10 Actors Who Have Never Made a Bad Movie

Film is a subjective art form. But aggregated movie ratings aren't.

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Complex Original

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The Oscars may be Hollywood's gold standard for what constitutes a "good" movie, but the truth is that—like painting, photography, music, or any other art form—all movies are subjective. And we do we mean all movies.

Over at The Escapist, you'll find an entire forum dedicated to Citizen Kane haters. On MovieFanFare.com, one critic has kindly shared the "10 Things I Hate About Casablanca." Most recently, of course, film critic Armond White famously launched a one-man assault against 12 Years a Slave, which the Hollywood powers-that-be just named the year's Best Picture. The point is that differing opinions are what make movies such fertile ground for conversation, debate and, occasionally, a physical altercation. (If you want to test that latter claim, just try telling a Star Wars fan that Han Solo sucks.)

While there may be no litmus test to make an unimpeachable case for a movie being good or bad, we do have a little thing called statistics. And in the movie world, there are few better websites than Rotten Tomatoes to help a moviegoer determine whether a specific film is worth the $20 ticket-and-a-popcorn price tag. We're not saying that just because the majority of people on the site like the movie means that you will, but an aggregate rating just might be the best thing we've got in terms of hard data for determining a movie's worth.

Dig a little deeper, and you'll find that Rotten Tomatoes also offers a handy little breakdown of the celebrities who populate these movies, and whether their resulting movies tend to be well-liked or, well, hated. Which led us to a little experiment: Using Rotten Tomatoes' rankings as our basis, are there particular actors who—according to the numbers, at least—have never made a bad movie?

In analyzing the data, we looked at both legendary actors of the past and some of today's rising stars. In order to level the playing field so that newcomers like Lupita Nyong'o, who have very few acting credits on their resume, didn't skew the results too heavily in their favor, we discounted any actor with fewer than five feature film credits listed on the site. Which means that James Dean, whose films earned an average rating of 93 percent—couldn't be considered. It also means that we couldn't include Shailene Woodley, whose three features have scored an 80 percent average. (But talk to us again in a couple of months, when Divergent and The Fault in Our Stars have hit theaters.)

As for the ratings themselves, we considered anything above 50 a positive majority for making it eligible. But we also accounted for the number of films that boasted a perfect score (Humphrey Bogart killed it in that category, with 12 of them total). The bad news was that this rule knocked poor, talented Carey Mulligan off the list (which she can blame on The Great Gatsby's 49 percent approval rate). That rule also spelled disaster for the many, many A-listers who appeared in last year's abysmal Movie 43 (which scored a whopping four percent)!

But after much research and many crunched numbers, here—statistically speaking—are 10 Actors Who Have Never Made a Bad Movie.

10. Sacha Baron Cohen

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9. Charlie Day

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8. Steve McQueen

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7. Emma Watson

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6. Donna Reed

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5. James Cagney

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4. Grace Kelly

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3. Charlie Chaplin

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2. Humphrey Bogart

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1. John Cazale

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