8 James Gunn Movies Ranked (Superman)

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The latest: James Gunn’s Superman flies into theaters July 11.

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Over the years, James Gunn has established himself as one of Hollywood’s top blockbuster directors. From early screenwriting credits like Scooby-Doo (2002) to his breakout with the Dawn of the Dead (2004) remake, and eventually helming Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) franchise, Gunn has carved out an entertaining and action-packed film career. Now, he’s stepping into the DC Universe with his latest project, Superman, which soars into theaters July 11. Here’s a look at some of his most iconic projects, followed by a Tomatometer ranking of his films. (Michael Cahn)

James Gunn’s path to becoming a blockbuster filmmaker started in an unconventional way. As a child, Gunn found comfort in comic books, a passion that would eventually shape his career. He began making Super 8 horror films, played in a rock band, and even worked as a hospital orderly while creating underground comic strips. After earning an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, Gunn got his start in low-budget filmmaking with Troma Entertainment, co-writing and co-directing the film Tromeo and Juliet (1996). He broke into Hollywood with the surprise success of Scooby-Doo (2002) and its sequel, followed by the hit Dawn of the Dead remake, making him the first screenwriter to top the box office two weeks in a row.

Slither (2006): James Gunn’s directorial debut Slither is a gloriously grotesque throwback to creature features and alien invasion flicks, soaked in gore and dark humor. When a parasitic extraterrestrial crashes into the sleepy town of Wheelsy, chaos ensues, and it’s up to the local sheriff (Nathan Fillion) to stop the spreading infestation. Powered by sharp writing and a strong cast including Elizabeth Banks and Michael Rooker, Slither is a loving, slimy salute to schlock horror. The film was a cult favorite that put Gunn on the horror genre map.

Variety’s Joe Leydon on Slither: “Gunn—a Troma Entertainment alumnus whose writing credits range from Scooby Doo to 2004’s Dawn of the Dead remake—deftly balances broad humor, rude shocks and gross-out special effects for a fang-in-cheek extravaganza that often feels like a slightly more upscale version of cheapie-creepy Troma product.”

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014): After Slither, Gunn made the dark comedy Super (2010) and contributed to the sketch film Movie 43 (2013), before making the unexpected jump to big-budget superhero filmmaking with Guardians of the Galaxy. The film was a bold and wildly entertaining entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where Gunn was able to turn C-list comic characters into pop culture icons, such as the wisecracking Rocket Raccoon. With Chris Pratt leading the charge as roguish outlaw Peter Quill, the film blends stunning visuals, humor, and a killer retro soundtrack to deliver one of the MCU’s most beloved adventures. Gunn followed the success of Guardians of the Galaxy with two more installments, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017) and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023).

Jeffrey Rexl on Guardians of the Galaxy: “The way the plot elegantly alters the setting and the story step by step is remarkable, and the tone quickly feels similar to Back to the Future or Ghostbusters. Gunn manages to keep control of the plot, and manages to introduce the main characters in a way that makes them likeable and interesting. This movie makes you care about a talking tree and a raccoon in need of anger management.”

The Sucide Squad (2018): After the release of the second Guardians of the Galaxy installment, Gunn brought his twisted wit and savvy storytelling to the DC Universe with The Suicide Squad. Fired (temporarily) from Marvel in 2018, Gunn was quickly scooped up by Warner Bros. The resulting collaboration is a blood-soaked, comedic, and unexpectedly heartfelt Suicide Squad standalone sequel. Margot Robbie returns as Harley Quinn, joined by Idris Elba’s Bloodsport and John Cena’s scene-stealing Peacemaker. The Suicide Squad is pure Gunn: irreverent and wildly entertaining.

Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri on The Suicide Squad: “The Suicide Squad works best when Gunn the director can go to town with the dirty jokes and the over-the-top gunplay. He’s a slick filmmaker, to be sure. He shoots action cleanly and has a flair for visual punchlines that make his more grotesque indulgences acceptable.”

Superman (2025): In 2022, was appointed co-CEO of the newly restructured DC Studios, alongside producer Peter Safran. Now one of the most influential voices in comic book cinema, Gunn is writing, directing, and producing Superman, the first chapter in his reimagined DC slate. Rather than retell the familiar origin story, this reboot will focus more on Clark Kent’s dual identity and his relationship with Lois Lane. Stepping into the cape is David Corenswet, offering a more earnest and optimistic take on the character to contrast Henry Cavill’s brooding version. While the casting change stirred controversy, Gunn’s track record of reinvigorating well-worn franchises has fans watching closely.

