We ranked every one of Charlize Theron's movie performances, and there’s a lot of gold here
Photo-Illustration: Vulture, Paramount Pictures, Newmarket Films, Netflix, Focus Features and Warner Bros. This article has been updated to reflect Charlize Theron’s most recent work.
Below is our ranking of every Theron performance. To be clear, we’re not ranking the movies but merely her role in them. We skipped voice performances — sorry, Kubo and the Two Strings — but we did include her one-scene parts when she was still an up-and-comer. There’s a lot of gold here — and even when the film she’s in lets her down, she’s always far more composed and commanding than when she bit that bank teller’s head off so long ago.
40. Waking Up in Reno It’s not entirely clear why Theron decided to do a “redneck road comedy,” let alone one with Patrick Swayze, but here she is nonetheless, as “Candy,” an Arkansas girl who just wants to get pregnant. This is an inexplicable movie that once again showed Theron trying to find the right comedic note and picking the wrong film all together. She spends most of the movie loudly chewing gum.
36. The Last Face Yup, this Sean Penn–directed debacle is as horrible as you’ve heard. But we’ll go to bat for Theron, who brings a lot of compassion to her impossible role as an international aid organizer working in the most dangerous parts of Africa. Against this backdrop of devastation and human atrocities, The Last Face tells a doomed, terrible love story in which Theron’s character falls for a hunky doctor who’s equally affected by the horrors around him.
32. The Cider House Rules There’s something so electric about Theron’s presence that makes it hard for filmmakers to plug her into staid awards-bait — her natural liveliness overwhelms the stuffiness around her. That’s especially true with The Cider House Rules, the Oscar-winning adaptation of the John Irving novel that’s a rather tepid, syrupy look at love and growing up.
28. The Legend of Bagger Vance It’s not easy to mute the charisma of Matt Damon, Will Smith, and Charlize Theron, but Robert Redford, using the transformative power of golf, somehow finds a way. This dull sports film has the ugly trope of the Magical Negro at its center, but it’s not any better elsewhere: The whole thing is shot in this “respectful” haze that makes you feel like you’re watching through a museum display.
24. Dark Places Known as the other Gillian Flynn adaptation, Dark Places stars Theron as a woman involved in an infamous True Crime murder as a child, who ends up, out of desperation, reinvestigating the crime as a grown woman. Theron landed the less fun, less showcase-y Gillian Flynn adaptation, and she definitely ended up with the wrong director: Gilles Paquet-Brenner, suffice it to say, is no David Fincher.
20. The Burning Plain The directorial debut of Guillermo Arriaga — known mostly for writing Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel — is a deadly serious chore to get through, but Theron’s excellent as a self-destructive woman with a horrible secret in her past. Curiously, that secret in her past happened when she was a very young woman and played by, of all people, a 17-year-old Jennifer Lawrence. The two actresses don’t look much alike today, but apparently Arriaga thought they did in 2008.
16. 2 Days in the Valley Theron’s movie debut, filmed when she was 19 years old, it’s somehow a ripoff of both Quentin Tarantino and Robert Altman. Most of the massive cast gets lost, but Theron leaps off the screen as the soulless moll both seducing and battling an amusingly sinister James Spader. In a movie with Spader, Danny Aiello, Eric Stoltz, Teri Hatcher, and Jeff Daniels, it was Theron who made the poster, and for good reason.
12. The Road In Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer-winning novel, the dead wife of the unnamed main character is barely heard from. But for the film version of The Road, director John Hillcoat wisely picked Theron to flesh out the role in flashbacks. The reasoning was obvious: Viggo Mortensen’s rugged survivor of a post-apocalyptic devastation isn’t just grieving for the world but, more specifically, the love of his life, and the Oscar winner makes that absence sting.
8. Atomic Blonde .youtube[data-uri="www.vulture.com/_components/youtube/instances/cjvcnvnwx004e3h65jgoxg4gy@published"].border-top:before { content: 'Watch'; } This David Leitch thriller isn’t the first time Theron has played an ass-kicking action hero. But nonetheless, Atomic Blonde plays out as a culmination of the Oscar winner’s commercial ascension over the last decade or so.
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