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).
It may be one of his least-known films, but Bale is the lead in this 1997 dramedy from Philip Saville (who spent most of his career before and after directing for British television). It's an adaptation of the debut novel of the same name by Booker Prize-winner Julian Barnes that stars Bale (opposite Emily Watson in one of her earliest roles) as a married Londoner in the late 1970s who grows bored of his dull suburban life as a banker and becomes envious of his free-spirited friend (Lee Ross). Critics simply grew bored of the movie, though they had praise for Bale's performance.