Doesn’t it seem like every time a youngish actor is declared an heir to Al Pacino or Robert De Niro, it sets them up for some degree of failure, or at least mild disappointment? Previous next-gen actors like Edward Norton, Ryan Gosling, or Christian Bale have racked up plenty of great performances and can certainly summon the requisite intensity, but contemporary Hollywood isn’t especially conducive to making a run resembling anything like those glorious stretches that De Niro or Pacino hit in the ’70s, combining critical acclaim, awards success, and even sometimes popular appeal. Maybe, though, we’ve been looking at the wrong gender; for about a decade, from the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s, Amy Adams starred or co-starred in a group of movies as eclectic and high-quality as any number of upper-tier male-powerhouse filmographies. Then she hit a few potholes with the likes of Hillbilly Elegy and Dear Evan Hansen; her new movie Nightbitch boasts a typically committed and nuanced performance, but the movie itself isn’t quite at the level of her best work. Still, it’s an encouraging sign that Adams will continue to take risks and challenge herself as she enters her third decade as a major star. How flush is her career with great performances? The following list of her ten–make that 11–best doesn’t even include all six of her Oscar nominations. This list–ranked by her work in them more than the movies themselves, though many of the movies are also terrific–covers plenty of ground, from a cartoon princess to a fried con artist. Give her another 10 or 20 years, and she’ll cover even more.
11. Enchanted (2007)
My hot take is that Enchanted isn’t much of a movie, basically going where Shrek and “Fractured Fairy Tales” and a million other cartoons before it had gone before. (Classic live-action move, thinking you’re cooler than animation for no real reason!) But in a way, that makes Amy Adams even more impressive in the movie. In the midst of a fairly obvious, broad, and squishily sentimental in-house spoof of classic Disney animation, she gives a performance of both deep commitment (to her cheerful cartoony shtick) and impressive nuance (once her Princess Giselle must grapple with real-world emotions). Can you think of another contemporary actress who could give this particular performance this well?
10. Doubt (2008)
Adams’ second Oscar nomination came from a rare quadruple play: In John Patrick Shanley’s adaptation of his own play, the film’s four primary adult performers – Adams, Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Viola Davis – were each nominated in separate acting categories. It would be easy to lose track of Adams, over in Best Supporting Actress, with the powerhouses Streep and Hoffman squaring off in scenes involving a nun (Streep) who suspects a priest (Hoffman) of abusing a schoolboy, and one-scene wonder Davis, stepping in to devastate as the boy’s mother. Adams, meanwhile, plays the more naïve and gentle-spirited nun who first reports the possible abuse, and it turns out to be an Adams specialty: unshowy, delicate, and a key element of the movie’s balance.
9. The Muppets (2011)
The gold standard in the specialized field of Human in a Muppet Movie has long been Michael Caine playing Scrooge in A Muppet Christmas Carol. By comparison, the characters played by Jason Segel and Amy Adams in the self-conscious throwback The Muppets are written (in part by Segel) as a little cutesy. (Their names are Gary and Mary, FFS.) But this sweet and silly movie is also the closest Adams – a lovely singer – has ever come to appearing in a great musical, at least on movie screens. (She played the Baker’s Wife in a Central Park production of Into the Woods.) She makes an adorable meal of Mary’s melisma habit, and has a showstopping number nearly to herself: In “Me Party,” she sings a split-screen duet with Miss Piggy about the self-deceiving pleasures of being left alone.
8. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)
Made before her Oscar nomination for Junebug but released afterward, this supporting role as the mousy-turned-stunning, assistant-turned-love-interest figure for boobish racecar champion Ricky Bobby (Will Ferrell) might seem like the kind of dumb-comedy throwaway actresses have to grit their teeth through before a major breakthrough. (Adams would know plenty about that, having co-starred in the negligible Zach Braff/Jason Bateman comedy The Ex.) But Talladega is also a Will Ferrell/Adam McKay joint, which means it’s one of the funniest comedies of its era, and began a relationship that would result in Adams playing Lynn Cheney in Vice. In other words, no one is left behind in standard love-interest roles here, and though she doesn’t have as much screentime as designated sidekick John C. Reilly, Adams holds her own, particularly in a scene where she finally makes her admiration of Ricky Bobby fully known, climbing atop a bar table like a Whitesnake video. It’s a funny scene; the extra kick is that Adams makes it weirdly sweet, too.
7. Big Eyes (2014)
An underappreciated late-period Tim Burton drama doubles as an underappreciated mid-period Amy Adams showcase, casting her as painter Margaret Keane, whose husband Walter (Christoph Waltz) claimed credit for her distinctive, kitschy art style for years before the truth was eventually revealed. Adams is a counterintuitive choice for a Burton heroine – naturally sunny, rarely sardonic – which is exactly what makes this pastel-California period piece such an unexpected treat. Adams provides a much-needed shortcut: Rather than spending time puzzling over the taste levels of Keane’s art, the actress tells you that her sincerity means business.
6. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008)
No one knows or cares how to make a screwball comedy anymore, which has forced Adams to fit her obvious skill set for the subgenre into odd places like a Night at the Museum sequel. But Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day gets her closer than most, even if she’s not the title character. That would be Frances McDormand, who plays the governess mistakenly employed as a social secretary by the actress Delysia Lafosse (Adams), accompanying her on a whirlwind of competing romantic relationships. Essentially, Miss Pettigrew becomes a firsthand observer to Deylsia’s personal rom-com, while coming into her own as an older, wiser woman. Bharat Nalluri’s underrated gem features two of the best American actresses working, in a duo that doesn’t seem like it should necessarily pop as well as it does. But McDormand and Adams both modulate their performances beautifully, and through the dizziness of neo-screwball (and a dash of less restricted content – damn, Amy!) manage to create lovable portraits of womanhood at different stages of life.
5. Her (2013)
A performer with more prominent ego might well have turned down this part in Spike Jonze’s contemplative sci-fi romance about a shy man (Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with his computer’s A.I. operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). After all, playing, uh, Amy in Her involves playing second fiddle of sorts to a disembodied voice, and essentially playing out a story parallel to the male lead’s, only largely offscreen. It’s a movie built for Phoenix and Johansson to impress by playing a couple who never physically share the screen. But Adams took the role of Amy anyway (was it written for her?), and she’s stunning in it – a perfect example of how, despite her extensive awards history, she so often plays to what the movie needs, not any trophy-baiting careerism. Here, the movie needs a presence both openhearted and slightly opaque in her desires. She delivers, as usual.
4. Junebug (2005)
Amy Adams had been kicking around Hollywood for a while – she’s in Catch Me If You Can, among others, attesting to both her talent and Steven Spielberg’s great eye for casting – before she broke through with a counterintuitively smaller production. In Phil Morrison’s quiet, observant drama Junebug, she plays Ashley, the pregnant sister-in-law of George (Alessandro Nivola), who is visiting his North Carolina family with his art-dealer wife. Ashley, a boundlessly optimistic and sunnily-dispositioned young woman dealing with her taciturn husband (Ben McKenzie) in the belief that their impending child will solve their marital problems, could easily descend into caricature. Instead, Adams makes her into a kind of force of nature, clearly playing the comic overtones without ever denying the human reasons for her motormouthed enthusiasm.
3. The Master (2012)
In her second film opposite the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman as well as her first with Her’s Joaquin Phoenix, Adams plays Peggy Dodd, the wife of Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd, founder of a Scientology-like cult called The Cause. The Master focuses on the relationship between Lancaster and his wayward sorta-pupil Freddie Quell (Phoenix), and Peggy–a true supporting role–lingers on the periphery of the movie, loyal to her husband but steely in her own right. Paul Thomas Anderson’s drama has a certain degree of emotional withholding that only increases its vivid sense of character and place. Adams slips into this world effortlessly, combining submission to her husband’s bigger, brasher personality with an unshakeable, somewhat unnerving need to not just support him, but believe in him. She does quietly powerful work, just like Peggy herself.
2. American Hustle (2013)
Adams is queen of the Best Supporting Actress category, where she was nominated for her role in David O. Russell’s sports drama The Fighter, which numbers among several very good performances to just miss this list. But in her second film with Russell, she claimed her only leading-role nomination so far as Sydney Prosser, also known as Lady Edith Greensly, a con artist losing herself in a series of lies, bluffs, and charades, sending her pinwheeling between Irving (Christian Bale), the married man she loves, and Richie (Bradley Cooper), the overzealous FBI agent she’s seducing to get out of trouble. Con artist movies are known for indulging the thrill of deception, and although there’s plenty of that going on in American Hustle, Adams also conveys the pure desperation and panic that can emerge when living life within a painstakingly constructed persona. Everything from her gorgeous costumes to her confident yet vaguely shaky English accent projects toward a larger goal, and it’s a sensibility that requires unending, seemingly exhausting confidence. The whole cast of this movie looks like they’re having a blast, but it’s Adams who seems to most perfectly understand the angst underneath that wildness. Ironically but not unexpectedly, like many others before her, Adams ultimately didn’t enjoy the experience of working with the volatile Russell; this was their last movie together to date. Russell is the one who’s missing out; Adams has the discipline to restrain herself from hamming it up even in the craziest of Russell’s chaotic circumstances. It’s probably not a coincidence that he hasn’t made a better movie in the 10 years since this one.
1. Arrival (2016)
Look, not to keep harping on the Oscar thing, but it is absolutely bonkers that Arrival, a quietly heartbreaking 2016 science-fiction film, garnered a whole bunch of nominations, yet somehow missed out on one for Amy Adams, who absolutely carries the damn thing as a linguist recruited to forge communication channels with a mysterious alien intelligence. The movie’s half-twist structure requires a particularly careful navigation of hopefulness and loss, and when you think about it, those are both threads that figure into a lot of Adams roles: That wide-eyed optimism that most viewers probably associate with her, juxtaposed with a growing awareness of how the world might break you, or at least your heart. Despite impressive visuals from director Denis Villeneuve, so much of Arrival’s emotional arc plays out on Adams’ face — a universe of human experience.
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.