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 reunited with his Out of the Furnace director Scott Cooper for this 2017 western set during the late 1800s. The actor plays an Army officer with a reputation for killing Native Americans who reluctantly takes on the assignment of escorting a Cheyenne war chief (Wes Studi) across dangerous terrain, taking on another unlikely traveling partner (a widow played by Rosamund Pike) along the way. The film lost money during its theatrical run despite decent reviews, which included yet more praise for Bale and his "quietly devastating performance" (according to Rolling Stone's Peter Travers).