Every Michelle Pfeiffer Movie Ranked Worst To Best

We'll say one thing right off the bat: Even in a bad Michelle Pfeiffer movie, you still get good Michelle Pfeiffer. It seems like there's no role she can't wring some truth out of, and over the years, she's brought us unforgettable drama, comedy, romance, and songs. Her filmography may have its fair share of duds — ones that range from predictable rom-coms to lifeless prestige pictures — but she always brings something interesting to the table.

In revisiting her long and healthy career, we've looked at critical reviews and popular opinion to rank her films, counting down to the very best of them all. It's a substantial list. Even though we're only counting films we'd fairly describe as "Michelle Pfeiffer movies," where she's playing either a lead or a major supporting role, we still wind up with forty movies: Once Pfeiffer really broke out, she became not just a celebrated actress but a bona fide movie star, one everyone seemed to want to cast. Let's take a look at the projects she chose and how fondly we remember them.

"A Thousand Acres" could have been a more major entry in Michelle Pfeiffer's filmography: After all, it sounds important. It's an adaptation of a prestigious literary novel and a high-concept blending of Shakespeare's "King Lear" and the lonely landscape of the American Midwest. Pfeiffer stars as Rose Cook Lewis, a richly dramatic character who must contend with the complex and painful legacy — literal and emotional — left to her by her father.

Unfortunately, "A Thousand Acres" just doesn't work. Reviewing the film for The San Francisco Gate, Mike LaSalle dismisses it as a soap opera but excuses Pfeiffer and her co-stars from any responsibility for its status as a flop: "Don't blame the actors. Their efforts succeed in keeping the bad news from the audience for almost half the picture. Pfeiffer has never been more fierce and committed ..." It's a good performance mired in a lackluster movie that unfortunately can't live up to its high ambitions.

Hackneyed and emotionally dishonest, the romantic dramedy "The Story of Us" didn't just premiere to lukewarm reviews but blistering ones. It drew this commentary from Janet Maslin at The New York Times: "Though it sets out to explain why this marriage is worth saving, 'The Story of Us' could prompt even single members of the audience to file for divorce." It's hard to get worse press than that.

Michelle Pfeiffer and Bruce Willis star as a married couple who, with the kids out of the house for the summer, can finally do what they've been dying to do for a while now: split up and see if there's still anything real left beneath the smiles they put on for their children. Somehow, despite charismatic stars and director Rob Reiner's impressive romance filmography, this flops completely. It's too sanitized to have recognizable emotions, but it never goes all-in on Hollywood charm, either. Pfeiffer and Willis still have presence despite their milquetoast surroundings, however, so "The Story of Us" can at least occasionally scrape by on their talent.

Essentially, if you've seen any inspirational drama with one determined, earnest teacher changing the lives of disadvantaged kids, you've seen "Dangerous Minds." Michelle Pfeiffer plays Louanne Johnson, a first-time teacher who uses everything from her Marine Corps training to popular music to candy bars to get her class to engage with the material. It won't surprise you that she also has to deal with her share of cranky authority figures who don't understand her unconventional methods. There's also a heartbreaking — but predictable — tragedy in the final act.

Pfeiffer does strong work as Louanne, but there's only so much she can do to salvage staid material. "Dangerous Minds" also comes with some uncomfortable subtext that critics like Los Angeles Times writer Lydia A. Nayo were discussing even back at the film's release in 1995: "It is swathed in the aura of the Great White Hope movie. People of color [are] as sheep, led to redemption through the good offices of a courageous white shepherd." The film's melodrama can be satisfying, but there are a lot of reasons this doesn't rank higher on our list.

2012's "Dark Shadows" is a campy, loving adaptation of what was arguably TV's weirdest soap opera of all time. The film serves up witchcraft, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and shock rock legend Alice Cooper as it tells the weird and winding saga of the Collins family. Their cursed forefather, the vampire Barnabas (Johnny Depp), finds himself in the 1970s after spending over 200 years in a tomb. Michelle Pfeiffer plays Elizabeth, who is the head of the Collins family at the time Barnabas rejoins the world.

