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).
After a rare three-year gap in his filmography, Christian Bale returned to screens in 2022 with three different starring roles. The worst of the trio of films was Amsterdam, a rare critical disappointment for director David O. Russell (American Hustle, Silver Linings Playbook)—the third pairing of director and star—that also stars Margot Robbie, Chris Rock, John David Washington, Robert De Niro, and Andrea Riseborough (among many other big names). The 1930s-set ensemble farce (which is also part political thriller) finds Bale playing Burt Berendsen, a WWI veteran turned doctor who is framed for a murder as part of a larger conspiracy. Though a few critics liked the result, many others found it exhausting and incoherent, and Amsterdam landed on more than one "worst films of 2022" list.
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