The 8 best Brad Pitt films: From Fight Club to Se7en
Pitt's career sees a fascinating tension between his leading man looks and a desire to push into more challenging, less flattering territory.
Tom Cruise’s recent press blitz for Digger has seen the reemergence of a seriously weird label.
Have you heard? Apparently, Cruise is ‘the last movie star’.
Setting aside Leonardo Di Caprio for a second, and dismissing the question over what exactly that makes Timothy Chalomet, there’s the small matter of Cruise’s most famous contemporary. If Brad Pitt isn’t the very definition of a movie star, then what are we all even doing?
As it happens, Pitt too has a new film to push. Two, in fact.
First up, from September 24th, there’s Heart of the Beast, directed by David Ayer. In it, Pitt’s special forces veteran is forced to embark on a perilous trek through the Alaskan wilderness, with only his faithful German shepherd Odin for company.
The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth is set to follow later in the year. Written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by David Fincher (two frequent Pitt collaborators), it sees the star returning to the role that finally earned him an Oscar back in 2019.
While he got a much later start in the business than Cruise, Pitt has built up an enviable body of work over the decades, encompassing indie favourites and box office crowd pleasers alike.
Throughout the actor’s career there seems to have been a fascinating tension between his obvious leading man looks and a desire to push into more challenging, less flattering territory.
These different sides are well represented in the following list of the best Brad Pitt performances.
8. Thelma and Louise
Given how minor his role is, you might wonder why Pitt’s performance in Ridley Scott’s 1991 drama warrants a place on this list. This was the movie that set a 27-year-old Pitt on a path to rapid superstardom, however, helping the struggling daytime TV star to break into the Hollywood elite. His cocksure wanderer J.D. condenses everything we think of as a quintessential Pitt performance – laid back cool and effortless sexual magnetism with a background hint of deceit and degeneracy – into seven minutes of mesmerising screen time. You’ll be every bit as taken in as Gina Davis’s put-upon housewife.
7. Inglourious Basterds
Regardless of what you think of Quentin Tarantino’s sixth movie – or indeed of Quentin Tarantino movies in general – it can’t be denied that Brad Pitt’s contribution to Inglourious Basterds is quite extraordinary. His Lieutenant Aldo Raine appears to have been plucked straight out of a mid-century comic book – a blunt, chisel-jawed hero with an impossibly thick Tennessee drawl (even when speaking Italian) and an uncompromising drive to kill Nazis. He suits the larger-than-life ahistorical tone perfectly, forming a brash counterpart to Christoph Waltz’s chillingly suave SS colonel Hans Landa.
6. Ocean's Eleven
Anyone who doubts the part of the introduction asserting that Pitt is a bone fide movie star needs to revisit Ocean’s Eleven, and sharpish. In Steven Soderbergh’s impossibly slick heist romp, Pitt’s laconic criminal schemer manages to match George Clooney’s charming lead for pure cool and charisma every meticulous step of the way. Under Pitt’s guidance, Robert "Rusty" Ryan casually glides through the movie’s labyrinthine plot, with equal parts snacking and smouldering. It’s amazing to think that his role didn’t even exist in the 1960 original.
5. Fight Club
It’s at this point in proceedings that we’re going to emphasise the distinction between the best Brad Pitt films and the best Brad Pit performances. Because Fight Club, as influential as it was at the very end of the 20th century, hasn’t aged too gracefully. Its once edgy, counter-cultural appeal feels rather crass and forced as we approach its 30th birthday. Pitt’s performance as the mercurial Tyler Durden, however, continues to impress, thoroughly convincing as both the id of Edward Norton’s nebbish office drone and as a cult leader for disaffected young men.
4. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
This is the role that won Pitt his one and only Oscar (to date), scooping him the Best Supporting Actor award for his performance as chaotic stunt man Cliff Booth. It’s a role that you can’t imagine anyone else but Pitt playing, combining his effortless laid back cool and weathered good looks with an underlying note of danger and tension. It’s why you’ll just as easily buy his character flirting with a young hippy or fixing an aerial as you will his casually kicking Bruce Lee’s arse or brutally slaughtering a gang of Manson acolytes.
3. 12 Monkeys
Pitt had shown plenty of signs that he was more than just a pretty boy before 1995, but this was the year when he truly arrived as a multi-faceted and genuinely interesting Hollywood actor. As one-two punches go, you don’t get much more impactful than Se7en and 12 Monkeys. The latter role was particularly transformative for the star, seeing our golden boy playing a jittery and erratic psychiatric ward patient. It wasn’t exactly a subtle delivery, but then you don’t expect subtlety from a Terry Gilliam film about a convict sent back in time to stop the apocalypse.
2. Se7en
The first release in Pitt’s annus mirabilis was this bleak and nasty crime thriller – the first of several collaborations between the star and David Fincher. Pitt plays David Mills, a hotheaded young detective tracking a fiendishly intelligent serial killer. His character’s friction with Morgan Freeman’s world-weary partner forms the heart of the movie, while the film’s devilishly clever plot hinges on Pitt’s emotional response during its devastating denouement. Suffice to say, the actor most certainly doesn’t phone it in.
1. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Andrew Dominik’s 2007 historical drama is a near-perfect film, with impeccable cinematography (Roger Deakins strikes again), soundtrack (from Nick Cave and Warren Ellis), and performances from a talented cast. Nowhere is that latter point more evident than in Brad Pitt’s central take on the real life Wild West bandit, Jesse James. Pitt wholly convinces as a living legend who seems to have been immortalised within his own lifetime – with fateful results, as he encounters Casey Affleck’s awkward and resentful super-fan. It might not have won him any awards, but this was peak Pitt.
Skip the search — follow Shortlist on Google News to get our best lists, news, features and reviews at the top of your feeds!