100 Greatest Movies of the 21st Century

(Photo by WB/courtesy Everett Collection. MAD MAX: FURY ROAD.)

Welcome to the 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century, as reviewed and championed by Tomatometer-approved critics and Rotten Tomatoes users.

Here, we’ll ford all genres and moments that defined these decades, including 2000s fantasy (The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter), elevated horror (Get Out, A Quiet Place), franchise reboots (Star Trek, Casino Royale, Creed), superheroes (The Dark Knight, Avengers: Endgame), high-impact action (Mad Max: Fury Road, John Wick, Top Gun), anime (Your Name, Spirited Away), computer animation (WALL-E, Finding Nemo, The Wild Robot), and dramas historical and modern (Selma, Hidden Figures, The Social Network, Spotlight).

How are the movies ranked? First, every movie here is Certified Fresh. (Learn more on the About page.) Then we applied our recommendation formula, which considers a movie’s Tomatometer rating with assistance from your votes on the Popcornmeter, illuminating beloved sentiment from all sides. Critics-certified, audience-approved!

Other factors weighing into the recommendation formula: a movie’s number of critics reviews, the number of Popcornmeter votes, and its year of release. An editorial pass is reserved to finesse the final list, which includes minimum thresholds for each of the data categories.

Read on for the 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century. And see the movies integrated in our guide to the 300 Best Movies of All Time.

51 Alfred Hitchcock Movies, Ranked by Tomatometer

(Photo by Universal)

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The latest: Netflix is now hosting a collection of classic Hitchcock films, including Vertigo, Rear Window, Frenzy, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Family Plot, and The Birds!

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Watching the movies Alfred Hitchcock made over his five-decade career is not only a thrilling way to spend your free time, but doubles as a legitimate lesson in the history and development of cinema. As director, Hitchcock withstood every significant upheaval of the industry and, in fact, seemed to flourish with each transition. He started in the 1920s during the silent era (The Lodger), transitioned to sound when many of his peers and actors could not (The 39 Steps), and came to America at the height of Hollywood’s Golden Age (Best Picture-winning Rebecca). And yet Hitch was only just getting started. When color became the movie standard, he ascended to the Master of Suspense mantle that will become his enduring legacy. 1948’s Rope was his first color film, and what followed seemed an endless beloved parade of wrong men, guilty women, and nefarious murderous plots: Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds, and on and on. Even as movies hardened in the ’70s after the collapse of the Hays Code, Hitchcock gleefully followed suit, concluding his career with sordid, cynical takes on his formula in Frenzy and Family Plot. Now, it’s time to dial F for Fresh as we look back with Alfred Hitchcock movies ranked by Tomatometer! —Alex Vo

(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 A24. Thumbnail: Pixar, Vertical Entertainment, Compass International Pictures. Courtesy Everett Collection)

The 100 Best Movies Written by Women

Welcome to our guide of the best movies written by women: These are highly Certified Fresh films (nothing on the list falls below 95%) whose screenplay credit goes in part or fully to women.

The journey begins nearly a century ago with 1925’s Battleship Potemkin, written by Nina Agadzhanova, inspired by her own participation in Soviet uprisings. Just two years later, Metropolis, cinema’s first sci-fi feature masterpiece, emerged out of Germany, written by Thea von Harbou. The 1930s were one of those peak decades for movies, in no small part thanks to King Kong (co-written by Ruth Rose), The Wizard of Oz (co-written by Florence Ryerson), and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Walt Disney had hand-picked Dorothy Ann Blank, a movie magazine writer, to identify and adapt tales into animation. Snow White was the first, and in the process Blank founded the studio’s Story Development Department.

Women were a driving force behind Alfred Hitchcock’s best romantic psychological thrillers. Joan Harrison became the first woman to be nominated for Best Screenplay with Foreign Correspondent at the 13th Academy Awards, with the also Harrison-written Rebecca winning Best Picture that night. Sally Benson and Hitchcock’s wife Alma Reville co-wrote Shadow of a Doubt. Elizabeth Reinhardt co-wrote Laura, and Strangers on a Train was co-written by Czenzi Ormonde, who also acted as Hitchcock’s chauffeur as he never learned how to drive.

