With the latest Oscars winners announced, the debate about what the best movie ever is has been revived again.
While many will argue that the Oscars isn’t a representation of their favorite film, most of us will still want to know what is deemed to be the greatest film each year.
With critics raving this year about Killers of the Flower Moon, Barbie, Past Lives and Oscar winner Oppenheimer, we’ve decided to take a look back and figure out what the best of the best is.
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Whilst most will just yell Lord of the Rings until they’re blue in the face, we have looked at the Rotten Tomatoes score for Best Picture winners from 2000 onwards (we get it, Casablanca is great) to figure out what is truly the best film.
In unsurprising news to anyone who has watched it - the highest rated Rotten Tomatoes Best Picture winner is the 2020 winner.
Despite having wowed critics and fans everywhere, it still managed to be a surprise winner, with very few people expecting it to go on and win.
That movie is Parasite, the Bong Joon Ho instant classic which was the first ever foreign language film to win Best Picture at the Oscars.
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The South Korean masterpiece has a near perfect 99 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, with only seven critics out of a whopping 483 giving it a ‘rotten’ review.
This near-perfection was rewarded in spades at the Oscars, with Bong Joon Ho winning the famed ‘triple crown’, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and finally Best Picture.
Add to this Best International Film, and the film won every single award it was nominated for, leading Bong Joon Ho to ‘apologize’ to engravers for winning too much.
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Most importantly though, Parasite is not some pretentious awards darling that the everyday person would find boring and hard to watch.
Clocking in at the perfect film length of just over two hours, Parasite features an amazingly high score of 90 percent for audiences on Rotten Tomatoes.
The psychological thriller has it all - drama, shocking twists, scares, and even some hilariously funny comedic bits.
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The film, which was the first Korean movie to ever win an Oscar, won in an uber competitive year too.
Beating out 1917, Marriage Story, and even Joker, the movie was the shock winner for 2020.
If you’ve read all this though and thought - ‘nope, not for me’, worry not - as Parasite won by just 1%.
2016’s Best Picture winner Moonlight received a similarly high score of 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, even if most of us still haven’t gotten over the La La Land mix-up.
Top Five rated 21st Century Best Picture winners according to Rotten Tomatoes
- Parasite (99 percent)
- Moonlight (98 percent)
- Spotlight (97 percent)
- The Hurt Locker (97 percent)
- Argo (96 percent)
Topics: Oscars, Rotten Tomatoes, Film and TV, Celebrity
Michael Slavin