Netflix has had no difficulty (thanks to their pots and pots of cash) in attracting big names to the streaming service. They convinced Kevin Spacey and David Fincher to enter the TV world, they’ve virtually monopolized the stand-up comedy circuit, and they’ve made two deals with Adam Sandler to make a total of eight movies. But this Friday sees probably the biggest A-lister they’ve yet attracted, with David Michôd’s dark satire “War Machine,” starring none other than Brad Pitt.
It’s both a move into new territory for a man who’s been one of our biggest stars for pretty much 25 years, and also a sign of the times — Netflix backed the project when other studios were reluctant to greenlight a risky mid-budget movie. But then, Pitt’s never been shy about taking risks: unlike most of his A-list compatriots, he hasn’t built his career on the back of franchises (he has only two: the auteur-driven, long-dormant “Ocean’s Eleven,” and “World War Z”), but rather by embracing adult dramas and dark comedies made by some of the world’s top directors.
READ MORE: Failure To Launch: ‘War Machine’ Starring Brad Pitt Is A Major Misfire [Review]
The gambles haven’t always worked out, as films like “Meet Joe Black,” “Fury” or “Allied” will attest, but on the whole he’s compiled a filmography that anyone would be proud of, including some of the best films of the last quarter-century (and producing many of them through his company Plan B, including movies he didn’t appear in, such as “The Departed,” “Moonlight,” “The Lost City Of Z” and recent Cannes debut-er “Okja”).
The future looks bright for Pitt, with James Gray’s sci-fi “Ad Astra” and a “World War Z” sequel to be directed by David Fincher on his horizon. And in honor of “War Machine” being available on your favorite device Friday, we’ve picked out our favorite 20 Pitt movies below. Note that it’s movies rather than performances: we’d likely go for the same films, but in a very different order, as you’ll see below… Take a look at our list, and let us know your favorite Brad Pitt films in the comments.
20. “Ocean’s Twelve” (2004)
It has a bad rep in many quarters, but we’re very fond of the middle part of Steven Soderbergh’s all-star heist trilogy (as is Soderbergh, who calls it his favorite of the three), which is doubly useful for our purposes here by being probably the most Pitt-centric. His junk-food-addicted Rusty Ryan, the right-hand man of Danny Ocean (George Clooney), becomes a key factor, and possible problem, in the gang’s bid to pull off the theft of a valuable Fabergé Egg, in a race against Gallic cat burglar The Night Fox (Vincent Cassel), due to his past relationship with Interpol agent Isabel Lahiri (Catherine Zeta-Jones). It’s undoubtedly a bit indulgent, even smug in places, but it’s also dripping with Nouvelle Vague style, a movie where the plot is secondary to the sense that this is just the director playing around and experimenting, and the cast, Pitt in particular, simply having enormous fun getting to play off each other again.
19. “The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button” (2008)
It was the movie that broke him through to Oscar success (13 nominations including Best Director), and remains one of his biggest hits, but “The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button” is the one David Fincher movie that it’s not cool for cinephiles to like — even “Alien3” probably has more defenders. But we think this epic adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fable about a young man (Pitt) who ages in reverse, and his romance with a childhood friend (Cate Blanchett), is a misunderstood film that’s ripe for rehabilitation. “Forrest Gump” comparisons abounded when it was released (that it was scripted by the same writer, Eric Roth, perhaps explains why), but it’s a much odder, far more beautiful film, infused down to its bones with sadness, and with a Pitt performance that pushes him while also letting him be his movie-star best. And of course, it’s a technical marvel. Maybe a director other than Fincher would have made something more crowd-pleasing, but it’s much more interesting in his hands.
18. “Snatch” (2000)
Few directorial debuts in the 1990s turned as many heads as Guy Ritchie’s “Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels” — a sort of British Tarantino, it became a cult smash, and won him fans from Madonna (who married him) to studio bosses. Pitt was the biggest American name to join Ritchie’s second movie (also including Benicio Del Toro and Dennis Farina), very much a spiritual sequel in its darkly comic Cockney crime capers. The pleasingly convoluted plot takes in boxing promoter Turkish (Jason Statham) and sidekick Tommy (Stephen Graham) becoming caught up with psychotic gangster Brick Top (Alan Ford), while becoming linked to a plot involving a stolen 86-carat diamond. It’s stylish, energetic, firmly enjoyable stuff, if not quite as good as ‘Lock, Stock,’ and is probably at its best when Pitt’s unintelligible Irish traveler boxer Mickey is on screen. It’s a really enjoyable character turn, even if the accent is a bit shaky, and he gets the film’s stand-out sequence, a bravura boxing bout cut iconically to Oasis’s “Fucking In The Bushes.”
17. “Interview With The Vampire” (1994)
A starry, big-budget blockbuster of the kind that it’s hard to see a studio greenlighting today, “Interview With The Vampire” isn’t a great movie, but it’s a fascinating, beautiful and rewarding one that we’d happily see more like today. Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Anne Rice’s best-selling first book in her “Vampire Chronicles” series sees Pitt play Louis de Pointe du Lac, the subject of the titular interview by a journalist (Christian Slater). It sees Louis relate his life story: of beginning as a plantation owner in the 1790s before being transformed into a vampire by the charismatic Lestat (Tom Cruise). Jordan’s film plays up the Gothic beauty and beautifully executes an impressive scope and scale, while retaining the homo-eroticism and moral queasiness that studios surely would rather he’d have avoided. And if he’s overshadowed both by Cruise and by the then-12-year-old Kirsten Dunst, who is terrifying as Louis’ surrogate daughter Claudia, Pitt makes a fine early outing as a mainstream leading man here.
16. “Spy Game” (2001)
From the time when he first emerged, Pitt drew comparisons to a young Robert Redford (undoubtedly aided when he starred in Redford’s “A River Runs Through It”). So it’s perhaps not surprising that they ended up starring together (Redford wasn’t on screen in ‘River’) at some point, and fortunately in a film as well put-together as the underrated “Spy Game.” Tony Scott’s ambitious picture follows the two-decade relationship between veteran CIA agent Nathan Muir (Redford) and his protege Tom Bishop (Pitt), as Nathan works under-the-radar to get Bishop released from a Chinese jail before he’s executed. It’s a sophisticated, grown-up movie closer to Le Carré than Bond in many respects, intelligently delving into the history of the Agency and American foreign policy, and both leading men are on very fine form, their pairing benefiting the surrogate father-son relationship their characters have. Scott’s style, which was moving towards the near-abstraction of “Man On Fire” and “Domino,” is sometimes an awkward fit with the material, but this is otherwise manna from heaven for espionage fans.
15. “Babel” (2006)
Pitt’s first team-up with ‘Benjamin Button‘ co-star Cate Blanchett (they also both narrated different versions of Terrence Malick’s “Voyage Of Time”) came with this Oscar-nominated, globe-spanning drama from Alejandro González Iñárritu. It’s not our favorite movie from the Mexican director — it’s uneven, and at once a bit glib and rather unsatisfying in its butterfly-effect macro-plotting as it shows the rippling aftermath of a Japanese businessman’s gift of a gun to a Moroccan tour guide. But it’s a movie full of terrific filmmaking, powerful moments (many of them in the best segment, following Rinko Kikuchi’s deaf teenager in Tokyo) and terrific performances. Among them are Pitt and Blanchett, who give generous, raw turns as a grieving married couple in desperate straits after she’s hit by a stray bullet. Pitt in particular is both sympathetic and white-privilege brittle (in his interactions with Adriana Barraza’s nanny over the phone ), the scene where he tends to his wife being arguably the film’s most moving.