Every Joe Wright Movie Ranked From Worst to Best

Every Joe Wright Movie Ranked From Worst to Best

With the release of his latest film “The Woman in the Window,” we take a look at the director’s films, ranked from worst to best.

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The Woman in the Window marks director Joe Wright’s eighth film, but how do his movies rank from worst to best? A British film director with a wildly diverse filmography, he has directed two films to Best Picture nominations and received considerable critical acclaim for most of his career.

Wright has adapted literary works such as Pride and Prejudice, Atonement, and Anna Karenina. He’s had massive misfires, like his Peter Pan prequel Pan, and great successes, like directing Gary Oldman to a long-overdue Oscar for Darkest Hour. While most of his movies might be perceived as staid pieces of period prestige, he’s first and foremost a visual stylist, both celebrated and derided for his showy camera moves. In his own words, at the Hay Festival of Literature and Arts, “I like to show off.”

The Woman in the Window has received some of the worst reviews of Wright’s career, but that does nothing to negate the outstanding work he’s put forth since his first film in 2005. Here are his films, ranked from worst to best.

8. Pan (2015)

Wright’s grossly unnecessary prequel to the Peter Pan story finds a bizarre amount of glee answering questions nobody ever asked about J.M. Barrie’s classic tale: What is the scientific name for pixie dust? How did Smee get to Never Land? How does Captain Hook’s pirate regime function, infrastructurally? That this is all married to a Harry Potter-esque “Chosen One” narrative and festooned with a CGI bonanza of loud, busy setpieces only muddies the water. Wright is an underrated visual storyteller, yet here it’s pure chaos. Ships fly, fairies glow, and people explode into colorful dust when killed for no apparent reason. Rooney Mara was criticized for playing Native American princess Tiger Lily (Mara is white), but the surrounding performances are all offensive in their own ways. There were clearly franchise aspirations here, but critics took the film’s title more as instruction, and audiences barely showed up.

7. The Woman in the Window (2021)

This adaptation of A. J. Finn’s bestselling book was originally due to be released in October 2019. One Fox-Disney merger and a pandemic later, The Woman in the Window arrives on Netflix with an impressive pedigree: directed by Wright, with a screenplay by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts, cinematography by Bruno Delbonnel, a score by Danny Elfman, and a cast featuring no less than Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore, Anthony Mackie, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Brian Tyree Henry. However, while that talent roster certainly screams, “This is gonna be good,” The Woman in the Window received mostly negative reviews. The film is overwrought and lacking in tension, with a twist both underwhelming and unearned, and a climax that wouldn’t be out of place in a Looney Tunes short. Adams does her best, but she’s here to make the film feel better than it is, and while she doesn’t embarrass herself, it’s a bummer to see one of America’s greatest actresses follow up her career-worst turn in 2020’s Hillbilly Elegy with yet another movie wasting her talents.

6. The Soloist (2009)

Released in the afterglow of Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man comeback, The Soloist sees the actor giving one of his most underrated performances as real-life L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez. The surrounding film, however, is decidedly less successful. The inspirational, based-on-a-true-story tale of Lopez’s relationship with a homeless, schizophrenic cellist named Nathaniel Anthony Ayers (played by Jamie Foxx) doesn’t totally fall prey to the tropes and trappings of this type of Oscar-bait tearjerker, but it comes fairly close. Most of the blame can be placed on Wright’s direction, who packs the film with eye-rollingly obvious visual metaphors (doves ascend to the heavens when Downey first hears Foxx play) and a voyeuristic, overly-sentimental treatment of L.A.’s homeless population that feels like the worst kind of “poverty porn.”

5. Darkest Hour (2017)

Wright’s 2017 drama about the period between Winston Churchill becoming British prime minister in 1940 and the evacuation of Dunkirk seemed even at the time of its release to be scientifically engineered to win Gary Oldman a long-overdue Oscar. Indeed, his makeup-caked and fatsuit-padded performance proved too undeniable for the Academy; never mind that it meant more lastingly memorable performances went unrewarded, like Timothee Chalamet’s sizzling debut in Call Me By Your Name, Daniel Day-Lewis’ final performance in Phantom Thread, or Daniel Kaluuya’s iconic turn in Get Out. Never mind also that Darkest Hour rarely transcends its stuffy, awards-bait vibe. Its narrow focus is a definite asset, as is Wright’s and Oldman’s focus on Churchill’s intense inferiority complex. Nonetheless, by the time Wright has orchestrated a cloying, fictionalized scene of Churchill asking British civilians on the Tube their opinions about the war, one can hardly blame those who might find this a bridge too far.

