Amy Adams was doing a Minnesota dinner-theater production of Brigadoon when she auditioned to play a dotty cheerleader in Drop Dead Gorgeous. The role was small, and the movie famously went nowhere at the time. Still, it was enough to convince Adams to hightail it to Los Angeles, where she spent most of the next decade portraying perky sweethearts. For women in Hollywood, that archetype can be tough to escape — ask Meg Ryan. But Adams often located a layer of melancholy beneath her characters’ sunny surfaces, and those early performances had a depth that now makes her versatility seem obvious. These days, she tends to do the opposite, pinpointing the charm lurking within even the scariest or most sullen role.
With six Oscar nominations to her name (and one or two others she probably should have received — looking at you, Arrival), Adams has attained the “overdue” label that risks reducing a vibrant career to fickle awards metrics. Does it matter whether her newest movie, Nightbitch, will finally net her the trophy that none other could? Only in the sense that Adams’s likability makes you want to root for her, and because six is an awful lot of Oscars to lose. Adams has proven to be a magnet for hip directors like Paul Thomas Anderson, Spike Jonze, and Marielle Heller, and the real mystery governing her career is what clever shades she will use to color in the great roles still awaiting her.
With Nightbitch opening in theaters, we’re ranking Adams’s major work thus far. That means no bit parts like The Slaughter Rule or The Ex, no direct-to-video ephemera like Cruel Intentions 2, and nothing that lacked a proper release. Also, no one-off TV appearances or Dr. Vegas, which lasted all of five episodes and presumably only exists in some padlocked CBS vault. Her best roles tend to flit between genres, finding candor and nuance in the grayest areas.
34.
Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, and Justice League (2013–17)
Apologies to the Lois Lane stans out there, but Adams is mostly on hand in these movies to deliver stern gobbledygook (something about isotopes?) and stare at Henry Cavill’s cheekbones. “I’m a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter,” she declares while trying to convince her editor (Laurence Fishburne) to run a story about the alien spacecraft that will eventually bring her and Superman face-to-face with evil General Zod (Michael Shannon). It’s a serviceable Adams performance, determined and matter-of-fact. But she and Cavill have zero chemistry, which makes Lois a dubious love interest, and if Adams is going to do superhero movies, it would be nice if the material weren’t so dour.
33.
Leap Year (2010)
Right as romantic comedies were curdling at the box office, Adams made one of the genre’s all-time stinkers. Leap Year is primarily a showcase for high heels worn in improbable situations, like trudging through the muddy, hilly Irish countryside, where Adams gets waylaid en route to propose to her inattentive boyfriend (Adam Scott). We’re supposed to root for the surly stud (Matthew Goode) who gives her shelter along the way, but their bond is so unconvincing that it’s actually kind of upsetting when they end up together. Adams can’t phone in a performance to save her life, and it’s hard to ding her too much for a script that was doomed from the start. Still, you have to wonder what favor she owed the dark lords to agree to make this witless turkey.
32.
Hillbilly Elegy (2020)
Even when you ignore the baggage of J.D. Vance’s political profile and the fact that this movie yielded Glenn Close’s eighth Oscar loss, Adams can’t overcome Hillbilly Elegy’s foulest impulses. However well intentioned the Ron Howard film may be, everyone onscreen is a caricature of American poverty filtered through Hollywood’s unstudied meaning-making, their chunky southern drawls and anger-management issues substituting for enlightened class commentary. As Vance’s troubled mother, Adams shrieks a lot, which is not her specialty. She’s constantly going from zero to 1,000 in a way that turns an already fraught adaptation into clueless melodrama.
31.
Standing Still (2005)
Standing Still is like The Big Chill for Gen X, except it’s less charming and no one saw it (total grosses: $30,142). Adams stands out because her career has far eclipsed her co-stars’ — with all due respect to Mena Suvari, Colin Hanks, Ethan Embry, Adam Garcia, and James Van Der Beek, of course. There’s not much to grab on to in this drowsy ensemble comedy about self-involved college friends reuniting for a wedding. Adams has one of the group’s more grounded characters, but that also means she’s a bit bland.