"Dark Shadows" is, alas, kind of a mess: a Gothic buffet that takes just a little bit too much of everything. If you're into gleefully over-the-top fish-out-of-water comedies full of Tim Burton's signature aesthetic, it can at least be a fun mess ... but if Burton's more recent movies have left you cold, there's no pressing reason to check this one out. Everyone here has done better work elsewhere.

"Maleficent: Mistress of Evil" has one of the biggest splits between critics and audiences of anything on this list, so we figured it's only appropriate for it to serve as a kind of bridge between the movies we wouldn't really recommend and the ones we would. Like "Grease 2," which also offers a lively dose of Michelle Pfeiffer, this live-action Disney sequel isn't quite good enough to rise above its status as a fun but unnecessary retread ... but sometimes fun is all you need. If you want more dark glamor, adult-oriented fairy tale revisionism, and showy performances, "Maleficent: Mistress of Evil" delivers.

Plus, Pfeiffer makes her Queen Ingrith a superb villain: campy, chilling, and plausible all at the same time. Most of Pfeiffer's great characters over the years have been more towards the heroic end of the spectrum, but "Maleficent: Mistress of Evil" stands as spectacular (and highly enjoyable) evidence of the fact that she's just as good at being bad.

"Into the Night" is a deliciously off-kilter caper film. It features Michelle Pfeiffer as Diana, a jewel thief who, up to her neck in trouble, needs some help from Jeff Goldblum's Ed — who is up for a night of frantic driving and problem-solving because, between insomnia and heartbreak, it's not like he can sleep anyway. The two make an unexpectedly great pair, and their chemistry lights up this funny, dark, and weird little movie. The film is loaded with more cameos than it can easily handle — especially if you can't recognize everyone — but its jazzy rhythms and central pairing make up for the fact that it stretched itself a little thin.

It makes sense that such an uneven movie would receive uneven reviews, but we're still ready to dub "Into the Night" a burgeoning cult classic. Film School Rejects aptly compared it to Martin Scorsese's "After Hours," noting that both movies are a kind of "screwball noir," only they take their curious tonal mishmash in different directions: "Before the closing credits roll, 'After Hours' has turned deeply noir, while 'Into The Night' emerges proudly screwball." If that sounds good, this is a movie you should definitely check out.

"What Lies Beneath" is a slightly lukewarm Hitchcock pastiche from 2000. Michelle Pfeiffer stars as Claire, a woman who begins to believe her house is haunted. Her husband (Harrison Ford) tries to dissuade her of all this, but Claire is determined to get answers ... even if it's unsettling how this haunting seems tied to her husband's past affair.

Of course, the problem with homaging Hitchcock is that you can make your audiences wonder why they're not just watching something by the Master of Suspense himself, rather than something that never rises above "solidly okay." To its credit, while "What Lies Beneath" could stand to muster a little more verve or cleverness, it doesn't drag, and it has its virtues. One of them is definitely Pfeiffer, whom Roger Ebert credited as a standout: "Pfeiffer is very good in the movie; she is convincing and sympathetic and avoids the most common problem for actors in horror films — she doesn't overreact. Her character remains self-contained and resourceful." In a potboiler-esque supernatural thriller like this, a good, reliable lead character goes a long way.

"One Fine Day" is a featherweight romantic comedy that succeeds on the strength of its leads, George Clooney and Michelle Pfeiffer. Their chemistry sparkles enough to distract us from the fact that we've admittedly seen all this before. They play Jack Taylor and Melanie Parker, two single parents who get mixed up in each other's lives for one extraordinarily hectic day — and inevitably realize that they don't really want to get unmixed again.

