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The Shia LaBeouf Marathon Is An Uneven Mess Bookended By Greatness

Shia LaBeouf, a performance artist who once had a vibrant acting career, is wrapping up a three-day movie marathon at the Angelika Film Center in New York. Fans of the artist have watched along on a live stream as Shia watched Shia: He marathoned through all his movies, starting with the most recent.

Kicking off with the yet-unreleased “Man Down” at noon Tuesday and wrapping up Thursday night, Shia has enjoyed a pretty wide variety of movies. He’s been in the best “Transformers” movies and the worst “Indiana Jones” movie, and everything from “Holes,” where he digs holes, to “Nymphomaniac: Volume I” and “Nymphomaniac: Volume II.”

What is watching all Shia’s movies in reverse chronological order like? It’s a roller coaster. I pulled the Rotten Tomatoes user and critic scores for all of the films Shia watched. Here’s what the marathon looked like in the order he watched them:

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After “Man Down,” which doesn’t have any ratings yet, Shia opened the marathon strong with “Fury” and “Nymphomaniac: Volume I.” But then he spent some serious time in his wilderness period, a batch of nine movies that varied between 19 percent fresh among critics (“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”) and 67 percent (“Lawless”).

At film No. 13, Shia entered the solid part of his film career, the period that in the real world essentially ended with the highly rated but in retrospect regrettable “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” This batch included the first “Transformers” movie, “I, Robot,” “Constantine” and “Bobby.”

Thursday’s itinerary featured the most jarring jumps in quality. The marathon made its way to “Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd,” Shia’s worst movie. But he also saw “The Even Stevens Movie” and “Holes,” a spottily reviewed but nonetheless decently regarded set of films.

CLARIFICATION (Nov. 13, 4:04 p.m.): The final #AllMyMovies schedule differed from the reported schedules we used in the original analysis: Rather than finishing with “Monkey Business,” “The Christmas Path” and “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind,” the marathon finished with “Tru Confessions,” “Hounded,” and “Breakfast with Einstein.” A chart updated with the official ordering is below, and the text above has been updated:

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Walt Hickey was FiveThirtyEight’s chief culture writer.

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