Suso Cecchi d’Amico helped lay the foundations of key Italian neorealist film Bicycle Thieves, along with Luchino Visconti’s opulent epic The Leopard. Betty Comden and Adolph Green were showered with Oscar, Tony, and Grammy nominations and wins throughout their six-decade musical-writing partnership, with Singin’ in the Rain their most enduring work.

Novelist Leigh Brackett adapted Rio Bravo and The Big Sleep, and worked on an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back, though she died before the movie came out. George Lucas’ earlier feature, American Graffiti, was co-written by Gloria Katz, who would go on to doctor the script to A New Hope, infusing Star Wars with its trademark sense of humor and fleshing out Princess Leia’s personality and arc. Another sci-fi classic of the era, E.T., was written by Melissa Mathison.

After Sofia Coppola‘s Lost in Translation Oscar win for Best Original Screenplay and nom for Best Director (only the third woman to be nominated at the time in Academy history), representation in the industry has been a constant topic of conversation and controversy. Ever since, there has been a consistent rise in critically acclaimed films solely written and directed by women. The players include Dee Rees (Pariah, Mudbound), Céline Sciamma (Tomboy, Portrait of a Lady on Fire), Nicole Holofcener (Enough Said), Haifaa al-Mansour (Wadjda), Jennifer Kent (The Babadook), Ana Lily Amirpour (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night), Marielle Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me?), Anna Rose Holmer (The Fits), Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird, Little Women), Chloé Zhao (The Rider), Lulu Wang (The Farewell), Eliza Hittman (Never Rarely Sometimes Always), Channing Godfrey Peoples (Miss Juneteenth), and more.

In our latest update, we’ve added Till (Chinonye Chukwu), EO (Ewa Piaskowska), and Sissy (Hannah Barlow).

Read on to see the full list of the 100 best movies of all time written by women. Click through on each title for full credits.

(Photo by Warner Bros. /Courtesy Everett Collection)

Best Cinematography Oscar-Winning Movies, Ranked

Movies are first and foremost a visual medium, and on-set cinematographers are responsible for setting up the angles, the lighting, and the look of what’s being captured on camera. In other words, cinematography is about how we see movies. Take a look at the movies and filmmakers that have won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography over the past 25 years and big scenes and moments immediately fill the mind’s eye: Saving Private Ryan’s desaturated, dirt-and-blood-on-the-lenses look put you in the middle of the chaos on Omaha Beach. Andrew Lesine brought the high fantasy of Tolkien to earthy life in The Fellowship of the Ring. You can’t separate the overwhelming rain-drenched appearance in Road to Perdition from the movie’s plot, thanks to Conrad Hall, who won the Oscar posthumously. Like a magician, Emmanuel Lubezki won three in a row for pulling off three wildly different assignments: Gravity, Birdman, and The Revenant. Roger Deakins was nominated 13 times before finally winning one for Blade Runner 2049′s sci-fi vistas and memorable triple-layered love scene, and then winning again for matching all the complicated sequences in 1917 to help achieve the appearance of one continuous shot.

The Best Cinematography award has been a thing for as long as the Oscars have been around, with Sunrise taking home inaugural gold in 1927. By 1940, the award had permanently split in two: One for Black-and-White, and the other for films in Color, with Gone with the Wind being the first to win the latter. 1966 was the final time the Academy made that distinction, though black-and-white movies have won since, like Schindler’s List in 1994, Roma in 2019, and Mank in 2021.

And now, we’re ranking all Best Cinematography Oscar-winning movie by Tomatometer! —Alex Vo

(Photo by Universal / courtesy Everett Collection)

20 Movies To Watch If You Loved Shutter Island

Martin Scorsese followed his Best Picture and Director-winning The Departed with his most directly entertaining, plot twist-heavy movie, a psychological thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio investigating a remote asylum with a missing patient. Of course, it’s apparent from the beginning things aren’t as they seem…

If you’re looking for more movies like Shutter Island, why not start with the grandaddy of unreliable narrator movies: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It may be 100 (!) years old, but it still has the power to spook and captivate.

Part of Shutter Island‘s fun is that it encourages viewers to participate in solving the mystery, poke holes in the movie’s established reality, and look for the actual truth. It requires filmmaking mastery to create these puzzle boxes, so it’s not surprising some of our most beloved directors built their reputation on these: Alfred Hitchcock (Rebecca, Vertigo), David Fincher (The Game, Gone Girl), Christopher Nolan (Inception, Memento), Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan), and David Lynch (Mulholland Drive).

