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 in 2007 with his Velvet Goldmine director Todd Haynes for another unconventional music-themed drama. But while the earlier film took its inspiration (unofficially) from David Bowie, I'm Not There is 100% a Bob Dylan movie—or maybe 700% a Bob Dylan movie. Each of the film's seven sections is inspired by a different aspect of Dylan's career, with a different actor starring in each segment. Bale is the only actor to take on two parts of the singer, effectively portraying Dylan during his protest days (still as an acoustic musician) in the '60s before segueing into Dylan's "born-again" period circa Slow Train Coming. Other Dylan portrayers include Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, and Heath Ledger—who doesn't have any scenes with Bale here but certainly would in Bale's next film, The Dark Knight.
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