30.
Serving Sara (2002)
Adams isn’t in much of Reginald Hudlin’s crass rom-com flop, and for that she can count herself lucky. She has a twang straight out of Steel Magnolias and a wardrobe lifted from a ditzier Legally Blonde, which might be fun if she hadn’t been handed such an undercooked bimbo caricature. (One of Adams’s few scenes ends with the camera panning down to a close-up of her chest, in case you’re unfamiliar with Serving Sara’s wit.) At least she doesn’t seem as bored with the movie as Matthew Perry and Elizabeth Hurley — you know, the people on the poster.
29.
Dear Evan Hansen (2021)
The Adams Family — that’s the name of her fan group, right? — had a rough go of it in 2020 and 2021, when we waded through Hillbilly Elegy, The Woman in the Window, and this cringey Broadway adaptation. Those were dark days. Two of the movies feature both Adams and Julianne Moore, and what’s really depressing is that such a phenomenal pairing got wasted on hapless material. Fortunately, Adams is affecting as a grieving suburban mother grasping for clues about her teenage son’s suicide. She’s the only person who makes you want to believe that Ben Platt could reasonably be 17.
28.
Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)
Can a girl with glasses be sexy? That’s the question governing Adams’s Talladega Nights character, and the answer is “only if she puts her hair down.” Adams doesn’t have a ton to do in Adam McKay’s hit-or-miss NASCAR spoof, other than one key scene where her long, silky mane and sensual speechifying convince superstar Ricky Bobby (Will Ferrell) to get behind the wheel again.
27.
The Muppets (2011)
Adams’s Muppets performance suffers from recent history. She’d done the whole pathologically cheerful thing in Junebug and Enchanted, two career-defining roles far richer than what Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller’s tongue-in-cheek script called for. Adams is relegated to the sidelines here, playing a small-towner who’s basically in a throuple with a man-child (Segel) devoted to his Muppet brother (voiced by Peter Linz). It’s a real “girl, leave him” situation, even for a kids’ movie. She wears her cherry-lipped smile and sinless sundresses well, but not even a peppy musical number about how she’s totally fine dining alone while everyone else hangs out with Kermit can touch the verbose sparkle of those previous movies.
26.
Nocturnal Animals (2016)
Adams sheds her usual warmth to play a snooty Los Angeles gallerist whose eyeliner is as heavy as her unresolved emotional baggage. Tom Ford’s sense of melodrama was far more evocative in A Single Man, though; he doesn’t seem to grasp how silly a lot of Nocturnal Animals is, which maroons Adams somewhere between winkingly arch and gravely serious. As pleasing as it is to see her swan around in glamorous low-cut dresses and high-heeled boots, she can’t break through Ford’s hypermanicured gloss.
25.
On the Road (2012)
Hollywood had been trying to put Jack Kerouac’s Beat touchstone on film since the moment it was published in 1957. Five decades later, Garrett Hedlund wound up playing Dean Moriarty, a part that Marlon Brando, Brad Pitt, and Colin Farrell had all circled. The movie crashed and burned like a yellow Roman candle, but Adams is on fire in her few scenes as a bohemian who takes in the freewheeling road-trippers. The film’s other actresses — Kristen Stewart, Kirsten Dunst, Elisabeth Moss, and Alice Braga — have fuller roles, but Adams feels totally alive in spite of her limited screen time. At one point, she pantomimes a blowjob while scrubbing kitchen floors, and the wild satisfaction in her eyes tells us more about the character’s eccentricities than the script has time for.
24.
Psycho Beach Party (2000)
This farcical John Waters knockoff is Lauren Ambrose’s movie from top to bottom; she plays a Gidget analog with multiple personalities, one of whom is a serial killer wiping out groovy beachgoers. Adams’s role, however minor, foreshadows the star power she would later unleash. Whenever she’s onscreen, Psycho Beach Party gets a punch-up. Adams’s kittenish Marvel Ann, a boy-crazy 1960s teenager who fancies herself an expert on the opposite sex, uses bubbliness as a manipulation tactic, and it’s fun to see Adams spoof mid-century pinup aesthetics with such panache.