Movies like Shutter Island are all about building paranoia, like the hero has tapped into something true and sinister that nobody else is taking seriously. And frequently they’re told from a female perspective: Along with the already mentioned Black Swan, there’s also The Girl on the Train, the classic Diabolique, and Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, starring Angelina Jolie, who’s convinced the missing son the police have returned to her is not her boy.

Psychological thrillers like Shutter Island differ from typical mysteries in that the nature of the film itself is the central mystery, as opposed to, say, figuring out who the murderer is. Movies in this vein include Open Your Eyes (remade as Vanilla Sky), John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (which helped drive Brian Wilson over the edge in real life), the sci-fi noir Dark City, the relentlessly scary Jacob’s Ladder, and A Scanner Darkly, arguably Keanu Reeves’ best movie made in that period between The Matrix and the Keanussance.

And if you’re looking for something more basic and primal, check out Identity or Secret Window. Not too taxing on the mind, but they’ll still give it a good twist. —Alex Vo

2018 has been a banner year for Claire Foy thus far, having already starred in Unsane and First Man — both Certified Fresh — and she’s looking to keep it going with The Girl in the Spider’s Web, due out on November 9. The former star of Netflix’s acclaimed series The Crown takes over the role of vigilante hacker Lisbeth Salander in the new film, as she takes on cyber criminals in cahoots with corrupt government officials. Foy sat down with Rotten Tomatoes to offer her Five Favorite Films, gushing over Meg Ryan and Meryl Streep and describing how she would love to live in the world of a Hitchcock classic.

The Girl in the Spider’s Web opens everywhere on Friday, November 9.

Master horror producer Jason Blum’s has given us modern horror hits like the Paranormal Activity series, The Purge films, Sinister, Insidious, and the Oscar-nominated Get Out. This month his Blumhouse Productions goes classic with Halloween, the sequel to the seminal 1978 slasher movie of the same name, which sees Laurie Strode (a returning Jamie Lee Curtis) and Michael Myers (a returning Nick Castle) facing off once again in Haddonfield. Ahead of the movie’s release, Blum sat down with Rotten Tomatoes to reveal his all-time favorite horror movies, which range from a Certified Fresh Hitchcock classic to the movie he says put his company on the map.

Halloween opens everywhere on Friday, October 19.

Less than a decade ago in 2009, a tiny, inexpensive found-footage horror movie about a young family terrorized by an unseen evil did gangbusters at the multiplex and dramatically altered the genre’s commercial and creative landscape. That film was Paranormal Activity, which made almost $200 million from a reported budget of only $15,000, and it was unveiled to the world thanks to Blumhouse Pictures, a then-fledgling production company founded by Jason Blum.

The following years brought even more success to Blumhouse, which released such films as the Insidious franchise, the Purge franchise, and this year’s acclaimed Get Out, and eventually branched out to include comedies and dramas, like 2014’s Oscar-winnihg Whiplash. At its core, though, Blumhouse remains committed to the horror genre, and this week, its latest offering, Happy Death Day, hits theaters. The story revolves around a college student who relives the day of her death over and over again, gradually unraveling the mystery behind her killer. In the same spirit, Jason Blum has done a Five Favorite Films interview with us before, but we decided to revisit that with an appropriate twist. With that in mind, here are five of Jason Blum’s favorite horror movies.

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Happy Death Day opens everywhere on Friday, October 13.

This week on DVD, we’ve got a a couple of wide releases that didn’t fare so well with critics, a few worthy indies, and some great TV. Read on for the full list.

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Also Available This Week:

• The Criterion Collection offers a new release of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, an adaptation of the Daphne du Marier novel starring Joan Fontaine as a young woman who marries a charming widower (Laurence Olivier), only to discover his estate is haunted by his first wife. It comes with an isolated music and effects track, new interviews and conversations with film scholars, a making-of documentary from 2007, and a whole lot more.

Jennifer Lawrence’s latest collabo with director David O. Russell has the 25-year old actress starring as Joy Mangano, a single mother and entrepreneur who invents the Miracle Mop. The movie is aptly called Joy and (see if you can follow us on this one) inspires this week’s 24 Frames gallery: all the single female titles that we think you might enjoy watching.