There are movie stars, and then there are silver screen gods. Brad Pitt is the latter, and he might be the last one. In the earliest stages of his career, he was the handsome, goofy surfer-bro next door who made all the girls swoon, but he quickly proved that his talent and taste transcended his Tiger Beat good looks, and by the mid-90s he was a serious force courting the most coveted roles in Hollywood.

As an actor, his choices have only gotten more interesting with age. Unlike, say, Tom Cruise, who’s moved away from the idiosyncratic character material that made him so interesting in the ‘90s and remade himself as the Ageless Action Hero, Pitt is taking more risks than ever. Not all of them pay off, but his failures (War Machine and By the Sea, for instance) are always admirable. And he hasn’t just starred in some of the best movies of the last 30 years, he’s used (and continues to use) his star power as a force for good, championing exciting new filmmakers and helping risky projects secure funding through his Plan B production shingle.

With 80 acting credits to his name, there’s very little filler and an abundance of killer in Pitt’s filmography. These 20 movies were chosen based on the strength of his performance and the quality of the movie. Some of these are classics in which Pitt’s role is relatively minor (Thelma & Louise, True Romance), a few are not-so-great movies that are nevertheless elevated by Pitt’s presence (Snatch). All are worth watching.

To read our review of Pitt's latest film Ad Astra click here, and for more ranked lists from Collider, check out our rankings of Tom Cruise moviesQuentin Tarantino moviesChristopher Nolan movies, and Steven Spielberg movies.

20) Thelma & Louise (1991)

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Image via MGM

Thelma & Louise is a great movie, and, in the era of #MeToo, more relevant than ever. Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon are spectacular as the eponymous doomed heroines whose girls’ weekend turns into a nightmare when Louise (Sarandon) kills a man attempting to rape Thelma outside of a country bar. An early touchstone of third-wave feminism, the movie was weirdly controversial for its unapologetic depiction of put-upon women marginalized (and effectively criminalized) by the cruel buffoonery of men, but its message has only grown more poignant with time. In his breakout role, Pitt plays J.D., a seemingly sweet young drifter who seduces Thelma—but, like almost every other man in the movie, turns out to be an asshole, unwittingly pushing the pair one step closer toward their fated final drive across the Grand Canyon. (It should be noted that the film’s ranking on this list is more reflective of the briefness of Pitt’s appearance than the quality of the movie.)

19) Snatch (2000)

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Image via Screen Gems

Time has done Snatch no favors. The British crime caper from Guy Ritchie feels like a relic from the post-Pulp Fiction ‘90s, when a slew of Tarantino knock-offs (The Boondock Saints, Go, Suicide Kings) clogged theaters and video shelves. Despite its shortcomings, Pitt still shines as the Irish bareknuckle boxer Mickey O’Neill. The ongoing joke about Mickey’s unintelligible regional dialect has only gotten more cringey, but Pitt is fully committed to the role and delivers Mickey’s lines with humor and gusto.

18) The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

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Image via Paramount Pictures

David Fincher’s weakest movie (not counting his doomed debut Alien 3, a practice round for dealing with studio interference) is ponderous and plodding, but still pretty damn good. As the titular hero cursed with an affliction that causes him to age in reverse, Pitt never allows Button’s humanity to be overshadowed by the film’s uncanny conceit (based on the premise of an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story) or the breathtaking CGI work that brings it to life.

17) True Romance (1993)

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Image via Warner Bros.

A perennial fanboy favorite, True Romance is the fairy-tale flipside to the methy nightmare of Natural Born Killers, Quentin Tarantino’s other criminal-couple-on-the-lam script that would be released the following year. For all its violence and mayhem, Romance is a resolutely sweet movie whose two lovers (Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette) are relative innocents lost in a violent fantasy world fueled by comic books, kung fu movies, and Elvis apparitions. As the stoner couch-potato Floyd, Pitt’s role is minor, but he owns every second he’s on screen. 15 years later, the character would inspire another classic: Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen reportedly conceived Pineapple Express based on Pitt’s performance.

16) World War Z (2013)

Gerry Lane, played by Brad Pitt, gives a concerned look in 'World War Z'
Image via Paramount Pictures

Fairly or not, my interest in World War Z all but evaporated when the initial December 2012 release date was delayed and word got out that the entire third act was being scrapped and reshot, with significant last-minute rewrites by Damon Lindelof. For me, that was strike three against the movie—the first two were the hiring of director Marc Forster (hacky journeyman responsible for the worst Bond movie) and the goal of a PG-13 rating (how do you make a serious zombie movie without going for a hard R?). For those reasons, I put off watching the movie for years. Stupid me. Against all odds, the whole thing works like gangbusters. It’s not without its flaws: Pitt’s Gerry is far too passive for a traditional franchise-building action hero, the subplot with his wife and child feels obligatory and goes nowhere, and the wide CGI “swarm” shots are distracting. And yet… The movie is a blast. The lack of gore turns out to be a smart move. The reshot third act is nearly seamless. And Pitt, despite being saddled with a severely underwritten character, anchors the movie in reality and sells the human stakes.

15) Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005)

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Image via 20th Century Fox

Some movies work based on the wattage of their star power alone. Such is the case with Mr. & Mrs. Smith, an action trifle that borrows from the True Lies playbook with the added twist that both husband and wife (Pitt and Angelina Jolie) are deceiving each other and leading double lives as contract killers. While the movie never quite achieves the screwball charm of James Cameron’s 1994 classic, the sexual chemistry between Pitt and Jolie is palpable—they fell in love while shooting, so viewers are basically watching a real romance unfold—and director Doug Liman shoots the hell out of Simon Kinberg’s thin script.

