| |
Every Jennifer Lawrence performance, ranked from worst to best by Will Leitch and Tim Grierson on Mar 1, 2018, 3:27 PM Advertisement
 We’ve still got a couple years to go, but Jennifer Lawrence easily deserves consideration in any debate about the decade’s best movie star. In a shockingly short time, the actress has compiled a formidable résumé that’s as impressive for its range as for its string of successes. Starting with her 2010 breakthrough, Winter’s Bone, she’s racked up a series of acclaimed art-house hits, snagging four Oscar nominations along the way. (She won in 2013 for Silver Linings Playbook.) And then there are the massive blockbusters: When she wasn’t running around as Mystique in the X-Men reboot/prequels, she was the moral compass and bow-and-arrow heroine of the Hunger Games franchise. But box office and awards only partly explain her appeal. Raised in Louisville and discovered on the street in New York by a talent scout when she was a teenager, Lawrence gives off a lively, funny, slightly smart-aleck vibe in interviews that’s a perfect buttress against our celebrity-obsessed times. She plays the part of a glamorous starlet with ease, but there’s a fundamental distrust of fame’s machinery — a sense that she wants us to know that she knows that Hollywood is kind of silly — informing her unpretentious public persona as well as her performances. As a result, whether she’s taking down dystopias as Katniss Everdeen or making out with Amy Adams in American Hustle, Lawrence isn’t just wholly confident onscreen — she radiates a spirit of excitement that she invites the viewer to share with her. Lawrence’s triumphs, in a weird way, feel like ours as well, because we’re along for the ride. She’s never asked us to bow down to her greatness — for all her range and emotional intelligence, perhaps her greatest talent is still seeming like an ordinary person. So, yes, she’s America’s Sweetheart — or, maybe more accurately, America’s Fun Buddy. Some may read this intro and roll their eyes, arguing that Lawrence’s patented self-deprecation and casual dorkiness are a big act. To which we’ll say: If that’s an act, it’s a really good one — and we’re not tired of it. When ranking her film performances, we decided to ignore small parts early in her career (Garden Party) or movies that didn’t get a proper release (The Devil You Know). We’re less concerned with overall quality of these movies than with Lawrence’s roles in them, but because she’s been the shining center of so many of her films, that proves tricky. Her best movies seem to vibrate on the same unpredictable, immediate wavelength that she likes to operate on. With Red Sparrow on its way, now seems like a good time to catalogue all she’s accomplished. And remember: She only turned 27 last summer. 15. "Serena" (2014)  This somewhat infamous misfire from Oscar-winning director Susanne Bier features that true rarity: a Jennifer Lawrence performance in which she looks deeply uncomfortable. One of the actress’s most impressive qualities is her ability to hold your attention effortlessly, to look as if acting in a movie is the most natural, normal thing a person could do. But here, stranded alongside Bradley Cooper (who has the same deer-in-headlights look), she’s completely lost as a Depression-era woman who goes mad after losing a child and directs her fury at a woman who had an illegitimate son with her husband years earlier. After years of delay, this was shuffled in and out of theaters for a week in 2013, and with good reason: Both stars would rather you forget this movie ever happened.
14. "House at the End of the Street" (2012)  An answer to the question, “What if, in an alternative but parallel universe, Jennifer Lawrence was forced to have Jennifer Love Hewitt’s career?” This trashy horror-thriller centers on an abused boy (Max Thieriot) who grows up to wreak havoc on a suburban town and the teenager (Lawrence) who cares about him. It’s pretty terrible, and it only received a wide release because Lawrence had already become hugely famous from The Hunger Games. She’s the only good thing about the movie, providing intelligence and grounding for a character that has neither in the script. Thank heavens she never has to do one of these again.
13. "The Burning Plain" (2008)  The directorial debut of Amores Perros screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga has the twisty-turning, multi-story-line structure of that film (and Babel, which he also wrote), but none of the restraint, turning what could have been a moving story into something so stultifyingly self-serious that you’ll suffocate from the lack of air in the room. Lawrence does shine in a smaller role as a flashback version of the lead character played by … Charlize Theron! Is there a universe in which Jennifer Lawrence grows up and turns into Charlize Theron? There is in this movie.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
| |
0 comments:
Post a Comment