The 5 Best Florence Pugh Movies, Ranked

In recent years, Florence Pugh has become one of the most celebrated and recognizable actresses of her generation. Since giving her breakout performance in the 2016 drama “Lady Macbeth,” Pugh has starred in an impressively varied array of movies, dipped her toes into two popular franchises and even nabbed a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for herself in 2020. Now, Pugh is returning to movie screens around the world in “Thunderbolts*,” the Marvel crossover film that sees her emerge as the unlikely leader of a team of misfits and comic book anti-heroes.

In honor of her return as Yelena Belova in “Thunderbolts*,” here are Pugh’s five best movies, ranked.

5. “The Wonder” (2022)

Perhaps the most underrated film that Florence Pugh has ever made, “The Wonder” is an absorbing, ingenious gothic drama. Based on a novel by “Room” writer Emma Donoghue, the film follows an English nurse (Pugh) who arrives in Ireland shortly after the country’s Great Famine to monitor and observe a young Irish girl, Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy), who claims to be fasting and surviving without food longer than is believed to be possible. As Pugh’s Elizabeth spends more time with Anna and within her puritanical community, she comes to discover the power of faith and the importance of stories.

Bookended by a fourth-wall-breaking device that is designed to simultaneously disorient viewers and further immerse them in the superstitious world of its characters, “The Wonder” is directed with patience and elegance by Sebastián Lelio and firmly anchored by Pugh’s magnetic, increasingly desperate performance. From all of its many, compelling parts emerges a film about the lies we tell ourselves, and the power they have to either destroy or save us, depending on which we choose to believe.

4. “Dune: Part Two” (2024)

Florence Pugh has a small but important role in “Dune: Part Two,” director Denis Villeneuve’s immaculately constructed adaptation of the second half of author Frank Herbert’s highly influential 1965 sci-fi novel. The actress stars in the film as Princess Irulan, the daughter of Emperor Shaddam IV (Christopher Walken) and promising initiate to the ever-scheming Bene Gesserit. For most of “Dune: Part Two,” Irulan is recording the events of Arrakis and reacting from afar to Paul Atreides’ (Timothée Chalamet) unlikely return and rise to power.

She is brought front and center in the film’s chamber-piece finale when she agrees to marry Paul, simultaneously cementing his ascension and also guaranteeing herself a powerful future. Irulan will be a larger presence in Villeneuve’s planned “Dune: Messiah,” but Pugh still makes a lasting impression in “Dune: Part Two,” a film so big that it could have completely outshined a lesser actress, especially one with such minimal screen time. For that reason, “Dune: Part Two” is further proof of Pugh’s innate star power. She can do nothing but stand and look across the room at another person, and she still manages to constantly hold your attention.

3. “Oppenheimer” (2023)

As is the case in “Dune: Part Two,” Florence Pugh does not have as large of a role in “Oppenheimer” as some of her other films. No list about her best movies could reasonably exclude “Oppenheimer,” though, a 3-hour biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the father of the atom bomb, that ranks solidly as writer-director Christopher Nolan’s most ambitious film — and perhaps his best. Pugh has a supporting role in the Oscar-winning ensemble drama as Jean Tatlock, the lover of Murphy’s Oppenheimer whose ties to the Communist Party come to haunt him almost as severely as their own, torrid love affair.

Pugh takes full, commanding force of one of the film’s more underwritten characters — providing yet another face to the human costs of Oppenheimer’s work with the U.S. government. She is one of many ghosts featured in “Oppenheimer,” a film that reaches some of the greatest, most explosive highs of Nolan’s career and yet does not settle for sheer spectacle alone. There is a deep well of regret, fear and grief lurking beneath the surface of “Oppenheimer,” and to watch the film is to find yourself slowly but surely sinking into it.

2. “Midsommar” (2019)

“Oppenheimer” is arguably a better, more impressive film than “Midsommar.” Pugh’s greater presence in “Midsommar,” however, gives it the edge over “Oppenheimer” on a list like this. Writer-director Ari Aster’s sun-soaked, nightmarish follow-up to “Hereditary” stars Pugh as Dani, a young American girl grieving the deaths of her entire family who travels with her emotionally distant, noncommittal boyfriend (Jack Reynor) and a few of his friends to Sweden to celebrate the year’s midsummer festival in a remote village.

Once there, Dani’s grief is compounded by the ritualistic violence committed by the village’s cultish members, who lead her (and viewers) into a finale of ridiculous, stomach-churning horror. Like Toni Collette in “Hereditary,” Pugh is asked to channel nerve-shredding levels of grief in “Midsommar” as her character edges closer and closer to a psyche-breaking point of extreme emotions. She more than rises to meet the film’s challenges — giving a performance that constantly feels like it is teetering on the edge of complete emotional disintegration. It is a fitting star turn for a film that also feels like it is constantly balancing on a knife’s edge between recognizable reality and alien, chilling surreality.

1. “Little Women” (2019)

An adaptation so good it makes one question whether it can ever be topped, Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” is an intelligent, dense drama that feels both faithful to its source material and ripped straight out of Gerwig’s own heart and mind. Based on Louisa May Alcott’s seminal 1868 novel, the film charts two periods in the lives of the March sisters — Jo (Saoirse Ronan), Amy (Pugh), Meg (Emma Watson) and Beth (Eliza Scanlen) — as they come of age and struggle with early adulthood in 19th century Massachusetts and New York City.

Blending the two separate sections of Alcott’s novel together, Gerwig’s ambitious, visually dazzling film explores the pains of growing up, the joys of sisterhood and the difficulty of finding your place in the world. Ronan’s lead performance as Jo is a towering achievement — one arguably deserving of more awards recognition than it got — and the same is true of Pugh’s scene-stealing supporting turn as Amy. She may have once been the exact opposite of a fan-favorite among “Little Women” readers, but Amy is given both a biting intelligence and startling practicality by Gerwig and Pugh that make her impossible to dislike — or forget.

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