Every Christian Bale Movie, Ranked
Updated January 2023.
With the arrival of Ford v Ferrari this week, the famously "difficult" and intense Academy Award-winning British actor Christian Bale has now appeared in (or lent his voice to) 45 feature films, dating back to his debut as a teenager in 1987.
In the gallery above, we rank most of those films from worst to best, minus 1989's Henry V (in which he barely appears) and a pair of minor European films (1987's Mio in the Land of Faraway and 1994's Royal Deceit) which never screened or received reviews in the United States. Also excluded are three animated films in which Bale provided voices (Mowgli, Howl's Moving Castle, and Pocahontas).
Bale's worst film came at the end of a streak of three terrible releases in the early 2000s—easily the low point of his career. A futuristic sci-fi thriller from not particularly accomplished director Kurt Wimmer (who would somehow go on to make an even worse film), this 2002 release finds Bale playing a law enforcement officer in a totalitarian state where emotions have been outlawed (and suppressed by medication). Emily Watson stars opposite Bale for the first time since 1997's Metroland, and the cast also includes Taye Diggs and Sean Bean. (Completely unnecessary spoiler alert: He dies.)
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