Every Christian Bale Movie, Ranked

by Jason Dietz, Metacritic Features Editor – November 13, 2019

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).

5 of 43 photo by 20th Century Fox

41 #38: The Secret Agent

One of two 1996 releases for Bale, this adaptation of Joseph Conrad's London-set novel about a terrorist in the 1880s came from British writer-director Christopher Hampton (best known for Dangerous Liaisons). Critics felt the film, which stars Bob Hoskins and Patricia Arquette and features Bale in just a small role as Stevie (the mentally impaired younger brother of Arquette's Winnie), was "stagey," "pointless," and "leaden."

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