4. Anna Karenina (2012)

Leo Tolstoy’s thousand-page tome Anna Karenina seems hardly primed to be the basis of a swiftly-paced, thrilling two-hour film such as this, yet somehow Wright (and screenwriter Tom Stoppard) managed to pull it off. As a director, Wright can often be pigeonholed as staid and conservative, but this is undoubtedly his most fleet-footed and free-wheeling film. Boldly reconceptualizing the tale’s settings of Moscow and St. Petersburg as theatrical stage sets, with painted backdrops and backstage accouterments, Wright transforms a potentially slavish literary adaptation into a veritable feast for the eyes, with stunning production design by Sarah Greenwood and Academy Award-winning costumes by Jacqueline Durran. With turns from future stars Alicia Vikander and Domhnall Gleeson, the cast is uniformly magnificent, the screenplay a masterclass in economic adaptation while maintaining a personality of its own. While the end doesn’t quite pack the tragic punch for which one might wish, this is still ridiculously entertaining stuff.

3. Hanna (2011)

Coming off the heels of Atonement and Pride and Prejudice, this shaggy dog of a movie felt like a shocking change of pace for Wright as a director. A patchwork quilt of genres and tropes, an action thriller by way of the Brothers Grimm, Hanna tells the story of a little girl raised in the Finnish wilderness to be an assassin. Sent away by her father (Eric Bana) on a mission, and pursued by a ruthless villain played by Cate Blanchett, Hanna soon uncovers truths about her upbringing that test her killer instinct. Perhaps more well-known now as the basis for the Amazon Prime series, Hanna is an absolutely wild rollercoaster ride of a movie, with an astonishing central performance from Saoirse Ronan that only grows more impressive and haunting as her career grows in repute.

2. Pride & Prejudice (2005)

Joe Wright’s sumptuous adaptation of Jane Austen’s iconic novel is nearly pitch-perfect in its bringing to life of the original romantic comedy. Wright’s visual flair and penchant for a roving camera plunge the audience headfirst into ballrooms, whirling through 16th-century palaces and past the flittering anticipatory conversations of the Bennet sisters, while never losing Austen’s commentary on class and social mobility. Amid the finery, he also assembles a top-notch ensemble, from Donald Sutherland’s curmudgeonly father to Jena Malone’s rambunctious, boy-obsessed youngest daughter, to Dame Judi Dench’s scene-stealing performance as Lady Catherine de Bourg. Of course, the pièce de resistance is the relationship between Elizabeth Bennet (Keira Knightley) and Mr. Darcy (Matthew Macfayden), here rendered beautifully as a push-and-pull dance of misread signals and pure screen chemistry. All is resolved in a finale among the most earnestly romantic in film history, that rare “happily ever after” that feels both cathartic and earned.

1. Atonement (2007)

The centerpiece of Atonement, Joe Wright’s 2007 awards darling about how one moment can shatter the lives of all involved, is a stunning one-shot through the beach at Dunkirk. Before Birdman and The Revenant made the single-shot commonplace, this was a standout moment of bravura filmmaking, and it remains an impressive feat to this day. However, that’s also discounting just how well the rest of the film holds up. Its opening act is a remarkable piece of pastoral beauty, the chemistry between Keira Knightley and James McAvoy electric, the breakout performance by Saoirse Ronan as Briony, the little girl whose jealousy will tear all their lives apart, an astonishing debut. Wright frames each moment with such detail that it’s impossible not to be engrossed and engaged, leading to a final scene that reveals a gut-punching twist. Don’t let the period prestige feeling fool you; Atonement is the shattering work of a detail-obsessed visual storyteller at the peak of his powers.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/joe-wright-movies-ranked-worst-best/

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