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All Michelle Pfeiffer Movies, Ranked By Tomatometer
It was no instant rise to fame for Michelle Pfeiffer, who began her movie career with ’80s teen fluff like The Hollywood Knights and an ill-advised revival of Charlie Chan. Even when she moved up to star status just a year later with Grease 2, it did more harm than good to her career. Both Brian De Palma and Al Pacino resisted auditioning Pfeiffer for Scarface, until they were convinced by producer Martin Bergman. Reason prevailed and she was cast as Tony Montana’s drug-addled girlfriend, and Pfeiffer began to draw national attention thanks to the role.
Pfeiffer’s immediate post-Scarface projects, like Ladyhawke and Sweet Liberty, reveal an actress trying get out of the bimbos-and-trophy-wives pigeonhole, eventually finding both commercial and critical success in 1987’s The Witches of Eastwick. The devilish John Updike adaptation showcased Pfeiffer as an arch comedic performer, able to pull off some strange material, which audiences would see more of in the following year’s Married to the Mob. This kicked off the most rewarding phase of Pfeiffer’s career, resulting in three Oscar nominations (Dangerous Liaisons, The Fabulous Baker Boys, and Love Field), working with Martin Scorsese (The Age of Innocence), and being crowned a box office queen with her pop culture-defining role as Catwoman in Batman Returns.
Dramas would be her bread and butter (Dangerous Minds, A Thousand Acres, The Deep End of the Ocean, The Story of Us, I Am Sam, White Oleander) up until a hiatus in 2003. She returned in 2007 with three movies: Amy Heckerling’s I Could Never Be Your Woman, cult fantasy favorite Stardust, and the musical Hairspray, which put her together with original Grease alum John Travolta. Her following movies didn’t quite live up to that big re-emergence, including a Batman Returns reunion with Tim Burton on Dark Shadows, and she took another hiatus until 2017. That’s when we got another triple hitter with The Wizard of Lies as Ruth Madoff, Darren Aronofsky’s allegorical freakout mother!, and the opulent Murder on the Orient Express. She drew some of the best reviews of her career in 2018 with Where Is Kyra?, the same year she boarded the MCU as Janet van Dyne in Ant-Man and the Wasp and Quantumania. —Alex Vo
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