump," 1994.
77. "All the President’s Men," 1976.
78. "Modern Times," 1936.
79. "The Wild Bunch," 1969.
80. "The Apartment, 1960.

81. "Spartacus," 1960.
82. "Sunrise," 1927.
83. "Titanic," 1997.
84. "Easy Rider," 1969.
85. "A Night at the Opera," 1935.
86. "Platoon," 1986.
87. "12 Angry Men," 1957.
88. "Bringing Up Baby," 1938.
89. "The Sixth Sense," 1999.
90. "Swing Time," 1936.

91. "Sophie’s Choice," 1982.
92. "Goodfellas," 1990.
93. "The French Connection," 1971.
94. "Pulp Fiction," 1994.
95. "The Last Picture Show," 1971.
96. "Do the Right Thing," 1989.
97. "Blade Runner," 1982.
98. "Yankee Doodle Dandy," 1942.
99. "Toy Story," 1995.
100. "Ben-Hur," 1959.

Grr. I’m annoyed that neither of my all-time favorites (those would be "Alien" and "Young Frankenstein") made the list. Oh well.

Be honest: How many of ’em have you seen?

Source: SeattlePI.com

Several websites have reported the news, but we’ll throw the linkage to the fine folks at Movie City News, cuz I’m pretty sure they broke the scoop. Apparently, Richard Kelly‘s "Southland Tales," which was met with much derision and disbelief at the Cannes Film Festival, will be getting a North American release courtesy of Sony Pictures… We’re just not sure which version we’ll be getting.

From Movie City News: "All Domestic Rights To Southland Tales Bought By Sony Home Entertainment Chief Ben Feingold… Film Will Be Released In Finished Version, Not The One Shown At Cannes, But Not As Edited By The Studio, But By Richard Kelly, Who Is Already In Early Preproduction On Part II… Unclear If A Sony Arm Will Release Or If Theatrical Will Go To An Associated Company, Like Samuel Goldwyn… Kelly Strongly Argues That The Film Cost $16.9 Million And Not More, As Rumored By People Associated With The Film."

Second film from the director of "Donnie Darko," "Southland Tales" stars The Rock, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jon Lovitz, and … John Larroquette? Cool.