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For most people, Amy Adams is probably best known as Lois Lane in the DCEU. But while she does a great job with the role, there’s only so much she can do with it. That is essentially a reactive character who just exists to give Superman something to come back to, and those movies never really gave Adams the chance to show just how good she is.
That’s a shame, because Adams is one of the most reliable actors working today. She has earned six Oscar nominations over the course of her career, and time and time again, she’s delivered nuanced performances that elevate already great movies. So, in this list, we’re covering all the great movies that put Adams front and center and demanded something more layered and complex from her.
10
‘Enchanted’ (2007)
Enchanted stars Adams as Giselle, a typical Disney princess who gets banished from her animated kingdom by an evil queen and lands in real-world New York, fully convinced that singing animals and true love’s kiss are still the rules of engagement. She is taken in by a cynical divorce lawyer named Robert (Patrick Dempsey), and the entire movie runs on the tension between her storybook optimism and his hardened New York realism. This was basically Barbie of the 2000s.
Adams plays Giselle with zero irony, fully inhabiting the physicality, the singing voice, and the wide-eyed sincerity of an animated character. And it never comes off as too over-the-top or parody-esque. She treats Giselle’s worldview as something worth taking seriously, which is exactly why the film’s emotional beats land rather than feeling like a joke.
9
‘American Hustle’ (2013)
David O. Russell’s American Hustle is one of those rare movies packed with A-list talent that somehow still remains criminally underseen. The ensemble cast includes Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Jeremy Renner, Michael Peña, and, of course, Adams, with every actor bringing their A-game. It’s a loose, high-energy riff on the real-life Abscam scandal. The film follows con artists Irving (Bale) and Sydney (Adams) as they get strong-armed by an FBI agent into helping run a sting on corrupt politicians.
Sydney’s whole identity in the film is a performance within a performance. She poses as a fictional British aristocrat named Lady Edith Greensly to lend their scams an air of legitimacy, all while juggling a real romantic entanglement with Irving and a manufactured one with the FBI agent trying to use her. Adams delivered such a layered character that you genuinely couldn’t tell, scene to scene, which version of her was the real one. And it even earned Adams an OScar nomination for Best Actress.
8
‘The Fighter’ (2010)
The Fighter tells the true story of boxer Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) and his crack-addicted half-brother Dicky Eklund (Bale). But the real core of the movie is the tug-of-war over Micky’s career between his domineering mother and his girlfriend Charlene Fleming, played by Adams. Charlene is a former college athlete turned bartender who sees clearly what Micky’s family will not, that his mother and brother are actively holding his career back even as they claim to be protecting it.
This movie marked Adams’ first collaboration with O. Russell and earned her a Best Supporting Actress nomination. Russell has talked about how motivated Adams was to break away from her bubbly, wholesome typecasting at the time, and you can feel that hunger in every scene. Charlene is foul-mouthed, willing to physically throw down with Micky’s seven sisters when they come at her, and Adams plays all of that with absolute conviction, without ever coming off like a one-note bossgirl archetype.
7
‘Doubt’ (2008)
Set in a Bronx Catholic school in 1964, Doubt centers on Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) and her growing suspicion that a progressive priest, Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), is engaging in inappropriate behavior with one of the school’s students. The film never gives you a definitive answer, and leaves Flynn’s guilt or innocence deliberately open to your interpretation. Adams plays Sister James, the idealistic young teacher caught directly in the middle of this conflict.
It is James who first reports the unsettling detail that sets the entire plot into motion, and from there she spends the rest of the film torn between her instinct to believe the best in people and the mounting suspicion that something is genuinely wrong. Adams is sandwiched between two acting titans, Streep and Hoffman, and yet she never gets overshadowed. In fact, the role earned her yet another Oscar nomination.
6
‘Junebug’ (2005)
Junebug is the movie that first put Adams on Hollywood’s radar, and also earned her the first Oscar nomination of her career. It’s an indie drama about a Chicago art dealer who travels to North Carolina with her new husband and meets his eccentric family for the first time. Adams plays Ashley, her husband’s pregnant sister-in-law, an endlessly chatty and almost aggressively cheerful presence in a household otherwise defined by silence and simmering resentment.
Ashley could have very easily been played as pure comic relief, a quirky Southern stereotype there to provide easy laughs against the more reserved Chicagoans. But Adams finds genuine sincerity underneath Ashley’s relentless positivity, a woman who believes that having a baby will fix her crumbling marriage and desperately holds on to that belief because reality is too painful to face. And when tragedy strikes her in the film’s back half, the optimism she’s been clinging to finally crumbles, and you see just how much grief she’s been hiding behind that bubbly exterior.
