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).
Writer-director Scott Cooper reunited with Christian Bale for the third time, following 2013’s Out of the Furnace and 2017’s Hostiles, for this 2022 gothic crime thriller based on the novel of the same name by Louis Bayard. Set in the 1830s at West Point, the film finds a detective (Bale) investigating a series of murders at the United States Military Academy with the help of a young cadet named Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling). Gillian Anderson, Lucy Boynton, Toby Jones, and Charlotte Gainsbourg also star. Critics were generally disappointed, finding the adaptation overly gloomy and somber, though the pairing of Bale and Melling was a highlight for many reviewers.