23.
The Office (2005–06)
Adams is the hot girl in “Hot Girl,” the season-one finale (directed by Amy Heckerling!) that introduces her as Jim’s love interest. Her resemblance to Jenna Fischer is part of the joke — those were the days of Pam and Jim becoming TV’s primo “will they, won’t they” couple. Adams plays a purse peddler who sets up shop for one day at Dunder Mifflin, which would seem like a spotty business investment were Michael and Dwight not so thirsty for her attention. Adams is funny, warding off the men’s awkward libidos like they’re bacteria. The Office brought her back for two more episodes the following year, making this one of the show’s most important mini-arcs.
22.
Big Eyes (2015)
Oh, what Tim Burton could have made with Amy Adams in the ’90s. Unfortunately, she linked up with the director when he was in a creative lull, churning out gaudy adaptations of Disney cartoons and movies that rehashed his earlier, better work. Big Eyes isn’t terrible, but it’s an iffy fit for Burton. He brings his expressionistic whimsy to what is meant to be a score-settling biopic about the kitschy painter Margaret Keane, whose Svengali husband (Christoph Waltz) initially took credit for her work. The movie never quite clicks, and Adams’s performance feels more mannered than it might have in someone else’s hands, especially opposite Waltz’s relentless scenery-chewing.
21.
The Wedding Date (2005)
The Wedding Date failed to make Debra Messing a movie star, but there’s a little more meat on its bones than its bum rap would have you believe. A reverse Pretty Woman in which Messing hires an urbane escort (Dermot Mulroney) for her younger sister’s wedding, the rom-com suffers mostly from a handful of unlikable characters who don’t square with the cutesy plot — chief among them the sister in question, played by Adams (and also named Amy). And yet! However objectionable her self-absorbed homewrecker may be, Adams is a hoot. She understands the humorous balance between sprightly and catty, in part by making Amy oblivious to her own narcissism.
20.
Trouble With the Curve (2012)
Trouble With the Curve begins with Clint Eastwood coaching his “little bastard” through a pee break, kicking a coffee table that’s in his way, and eating Spam out of the can. He’s old, he’s crotchety, he’s Clint Eastwood. As his daughter, Adams is appropriately frustrated with the strife her ailing old man inflicts upon her life. You know exactly where their hot-and-cold relationship is headed when Adams’s no-nonsense attorney reluctantly joins him on a trip to scout a young baseball player. The actress uncovers enough credibility in the character to withstand the syrupy sports drama’s conventions, offsetting the gruff Eastwoodisms on which the film is built.
19.
Vice (2018)
Adam McKay’s baggy Dick Cheney satire is the closest Adams has come to doing Shakespeare. Putting Vice and the Bard in the same sentence sounds sacrilegious, but the movie paints Lynne Cheney as a Lady MacBeth type and requires Adams to recite iambic pentameter about Dick’s capacity to usurp some of George W. Bush’s authority. Adams is the outlier in a film obsessed with its own supposed cleverness. Everyone around her is going for an uncanny wink pitched at a knowing liberal audience, whereas she has more room to extrapolate Lynne’s private wiles. With the help of a harsh wig and matronly costuming, Adams plays her as the grounding force behind one of the United States’ most cartoonish villains. Her clasped hands say as much about Lynne’s determination as any of McKay’s self-satisfied dialogue.
18.
The Woman in the Window (2021)
What if Amy Adams is good in The Woman in the Window? What then? Much of the blame for this COVID-era laughingstock seems to lie with Disney. As director Joe Wright tells it, the studio “watered down” Woman after acquiring Fox, only to pawn it off to Netflix, where the thriller now lives in ignominy. Whatever happened behind the scenes, it treats the story like a piercing psychological portrait instead of the schlock it should be. Adams isn’t any less earnest, but she’s compelling as a boozy agoraphobe who witnesses her neighbor’s murder. “Smart but pained” is an Adams specialty, and you can’t say she doesn’t understand the misguided assignment she was handed here.
17.