There aren't any surprises here. For example, if you've seen almost any movie from the '90s involving high-powered professionals, you'll already know that Pfeiffer and Clooney will have distressingly symbiotic relationships with their cell phones and that they'll need to learn to put family and relationships ahead of their work. Still, "One Fine Day" can coast on the allure and all-around delightfulness of its stars. Clooney and Pfeiffer feel like one of those romantic comedy pairings that just had to happen at some point, and this is as good a way as any to see them fall in love.

"People Like Us" is a minor family melodrama that benefits from a strong cast that includes Chris Pine, Elizabeth Banks, Michelle Pfeiffer, Philip Baker Hall, Jon Favreau, and Olivia Wilde. Pine and Banks take the lead here as Sam and Frankie, two good-hearted but damaged siblings who only find out about each other after they're adults. The father they didn't realize they shared is dead, and Sam — the legitimate child — is left with the seemingly out-of-nowhere request to deliver a lump sum of money to Frankie's son, Josh. Who are Josh and Frankie? Sam is about to find out. We don't recommend this as a strategy for dealing with family dysfunction.

Michelle Pfeiffer plays Lillian, Sam's mother, who is dealing with health problems and a burdensome family secret of her own, one that may help Sam and Frankie start to heal.

All in all, "People Like Us" never gets up enough sparkle to actually shine, but it still provides some effective, tear-jerking catharsis.

Years before "Ant-Man and the Wasp," Paul Rudd and Michelle Pfeiffer starred together in the romantic comedy "I Could Never Be Your Woman." The film tackles the pressures women in entertainment face when aging out of the strictest Hollywood beauty standards. Pfeiffer plays Rosie, who — even though she works strictly behind the camera on her show "You Go Girl" — is all too aware that she no longer exactly fits the image-driven culture around her.

Luckily, she's still Michelle Pfeiffer, which is more than enough to score Paul Rudd's amiable Adam, who is honestly invested in her despite their age difference. While Rosie tries to sort out a snarl of sabotage, parenting woes, and personal insecurities, "I Could Never Be Your Woman" develops into intelligent and mostly easy-going fun. It may hit its message a little too hard, but overall, its light touch lets it get away with its occasional lapses into preachiness.

"Frankie and Johnny" is a profoundly bittersweet romantic comedy. Michelle Pfeiffer plays Frankie, a diner waitress who is — with good reason, we eventually find out — afraid of offering anyone too much trust. Al Pacino is Johnny, the earnest and emotionally open ex-con who gets a job working as a short-order cook at her diner. He's dealing with just as much loneliness as she is, and he's quickly smitten with her. The movie becomes a push-pull dance where Johnny tries to persuade Frankie that the two of them can make each other happy.

The film leans into the delicate, flawed humanity of its characters. Unlike a lot of rom-coms, it never feels like it's offering a glamorized, idealized view of relationship. Instead, it's about two very specific, damaged, all-too-real people learning to open up to each other and find some much-needed happiness. Pacino and Pfeiffer make that journey both funny and poignant.

An intelligent and finely crafted Cold War spy drama, "The Russia House" deals with dangled Soviet nuclear secrets that could be tremendously important or simply part of an elaborate attempt on the USSR's part to find out what their enemies already know. In the midst of a quietly thrilling plot, the film also creates a believable and nuanced romance between Sean Connery's Barley, a publishing executive forced to turn into a spy, and Michelle Pfeiffer's Katya, a Soviet editor.

Critics offered nearly universal praise for Pfeiffer's performance. Writing for The Washington Post, Hal Hinson said, "[Pfeiffer is] great at playing contradictions, at being tough yet yielding, cloaked yet open, direct yet oblique. ... It's one of the year's most full-blooded performances."

In a world where a lot of spy movies lean on action, "The Russia House" aims at something a little more abstract: a character-driven drama where the tension, though rarely obvious, racks up exquisitely.

