Depending on how you look at it, it’s either hard to believe that Christian Bale is already turning 42 this week, or that he’s isn’t older than that. Those who only discovered this Oscar-winning actor’s work around the time that Batman Begins and American Psycho came out probably still think of him as a young buck, and those who grew up with films like Empire of the Sun and Newsies have been living with his excellent films for three decades.
Well, they weren’t ALL excellent. Like any prolific actor, Christian Bale has starred in his share of turkeys over the years, so that’s why we’re giving this actor the retrospective he (and everyone else) deserves, focusing on his greatest hits and weakest misses, from the recent Oscar contender The Big Short to that one sci-fi movie that earned him a reputation as a bit of a prick.
Also: Christian Bale Learned to Play Drums in Two Weeks By Listening to Pantera and Mastodon
Take a look at our picks for Christian Bale’s best and worst movies, and let us know what entries or omissions ticked you off. (We felt terrible leaving 3:10 to Yuma off of this, but hey, we had to cut it off somewhere.)
The Ten Best (and Five Worst) Films of Christian Bale:
Top Photo: Paramount Pictures
For more Christian Bale news, visit ComingSoon.net.
William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved and What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
The 10 Best (and 5 Worst) Films of Christian Bale
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10th Best: The Machinist (2004)
Christian Bale famously lost a whopping 63 lbs. to play Trevor Reznik, a machinist whose deteriorating psychological health leads to horrible consequences. Bale is great, but The Machinist plays like a Twilight Zone episode that ran for far too long.
Photo: Paramount Classics
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9th Best: Newsies (1992)
Hocus Pocus director Kenny Ortega directed Christian Bale in this originally panned, now beloved musical about newspaper boys who started an ambitious strike against Joseph Pulitzer in 1899. The music is great and the dancing is too, but Bale's wistful performance of "Santa Fe" is the emotional center of the film.
Photo: Buena Vista Pictures
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8th Best: Equilibrium (2002)
The cult of Equilibrium is small, but passionate. Christian Bale stars as a government agent tasked with destroying every vestige of human emotion, from those who still feel feelings to the works of art that inspire us. He eventually begins to see the error of his ways and blasts through the fascist government, in some of the most incredible shootouts ever filmed.
Photo: Miramax Films
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7th Best: The Prestige (2006)
Christopher Nolan's bloated but imaginative drama stars Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman as rival magicians out to top each other, at any cost. The plot goes in bonkers directions, but Bale is committed to his conniving, heartbroken part and David Bowie gives a fantastic cameo as the brilliant, under-appreciated inventor Nikola Tesla.
Photo: Buena Vista Pictures
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6th Best: The Big Short (2015)
Christian Bale is just one part of a rich ensemble, assembled by writer/director Adam McKay to tell the tragicomic story of the completely avoidable implosion of the American economy. Bale plays Dr. Michael Burry, who accurately predicted the national nightmare and whose investors had absolutely no faith in his reasoning. McKay's film is an important one, told with flash and humor.
Photo: Paramount Pictures
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5th Best: Little Women (1994)
He's not one of the Little Women of the title, but Christian Bale is an integral part of Gillian Armstrong's handsome, touching, lovely adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's beloved novel, about young women coming of age in a time of both romance and turmoil. Bale spends most of the film wooing Winona Ryder (giving what is probably her best performance), but destiny has other plans for him.
Photo: Columbia Pictures
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4th Best: Empire of the Sun (1987)
One of Steven Spielberg's best, but least talked about movies stars a young Christian Bale as Jim Graham, a character based on author J.G. Ballard, who spent World War II in a Japanese prison camp. Bale gives a rich performance, particularly impressive for his age, and Spielberg presents the sweeping tale with cinematic flourish and just the right amount of sentiment.
Photo: Warner Bros.
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3rd Best: The Fighter (2010)
The story of boxer Mickey Ward, played by Mark Wahlberg, is also the story of his drug addict brother Dickey, played by Christian Bale (who won an Oscar for this performance). In its structure, David O. Russell's The Fighter is just like any other boxing movie, right up to the big fight at the end, but uniformly excellent performances elevate the material into something genuinely special.
Photo: Paramount Pictures
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2nd Best: The Dark Knight Trilogy (2005-2012)
Lumping all of Christopher Nolan's Batman films together might seem like cheating, but it's all one big performance by Bale, who gave billionaire Bruce Wayne more grit and pathos than any other actor before him. Intensely cinematic and packed with meaningful themes about fear-mongering and fascism, Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Trilogy stands tall as one of the most impressive superhero stories ever told (even though some of the actual plot points are kinda stupid).
Photo: Warner Bros.
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The Best: American Psycho (2000)
Mary Harron's stylish and shocking American Psycho, based on the controversial novel by Bret Easton Ellis, gave Christian Bale his best and most iconic role: Patrick Bateman, a 1980s yuppie whose life is so stifled by superficiality that the only way he can let the air in is through murder. The people around him are all so self-obsessed that they don't recognize his cries for help, and don't even notice that their friends and associates are dead. Despicable and damning, and still remarkably funny, American Psycho is an American classic.
Photo: Lions Gate Films
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5th Worst: A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999)
Michael Hoffman's adaptation of William Shakespeare's magical comedy has a great cast and beautiful production design but hardly any laughs. The pacing feels off the whole way through, and only Kevin Kline (as the total ass Nick Bottom) seems to know how to make the material really work. It's not an awful adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, but it is a very, very unremarkable one.
Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures
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4th Worst: Out of the Furnace (2013)
Christian Bale headlines a mostly great cast in a mostly awful movie, half of it about underground fight clubs and revenge, and half of it about grief and the economy. Some of the performances are good but Out of the Furnace is so ferociously committed to its own importance that the whole film plays like a parody of an Oscar-contender, instead of the Oscar-contender it was obviously meant to be.
Photo: Relativity Media
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3rd Worst: Harsh Times (2005)
After David Ayer wrote the amazing Training Day, but before he moved on to the equally amazing End of the Line and (at least we hope it's amazing) Suicide Squad, he cut his teeth directing this meandering drama about a U.S. Army Ranger who can't make life work back at home, whose PTSD gets in the way of promising career prospects, and who seems destined for a life of tragedy. There's no momentum to Harsh Times, and none of the issues the film addresses ever come across, except that maybe life sucks.
Photo: MGM
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2nd Worst: Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014)
Ridley Scott's ambitious but tedious Biblical epic stars Christian Bale as Moses, and a whole lot of other white people in historical roles that probably weren't actually filled by white people. But that's just the window dressing for a blasé drama with nothing worthwhile to add to an otherwise timeless tale. Watch The Ten Commandments again instead.
Photo: 20th Century Fox
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The Worst: Terminator Salvation (2009)
After three time travel movies in a row, the Terminator franchise finally gave fans what we thought we wanted: an action spectacular set entirely in the apocalyptic future where John Connor, played by a well-cast Christian Bale, fought robots in order to save the human race. Unfortunately, Bale takes a back seat to a boring new character played by Sam Worthington, and the impossibly dumb plot points collide miserably with all the grey, forgettable action sequences. If you thought Terminator: Genisys was bad, Terminator Salvation is a lot, lot worse.
Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures