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008)
Circa 2008, even Adams’s vamps were perky. This long-gestating adaptation of Winifred Watson’s 1938 French novel is a footnote in that chapter of Adams’s career, but the peacockish actress she portrays has a sexual verve that sets the role apart from Junebug, Enchanted, and Doubt. Her fabulously named Delysia Lafosse treats life like a Mae West comedy, juggling three hunky lovers, deluxe showbiz dreams, and a starchy social secretary (Frances McDormand) with screwball frenzy. Miss Pettigrew can be a bit too giddy for its own good, but Adams matches that flamboyance at every giggly step.
16.
Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999)
Adams enters Drop Dead Gorgeous like a fidgety firework. As randy Minnesota cheerleader Leslie Miller, she immediately pops off the screen, her smile huge and her entire youthful aura unglued. This was her first movie, and it’s impressive how perfectly aligned she is with the beauty-pageant satire’s pitch-black humor. Even without a lot of screen time, Adams gets many of its biggest laughs, like Leslie gleefully thinking that her second-runner-up trophy means she won second place. When corrected, she barrels on as if nothing about her fortune has changed, and the grin plastered on her face is a testament to Adams’s innate comedic prowess.
15.
Charlie Wilson’s War (2007)
Opening one month after Enchanted’s Thanksgiving box-office sweep, Mike Nichols and Aaron Sorkin’s geopolitical comedy was crucial in expanding perceptions of Adams’s range. She’d never portrayed such a self-possessed career woman, and seeing her hold her own opposite Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts helped her longevity explode. As Hanks’s savvy, dutiful assistant, Adams is the paste that keeps a film full of larger-than-life performances earthbound.
14.
Julie & Julia (2009)
Adams is a natural fit for Nora Ephron’s gabby dialogue. She has a Meg Ryan–y glint and the can-do effervescence that’s basically Ephron’s trademark. Julie & Julia belongs to Meryl Streep’s boisterous Julia Child in every sense, but Adams ensures that the bisected trifle of a movie doesn’t lag too much when Streep is offscreen. When it came out, blogging was still fairly novel, so Adams’s half now feels like a quaint time capsule, a paean to a pre-Substack world. That, along with the fact that Adams was Ephron’s final leading lady before she died in 2012, makes revisiting the movie bittersweet.
13.
Sunshine Cleaning (2008)
This Nicole Holofcener–lite dramedy sits in the margins of the Amy Adams canon, but it’s more significant than its reputation implies. Sunshine Cleaning gave Adams’s Pollyanna era a slight edge. As Rose Lorkowski, she’s a struggling single mother who starts a crime-scene cleanup business with her wayward sister (Emily Blunt). Look at the gleeful smile Rose can’t stifle when she says a prospective client has just called about a suicide job. It’s far more genuine than the one she plasters on to impress old classmates or to recite cheesy empowerment mantras into the mirror. Sunshine Cleaning — a modest hit back in 2008, more than tripling its $5 million budget at the box office — drifts into quirky-Sundance-family clichés, but it grants Adams the fullest complexity any movie had asked of her up to that point and establishes her as one of her generation’s best cryers.
12.
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009)
Here comes Adams’s Katharine Hepburn moment. She’s a fast-talking fish out of water — Amelia Earhart reanimated in the 21st century — with broad shoulders and a mid-Atlantic sass. The sequel’s visual effects don’t hold up, and its manic plot was a bust from the get-go, but seeing Adams in a proper screwball-comedy tempo is bliss. She channels a breed of incandescent movie-star charisma that has since become endangered. Bringing Up Baby remake when?
11.
Her (2013)
By 2013, Adams could have her pick of leading roles, but she still embraced worthwhile supporting parts here and there. The best example is Her, in which she has a smallish role as Joaquin Phoenix’s sweet friend (perhaps his only friend) named, conveniently, Amy. It’s a supporting gig in every sense: She is there to round out the film’s arc, which involves Phoenix falling in love with a honey-voiced operating system. Spike Jonze gives Amy just enough of a side story to be a real character, but the rest is pure Adams. The moment we meet Amy, she feels fully formed, with an empathetic interior life that clarifies her kinship with Phoenix’s forlorn Theodore. She is far more balanced than he is, but Adams never lets us doubt Amy’s commitment to their platonic bond, in part because one of her great skills as an actress is listening. You, too, want to knock on Amy’s door in the middle of the night when your OS decides it’s time to break up.
10.
Catch Me If You Can (2002)
Another three years would pass before Adams became famous, but Catch Me If You Can is her breakout role insofar as it was the first time she stole a scene and made you wonder, Who is that? Even more impressive, the victim of that robbery was Leonardo DiCaprio. Adams enters the movie in tears, her girlishness embellished by the awkward braces on her adult teeth. Soon enough, she and Leo are hooking up like ravenous teenagers. Adams commits to the bit, stressing the hilarious contradiction of a hospital nurse who has the excitability of a 14-year-old. Everyone in Steven Spielberg’s romp is clearly having a blast, and Adams is adoring (and adorable) opposite DiCaprio’s smooth-talking con man. She later acknowledged that Catch Me If You Can kicked off her “naïveté phase.” Even though Enchanted was a ways away, the through-line from one to the other is clear.
9.
Doubt (2008)
Meryl Streep gets the best lines (“Look at that, you blew out my light”), but Adams is Doubt’s lodestar. When we first see Sister James, she’s attending mass, an awestruck gaze on her face as she watches Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) deliver a skillful homily. What Adams is conveying is callowness, an implacable belief that faith will carry her through any trial. Over the course of John Patrick Shanley’s film, her innocence slips away. Adams’s dulcet voice thickens, and her eyes grow heavier. The world, Sister James learns, does not run on the biblical integrity she has built her life around. Adams is the ideal vessel for that discovery: The character is more clueless about reality than her elders, and yet her idealism is rooted in a humanism that Streep’s reactionary matron lacks. Without overplaying her hand, Adams understands that James is a proxy for the audience processing Doubt’s thorny ideas.
8.
American Hustle (2013)
In theory, the role of Sydney Prosser, the stripper turned swindler in David O. Russell’s sinuous crime comedy, begs for a big performance. She’s shrewd, lawless, sexy, and capable of conjuring her English-aristocrat alter ego without missing a beat. But Adams brings Sydney down to earth through small details, like the watchful pause she places between the words “elaborate comb-over” when describing her balding con-artist boyfriend (Christian Bale). Even when her co-stars go big (namely Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence), Adams tends to keep her cool. Instead of howling, she hisses. And so we lean forward, quickly assessing that Sydney might be the only person who isn’t a liability in the elaborate sting operation at the movie’s center. Adams delivers American Hustle’s guiding principle — “We gotta get over on all these guys” — with the brio of someone convinced she’s too good to fail.
7.
Nightbitch (2024)
Adams is a great choice for the fed-up mom at the center of Nightbitch, referred to simply as Mother. The character is at once expressive and bottled up, wearing a brave face until her monotonous life becomes interesting again, which happens to be when she starts inexplicably transforming into a dog after the sun sets. Adams excels at that sweet-and-sour paradox, and Marielle Heller’s adaptation succeeds in capturing the acerbic humor of Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel. Unfortunately, it fails as a body-horror experiment, reducing most of the spikiness to a generic parable about gender orthodoxy. But even if the movie is missing its canine teeth, watching Adams teeter between woman-on-the-verge extremes is great. You just wish the movie around her worked better.
6.
The Fighter (2010)
With one swift punch, The Fighter put Adams’s wide-eyed era to bed. She has credited David O. Russell for the turning point, saying, “He met me and he said, ‘Oh, you are so not a princess type — we’ll have to do something about that.’” And, yes, Russell deserves kudos for pinpointing Adams to play Charlene Fleming, the tough-talking girlfriend to real-life boxer Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), before most directors thought to exploit her darker side. Still, Charlene is an Adams creature through and through. Micky’s father (Jack McGee) introduces her as a “nice girl,” but she has to go toe to toe with the baddest bitch in Lowell, Massachusetts: Micky’s formidable momager (Melissa Leo). Adams gives Charlene the loving, loyal heart to justify that nice-girl label and the brawn to pulverize it whenever needed. She makes us trust that Charlene is the smartest heavyweight in any room (or ring).
