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 gained 50 pounds to play former vice president Dick Cheney in this decades-spanning 2018 biopic that reunited the star with his Big Short director Adam McKay. Amy Adams, who previously starred with Bale in American Hustle and The Fighter, plays Cheney's wife Lynne. Many critics didn't like McKay's humorous approach to the material, but the performance earned Bale his fourth Oscar nomination (and second in a leading role), though he went home empty-handed after Rami Malek won the trophy for Bohemian Rhapsody.