Top 10 Best Movies of Christian Bale’s: Which Films Are His Best?

By Aarush Sharma On Jun 11, 2022

Christian Bale made his film debut at the age of 13 in Steven Spielberg’s coming-of-age military epic Empire of the Sun.

He went on to star in almost 40 films, ranging from his psychotic portrayal of a serial murderer in American Psycho to his brooding caped crusader in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy to a couple of subtle Terrence Malick performances.

He’s played both Dick Cheney and Moses, as well as Bagheera, Mowgli’s panther pal, and Howl from Howl’s Moving Castle’s English dub. From the Independent Spirit Awards to the Oscars, he’s won just about every tiny statue a film actor can win along the road.

10) American Hustle

Director David O. Russell had more than simply styling ’70s outfits, classic soundtracks, and at least five incidents of fantastic hair in American Hustle.

Those are pretty powerful weapons, and they can compensate for a shortcoming or two. Russell rewrote the screenplay from Eric Warren Singer’s original.

It centered on con artist Irving Rosenfeld (Bale). His only genuine vanity is his hair, which is separated and somehow plastered onto his bald dome.

9) Ford v Ferrari

For director James Mangold, framing Ford v Ferrari as a feel-good inspirational sports story felt like a horrible first step: This is the story of how Ford set out to construct a car capable of outrunning Ferrari at the 1966 Le Man’s race.

But it’s a lot of fun, especially when Christian Bale and Matt Damon trade jabs and one-liners and have childish slap fights in broad daylight while Miles’ saintly, patient wife Mollie (Caitriona Balfe) looks on.

Unfortunately, it’s also convoluted politically to the point of being distracting. Ford (a.k.a. “Hank the Deuce”) is played by Tracy Letts as a booming, bigmouth business jerk wanting to live up to his father’s heritage.

8) Batman Begins

Batman Begins is a textbook example of a superhero film arriving at the perfect time and place. It had been eight years since Batman & Robin, a seemingly interminable period by today’s franchise standards, but you might think of it as a moment of grieving and healing.

Begins was simply, exactly what the character of Batman needed at the time, rejecting the garish, cartoonish excesses of the ’90s Schumacher movies, and in a time before viewers had come to instinctively roll their eyes at the idea of a “dark and gritty reboot.

It provided us what will likely be the canonical portrait of Bruce Wayne’s training to become the Batman, a la the iconic comic Year One, and it wisely chose Ra’s al Ghul as the film’s primary enemy, one of Batman’s greatest but least-used rogues.

7) American Psycho

There’s something seriously wrong with Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale). Bateman is just all-around nasty, clearly expressing just how nuts he is, sadly to indifferent or uncomprehending ears, because the world he lives in is just as wrong.

Plus, the drug-addled banker has a penchant for inventing new ways to kill. (Does anyone have a nail gun?) Mary Harron’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ is a sparkling depiction of corporate soullessness and scornful opulence.

6) Little Women

Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s timeless 19th-century classic about a close-knit Massachusetts family set during and after the Civil War, has been adapted many times and in various ways, but none is more famous than the 1994 film adaptation.

With the film’s love interests, Eric Stoltz as John Brook and Christian Bale as Laurie, the hits just kept coming. From beginning to end, the film is beautiful and heartfelt, with the main flaw being the apparent chemistry that exists between Jo and Laurie.

Amy is a brat (later reformed), and Beth breaks our hearts (Danes’ chin quiver is working), but why would Jo put Laurie off to the side when their interactions glitter with such a hot connection?

5) The Prestige

Two rival magicians, portrayed by Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman, compete in The Prestige to outdo each other, but their true goal is to acquire a form of immortality.

Each seeks to elicit complete and total belief in their audiences, much like Nolan wants to accomplish in his, as though achieving that goal offers the doer divinity, whether or whether it is based on deception and trickery.

Our faith is based on lies we tell ourselves and others, Nolan seems to argue, and it’s a notion he expands on throughout his Dark Knight trilogy, suggesting that symbols are sacred not for their reality, but for what they inspire.

4) I’m Not There

In an old Counting Crows song, Adam Duritz sang, “I want to be Bob Dylan,” expressing a romantic yearning to be, well, who? In his nerdy Dylan opus I’m Not There, subversive writer-director Todd Haynes demonstrates what most of us already knew.

He needs six performers to play him in this scene. As gimmicky as that may sound, the premise lends a zany genius to this phantasmagorical take on the rock biopic.

These representations of Robert Zimmerman, while maybe unnecessarily simplistic, allow Haynes to revisit (satirically, symbolically, and speculatively) several stages of Dylan’s life.

The film can feel drastically uneven since it shuffles six unique story threads like a deck of cards. The film’s strongest moments are undoubtedly those of reckless abandon when Dylan is liberated from his own past.

3) The New World

There are a thousand questions concerning routes inside The New World’s framework of American mythology. The opening credits are displayed on a map with rivers that are gradually traced.

Characters are frequently rerouted, redirected, or given a new identity or a new existence. John Smith (Colin Farrell) is tasked with exploring the New World’s rivers in search of a route to the Indies.

You’re not the kind of man who starts a route and doesn’t finish it, are you?” someone inquires, unaware that if Smith accepts the opportunity, he will be leaving the path he started with Pocahontas. “Did you ever find your Indies, John?” she’ll ask him afterward.

2.) Empire of the Sun

Steven Spielberg, then well known as a director of family films, married J.G. Ballard, a controversial author of ghastly social horror books, in the most unlikely of creative unions.

However, Spielberg crafted one of his most mature and emotional works by recasting J.G. Ballard’s semi-autobiographical war novel Empire of the Sun as a dark fairytale and dipping his toe into darker waters before diving into Schindler’s List.

It’s World War II through the eyes of a hyperactive child: conflict is a playground for Jamie, who is ripped from his upper-crust English bubble when Japanese soldiers capture his Shanghai house and dump him in an internment camp.

1) The Dark Knight

Following Joel Schumacher’s neon-disco nightmare on ice that was Batman & Robin in 1997, Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005) deserved the universal sigh of relief it got for resuscitating the Caped Crusader’s cinematic reputation.

And if Batman Begins represented the character’s tonal course correction, The Dark Knight offers an equally essential act of rehabilitation: the Joker, Batman’s arch-nemesis.

Heath Ledger’s performance as the Clown Prince of Crime, a crime boss who wants nothing less than Gotham’s very soul, is a force of nature—brilliantly scripted as a crime boss who wants nothing less than Gotham’s very soul.