Nobody ruin this: 'Lady Bird' has the best 100% Rotten Tomatoes score ever

Lady Bird isn't just one of the best movies of 2017. It might be the best-reviewed movie of all time, at least according to the Tomatometer.

That statement comes with a lot of caveats, of course. Rotten Tomatoes has only been around for a couple of decades; its system isn't built for nuanced opinions; and its formula rewards certain kinds of movies over others.

But the point still stands: As of this writing, of all the purely 100% fresh movies on Rotten Tomatoes, Lady Bird has the most reviews.

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It's not just that Lady Bird has a perfect 100%. Lots of movies have a perfect 100%. However, most of those are smaller, more obscure releases with only a handful of reviews. Often, they have as few as five.

It's rare to see a film with a review count in the double digits reach 100%, and rarer still to see one with triple digits do so. That's what makes Lady Bird's achievement so remarkable.

The coming-of-age film now has 165 reviews – making it the most-reviewed movie ever to maintain a 100%. It just barely edges out Toy Story 2, which kept a flawless score with 163 reviews in.

This couldn't have happened to a nicer film. Lady Bird is sweet, funny, deeply empathetic, and so dead-on with its observations of teenage life in the early aughts that it's hard to know whether to laugh, cry, cringe, or do all three at once. (Especially if you came of age around that time, as I did.)

It's an easy film to love – which has a lot to do with that perfect score. Because Rotten Tomatoes boils down film criticism into a simple good-bad dichotomy, the Tomatometer is more accurately a representation of how many critics like a film than it is of how good those critics think a film is. (Though as far as I can tell, most of those critics also find Lady Bird to be really damn good.)

In other words, the Tomatometer heavily favors a crowdpleaser, which is exactly what Lady Bird is. It's the kind of film you could enjoy just as easily with your parents as you could with your Danny or your Julie – probably even your Kyle, eventually, once he got over his teenage pretension.

At a time when the default mode for film discussion seems to be screaming on social media, that makes Lady Bird feel like a minor miracle in itself.