"White Oleander" is a rich and emotionally difficult film. Michelle Pfeiffer and Allison Lohman star as one of cinema's most troubling mother-daughter pairs: Ingrid Magnussen poisons her lover and, utterly unrepentant, doesn't let her prison sentence get in the way of her exerting a powerful and almost ghostly influence over her troubled daughter, Astrid. As Astrid moves from foster family to foster family, Ingrid pulls whatever strings she can to make sure Astrid stays exclusively her daughter. If that means sabotaging Astrid's chance at finding a loving home, Ingrid can live with that.

With the slow evolution of Astrid, the continuous and proudly unchanging presence of Ingrid, and the brief but affecting portraits of everyone else Astrid meets as she's growing up, this is definitely a character-driven movie. Everything hinges on the actors, and luckily, there are some powerhouse performances here. The New York Times review had particular praise for Lohman, singling her out as having "may be the year's most auspicious screen acting debut," and for Pfeiffer, who, "giving the most complex screen performance of her career, makes her Olympian seductress at once irresistible and diabolical."

Can three suburban witches take on the devil himself? "The Witches of Eastwick" answers that question by introducing the sinister but compelling Daryl Van Horne (Jack Nicholson), who suddenly appears in one small town and starts systematically charming and seducing Sukie (Michelle Pfeiffer), Alexandra (Cher), and Jane (Susan Sarandon). They accidentally summoned him up to play the role of the man of their dreams, but he's actually a living nightmare.

Darryl likes spurring them on, enabling them to take their gifts to new and wicked places. When they try to pull away from them, he makes them pay — but he doesn't know what he's getting himself into.

"The Witches of Eastwick" is stylish, dark, and bitingly funny, and all of its performances have a magnetic appeal. Its only real fault is its ending, where, as The Hollywood Reporter says, "What was heretofore a bright and somewhat piercing look at male domination, as well as a perceptive insight into the female spirit, degenerates into a zap-dash, special effects war." Everything bright, piercing, and perceptive holds up just fine, however, making this a lasting favorite.

Tim Burton's "Batman Returns" is a worthy successor to his 1989 "Batman," and it adds even more Gothic-infused comic book style. Plus, while it may lack the glories of Jack Nicholson's Joker, it soups up its rogues' gallery with the equally flamboyant (and more pitiable) Penguin (Danny DeVito), sinister industrialist Max Shreck (Christopher Walken), and, of course, the morally ambiguous femme fatale Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer). As Catwoman, she fights Michael Keaton's Batman; as Selina Kyle, she loves his Bruce Wayne. Their love-hate chemistry and secret identity shenanigans are some of the best parts of the movie.

The characters and their larger-than-life performances complement the film's superb visuals: This is Tim Burton's sensibility at its absolute best. As Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times, "Costumes, attitudes, gadgets and the great ingenuity of Bo Welch's dazzling production design will linger in the mind long after the actual story of 'Batman Returns' becomes a blur." We're perfectly happy to forgive a few bits of weak plotting for this much delicious, lurid fun.

Undoubtedly the strangest film on our list, Darren Aronofsky's "mother!" is a horror fable about art and narcissism — and probably a lot of other things, as well. The movie tells the surreal story of "Mother" (Jennifer Lawrence) whose husband, "Him" (Javier Bardem), is a famous poet whose hunger for adulation forces her into both danger and discomfort. Huge, subterranean changes start when "Man" (Ed Harris) and "Woman" (Michelle Pfeiffer) become Mother's barely tolerated houseguests, eventually leading to uproar, inspiration, pregnancy, and tragedy.

This is a hard movie to understand, which means it can also be a hard movie to like. Its defenders, however, are eloquent in their passion — and, in Martin Scorsese's case, eloquent in his insistence that you don't have to understand or "define" a film to admire it. In an essay for The Hollywood Reporter, Scorsese wrote, "The horror, the dark comedy, the biblical elements, the cautionary fable — they're all there, but they're elements in the total experience, which engulfs the characters and the viewers along with them. Only a true, passionate filmmaker could have made this picture, which I'm still experiencing weeks after I saw it."