5.
Sharp Objects (2018)
Now this is a good adaptation. Sharp Objects enriches Gillian Flynn’s source material, rendering it more absorbing and more depressing (complimentary). Adams, who was also a producer on this HBO miniseries that was one of summer 2018’s buzziest hits, feels like as much of an auteur here as creator Marti Noxon and director Jean-Marc Vallée. The croaky leadenness she brings to Camille Preaker, a tormented crime reporter investigating a murder in her hometown, motors the show’s Midwest Gothic mood. Camille is an uncharacteristically cynical role for Adams, and she imbues in her a competence that defies easy categorization. The skeptical way she ambles around old-money Missouri makes clear where her scars originate, but Adams has enough mystery about her to keep Sharp Objects’s slow burn mesmerizing.
4.
Enchanted (2007) and Disenchanted (2022)
Adams’s first lead role in a studio movie demanded her entire comedic arsenal. Crossing Times Square in a ball gown with a cumbersome hoop skirt isn’t easy, for example, but Adams found a way to turn it into a motif. “I decided that she moves side to side,” she said of Giselle, “so the dress never got underneath me.” As a result, the fairy-tale princess seems to float when she walks, perfectly matching her singsongy exuberance. She really does resemble a cartoon come to life, like Lucille Ball in a fish-out-of-water fantasy whose heroine is familiar with castles and evil queens but not taxicabs. Enchanted made Adams a star, in part because she gives the story real stakes instead of making it feel like a meta Disney confection.
3.
Arrival (2016)
One striking thing about Arrival is how quiet Adams is in it. Not in the sense that she doesn’t speak — she plays a linguist, and there is plenty of dialogue, some of it quite wordy and cerebral — but in the sense that she expels all of her familiar rat-a-tat charisma. For as grand as Denis Villeneuve’s alien marvel can be, it’s really about its heroine’s anguish (and, you know, world peace and stuff). Adams externalizes Louise’s heartache with a breathiness that the sound editors seem to have cranked up like it’s Darth Vader’s ventilator. Even when she quavers, we know that Louise will solve her conundrums, extraterrestrial and otherwise, because Adams endows her with such a rich, proficient interiority. Turns out one of our talkiest actresses is also great in stillness.
2.
Junebug (2005)
Adams’s Ashley Johnsten is the last major character introduced in Junebug. She shows up 13 minutes into the movie, framed in extreme close-up as a peppy Haydn string quartet interrupts the Johnstens’ quotidian southern-family squabbles. Ashley is no squabbler. She peppers people with questions, rattles off anecdotes at warp speed, and bears a toothy smile that almost convinces you she is a stranger to all forms of melancholy. Junebug was Adams’s springboard, a Sundance sleeper that yielded her first Oscar nomination and led to a string of perky motormouth roles. This one is her best. Adams plays Ashley without any hint of irony; here is someone for whom jadedness might as well be the eighth deadly sin, no matter the lopsided marriage to her grumpy high-school sweetheart (Ben McKenzie). Adams wisely cuts through Ashley’s childlike virtue to reveal that she is wiser than anyone gives her credit for, emphasizing tactful observations that stretch deep into her otherwise happy-go-lucky soul.
1.
The Master (2012)
One of cinema’s greatest hand jobs is also one of its great Lady Macbeth moments, an act of forced subservience between a showman (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his canny wife (Adams). As Peggy Dodd, consigliere to her bumptious 1950s cult-leader husband, Adams tends to wear a soft smile and blouses buttoned to the neck — a picture-perfect model of mid-century femininity. But midway through Paul Thomas Anderson’s veiled Scientology fable, as Peggy pleasures Lancaster in front of a bathroom mirror, she reminds him, and us, who is maintaining this house of cards. The timbre of Adams’s voice remains delicate. She doesn’t need to underline Peggy’s inner monster to get the point across. Instead, through a blend of control and compassion — twin traits of any effective master — Adams leaves no doubt the character can bend her man to her will, again.