Screenwriter, director, actor. From the Oscar-winning Argo to the taut heist thriller The Town and Fincher's Gone Girl, Ben Affleck's finest work on and behind the camera.
The full ranking
Screenwriter, director, actor. From the Oscar-winning Argo to the taut heist thriller The Town and Fincher's Gone Girl, Ben Affleck's finest work on and behind the camera.
Good Will Hunting
The screenplay Affleck and Damon wrote and sold as unknowns gave both their careers their foundation. Affleck's Chuckie Sullivan, Will's best friend who wants him gone from Southie, contains the film's most emotionally precise scene.
Argo
Affleck directed and starred in the tense recreation of the CIA plot to rescue Americans from Tehran using a fake sci-fi movie as cover. It won Best Picture and established him as a serious filmmaker.
Gone Girl
Fincher cast Affleck against type as Nick Dunne, the blandly handsome husband suspected of murdering his missing wife. His very blankness is what the film needs, and Rosamund Pike's Amy consumes everything around him.
The Town
Affleck directed and starred in this dense Boston heist film, the city's best crime movie since The Departed. Morally complex, superbly cast, and built around a bank-heist sequence of real tension.
Dazed and Confused
Affleck's film debut as bully Fred O'Bannion in Linklater's perfectly observed 1976 last-day-of-school portrait. A small role, but Affleck makes him memorably awful in a film packed with future stars.
Shakespeare in Love
Affleck as Ned Alleyn, the theatrical rival to Fiennes' Shakespeare, in John Madden's Oscar-winning romantic comedy. He carries the period swagger with total conviction.
Chasing Amy
Kevin Smith's most emotionally honest film, and Affleck's best early performance: a comic artist who falls for a woman who identifies as gay. Raw, funny, and smarter about love than almost any film of its era.
The Way Back
Affleck plays a recovering alcoholic given a second chance as a high school basketball coach. The best dramatic work of his career, drawing on personal history in ways that feel uncomfortably real.
State of Play
Affleck as the congressman at the center of a Washington corruption scandal in Kevin Macdonald's smart political thriller. His wounded authority makes the film's reveals land with real weight.
Changing Lanes
A fender-bender on the FDR Drive spirals into mutual destruction in Roger Michell's taut ethical thriller. Affleck's prep-school lawyer has just enough charm to make his moral disintegration believable.
Ranked across 1 source: Rotten Tomatoes · Ben Affleck Movies Ranked by Tomatometer. Full scoring is on the Methodology tab above.
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