5
‘Her’ (2013)
Her follows Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), a lonely, recently divorced writer who falls in love with an AI operating system. Adams plays Amy, Theodore’s neighbor and longtime friend, who lives in the same apartment building and is working through the collapse of her own marriage over the course of the film. She is the primary human contact for Theodore in the movie and one of the only people who treats Theodore with compassion.
Adams has very few scenes in the film, but every scene with her radiates sunshine, and her greatest ability is how she manages to infuse every line with genuine sincerity. At one point in the movie, both Theodore and Amy confess their AI relationships to each other, and Amy delivers a line about love being a form of socially accepted insanity. With almost any other actress, that would have come off like an edgy Tumblr quote, but Adams is able to make the sincerity feel genuine instead of coming off as caricaturized.
4
‘The Master’ (2012)
Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master follows Freddie Quell (Phoenix), a traumatized World War II veteran who drifts into the orbit of Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman), the charismatic leader of a philosophical cult called “The Cause.” Dodd attempts to cure Freddie of his psychological demons through intensive, invasive therapy-like exercises, while Freddie becomes his most ferocious defender against skeptics. The film is a hypnotic, slow-burning character study about humanity’s desperate need to find something to submit to, whether that is an ideology, an addiction, or another human being.
And at the center of it all, quietly pulling strings, is Dodd’s wife Peggy, played by Adams. Adams plays completely against her usual type, ditching the warm and wholesome persona audiences had come to associate with her. Instead, she plays a woman who is serene on the surface and utterly menacing and calculating underneath, and she did it so well that it earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
3
‘Vice’ (2018)
Adam McKay‘s Vice is a black comedy biopic about the life and political ascent of Dick Cheney (Bale), the 46th Vice President of the United States. McKay tells the story in his signature chaotic style, with fourth-wall breaks and sardonic narration, just like The Big Short. Adams plays Lynne Cheney, Dick’s wife and arguably his most consequential partner, and both she and Bale are completely unrecognizable in their roles, firing on all cylinders like the pros they are.
Adams was Oscar-nominated for Best Supporting Actress for this performance, and it is not hard to see why. She portrays Lynne as a formidable, power-hungry woman who was every bit as ambitious as her husband and arguably more strategic. When Dick suffered health setbacks during his early Congressional bids, it was Lynne who kept campaigning. She helped him navigate Washington’s corridors of power and is depicted as his fiercest confidante throughout his entire political rise.
2
‘Nocturnal Animals’ (2016)
Nocturnal Animals is one of those films that is genuinely difficult to describe as a premise. But to put it simply, it’s a psychological thriller about a wealthy art gallery owner named Susan (Adams) who receives a manuscript of a novel written by her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), which he’s dedicated to her. From there, the film runs three parallel storylines simultaneously. There is Susan in the present day reading the manuscript, the fictional events of the novel playing out on screen, and flashbacks to her past relationship with Edward.
It is a brilliant film loaded with symbolism, sharp visual storytelling from director Tom Ford, and a highway sequence that is an absolute masterclass in building tension, right up there with the border scene in Sicario. Susan is not a likable character, and the film does not try to make her one. That is exactly what makes Adams’ performance so remarkable, because you simply do not see female characters written with this much contradiction very often, and you see even fewer actresses who know what to do with them when they get one.
1
‘Arrival’ (2016)
Denis Villeneuve‘s Arrival is a sci-fi thriller centred around Louise Banks (Adams), a linguist recruited by the U.S. military after 12 mysterious alien spacecraft appear around the world. With global panic setting in and governments racing to determine whether the visitors are a threat, Louise is tasked with making first contact and deciphering the aliens’ written language before the situation escalates into something irreversible. It’s basically the “learning to communicate with Rocky” section from Project Hail Mary stretched to the length of a full feature film, except much more serious and grounded in real linguistic theory.
The film opens with Louise processing the grief of losing her daughter, and that sadness lingers beneath every conversation and every discovery she makes. Adams anchors this cerebral, high-concept film with a very human performance that conveys intelligence and an almost unbearable emotional weight without ever overselling any of it. And if you have seen Arrival, you know the twist that comes in the end and reframes the entire movie, and it only works because of the complete commitment Adams brought to every single scene that came before it.
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Safwan Azeem
Almontather Rassoul
