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).
Mary Harron's 2000 adaptation of the novel by Bret Easton Ellis stars Bale as New York investment banker turned serial killer Patrick Bateman—a role that the studio wanted to give to the more famous Leonardo DiCaprio (and then Edward Norton or Ewan McGregor), though Harron's insistence ensured that Bale got the part. Even the critics who didn't like the film as a whole (and there were many, though more than a few admired the film's darkly humorous tone) were impressed by Bale's "tour-de-force" performance (as described by New York Times critic Stephen Holden).
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