"Ant-Man and the Wasp" ditches some of the caper and heist tropes of its predecessor, but it keeps the madcap charm, comedic complications, and crucial sense of heart. Here, Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) reunites with Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) and her father, Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), who reluctantly need him for a crucial task: tracking down Hope's mother, Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer), who vanished into the Quantum Realm years ago. Scott shocked them with possible evidence that Janet is still alive, and now they're determined to get her back on their level of reality.

Pfeiffer has a suitably profound, ethereal presence — one that really sells both the wrenching family reunion and the sense that Janet has become a little otherworldly after so much time in the quantum realm. Her performance is one more great touch in a movie that really fires on all cylinders, and it adds some good gravitas alongside all the fun.

Angela de Marco (Michelle Pfeiffer) can't stand being a mobster's wife. Her son is hustling his classmates, her husband is filling their house with stolen goods, and the other mob wives won't stop gossiping about her. Even her husband's death doesn't solve her problems: She tries to throw herself into a new, honest life, but now she has a lovelorn Mafia boss on her tail. That's the kind of problem that attracts the attention of the FBI, who assume Angela is in on everything. Luckily, the agent who has her under surveillance is falling in love with her ....

"Married to the Mob" is funny, colorful, and unique, and it's hard to resist its madcap blend of hairspray, fake mustaches, and explosive gunfire. On top of all that, Pfeiffer's performance gives the movie soul. As The Washington Post put it, "[The film is] all decked out in Godfather kitsch, but underneath its loud exterior, a complex heroine struggles for freedom ... Michelle Pfeiffer has the pivotal role of the movie and perhaps of her career as Angela De Marco." For comedy fans, this alone would be enough to assure her stardom.

Jack and Frank Baker (Jeff and Beau Bridges) are the not-so-famous "Fabulous Baker Boys," musician brothers who are slowly seeing the number and quality of their gigs declining. To shake things up, they hire a new singer: the bold Susie Diamond (Michelle Pfeiffer), who can deliver an achingly sexy version of "Makin' Whoopee" and bring a whole club to its knees. Unsurprisingly, though, the group's sibling tension, romantic conflict, and artistic differences only get worse with success.

"The Fabulous Baker Boys" is a bittersweet and enthralling study of life on the lower end of showbiz, with all the artistic and personal compromises that entails. It finds time for music, romance, and character drama — and sometimes accomplishes all three at once.

The film holds a special place in Pfeiffer's career. As The Guardian put it, "This is Pfeiffer's movie, the one that made her the biggest female film star in the world, and catapulted her to the top of every Most Desirable Female survey for most of the '90s." Unsurprisingly, Pfeiffer still feels a lot of affection for it: In a 2021 talk with Deadline, she revealed that she and Jeff Bridges have been campaigning for a sequel.

So much of Martin Scorsese's reputation is tied to films like "Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull," and "Goodfellas" that it's easy to forget that he also made a gorgeous adaptation of the 1920 novel "The Age of Innocence" — but this lush and quietly tragic period piece ranks as one of his best films. Daniel Day-Lewis plays Newland Archer, a member of New York's upper crust who vacillates between hewing to the conventions of his class and rebelling against them in the search for something passionate and true. When the unhappy and scandalous Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer) comes back to New York, Archer's spotless engagement to the more conventional May (Winona Ryder) suddenly feels like a weight around his neck. He and Ellen fall in love — but in this claustrophobic social environment, and with Archer's indecision, that's no sure route to happiness.

"The Age of Innocence" is elegant, complex, and poignant; in fact, we're prepared to deem it essentially flawless and say this could be the crown jewel of Michelle Pfeiffer's career. It captures her at her absolute best, channeling vulnerability, intelligence, romance, and independence. Rolling Stone called her work "brilliantly nuanced" and said, "Pfeiffer gives the performance of a lifetime as the outcast countess. With her hair in tight curls that accentuate her pale beauty, she seems lit from within." That incandescence lingers long after the movie's credits have rolled.