14) Ocean's Twelve (2004)

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Image via Warner Bros.

The secret to the success of the wildly entertaining Ocean franchise is that nobody involved seems to take the movies that seriously. A bunch of cool cats at the peak of their talents hang out and crack jokes in between planning elaborate heists in beautiful locales; the stakes are always low, even when they’re high, and the audience is less invested in the emotion of the characters than they are in the rapport among the actors themselves. Only Ocean’s 12 transcends its surface pleasures and approaches being genuinely interesting. Steven Soderbergh shoots it like a French New Wave film, with a loose, wandering camera as effortlessly cool as Pitt’s master thief Rusty Ryan.

13) Burn After Reading (2008)

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Image via Focus Features

When the Coen Brothers try to make mainstream crowd-pleasers, things usually get weird—and sometimes bad (see: Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers), but Burn After Reading, their goofy minor-key follow-up to No Country For Old Men, has aged well. Like all Coen comedies, it takes a few viewings to fully appreciate its absurd charms, but the work is worth it. In a jaw-dropping cast of top-tier movie stars and character actors (Frances McDormand, George Clooney, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins, JK Simmons), Pitt steals the show as Chad, a personal trainer and world-class doofus who ranks among the best of the great Coen fools.

12) Allied (2016)

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Image via Paramount Pictures

After a trio of stop-motion CGI family movies (The Polar Express, Beowulf, A Christmas Carol), director Robert Zemeckis announced his return to serious grown-up filmmaking with the 2012 Denzel Washington blockbuster Flight, but his last three movies (The Walk, Allied, Welcome to Marwen) have bombed with critics and audiences alike. Of those, the World War II spy-romance Allied lost the most money (Paramount ate an estimated $75-90 million when all was said and done), which is a shame because it’s not just the best of those three, it’s a legitimately good film, a golden-age epic throwback that lovingly tips its hat to Casablanca and Lawrence of Arabia. Pitt and Marion Cotillard are electric as Max and Marianne, star-crossed lovers desperate to escape the complications of their national allegiances for a shot at a real life together.

11) The Big Short (2015)

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Image via Paramount

The Big Short is compulsively watchable. Adam McKay takes an impenetrable subject—the math of the 2008 financial crisis, as told by author Michael Lewis (Moneyball)—and creates a rollicking pop tapestry that manages to be both educational and hugely entertaining. Don’t understand subprime mortgages? Here’s Margot Robbie in a bubble bath to explain them to you. Foggy on collateralized debt obligations? Anthony Bourdain’s fish stew analogy should clear up your confusion. Meanwhile, Pitt, who also produced, takes on a modest but compelling role as Ben Rickert, an elder Wall Street sage who advises two eager young traders (John Magaro and Finn Wittrock) on how exactly one would bet against the U.S. economy.

10) Interview with the Vampire (1994)

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Image via Warner Bros.

Neil Jordan’s sprawling, century-spanning adaptation of the Anne Rice novel is less horror movie than Gothic romance. The performances are largely upstaged by the lush, decadent production design and costuming, which might explain why Tom Cruise felt the need to ham it up as the vampire Lestat—to mixed results. Pitt, on the other hand, resists the urge to show off, and the movie is better for it. As Louis, the vampire of the title who tells his story to journalist Daniel Molloy (Christian Slater), Pitt exudes quiet confidence and keeps the movie from descending into full-blown camp.

9) The Tree of Life (2011)

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Image via Fox Searchlight

Terrence Malick’s most personal film, The Tree of Life is an audacious experiment on a grand scale, a tone poem that connects the filmmaker’s memories of his childhood with no less than the origin of the universe. As a stand-in for Malick’s authoritarian father, Pitt is cold and remote, expressing himself almost entirely through body language in extended montages that have become the director’s late-career trademark. Malick has always been interested in the interplay between the Big Questions—who are we, where do we come from, is God real, etc.—and the delicate dance of human relationships. Here, he distills a career’s worth of ideas into a beautiful meditation on creation and consciousness.

8) 12 Monkeys

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Image via Universal

This dark sci-fi/time-travel thriller remains director Terry Gilliam’s most financially successful film—and, arguably, still his best since Brazil. In a film full of showy performances (including Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, and Christopher Plummer), Pitt’s is the most unhinged. As Jeffrey Goines, a mental patient who might hold the key to humanity’s survival in the face of a world-ending virus, the actor is all tics and head-scratches and maniacal laughter. He sells every moment, and earned his first Academy Award nomination for it.

7) Seven (1995)

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Image via New Line Cinema

1995 was a good year for Pitt. On top of the acclaim he received for his supporting role in 12 Monkeys, the actor cemented his status as a marquee star by headlining Seven and leading the relentlessly ugly, bleak film to a success ($327 million worldwide) that’s almost unfathomable today, considering the subject matter. On the trail of a serial killer (Kevin Spacey) who uses the seven deadly sins as a blueprint for picking his victims, Detectives Mills (Pitt) and Somerset (Morgan Freeman) descend into hell, chasing their John Doe through the rain-soaked alleys and abandoned high-rises of an unnamed city, one of the most depressing visions of a metropolis ever put to screen, thanks to director David Fincher. As the cocky, idealistic Mills, Pitt is the innocence to Freeman’s weary experience, and his anguished reckoning with a surprise package at the film’s climax still shocks today.

6) Babel (2006)

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Image via Paramount

Babel is not for everybody. This is miserablist cinema writ large, a brooding treatise on human suffering told on a global scale through four interconnected stories that take place in Morocco, the United States, Mexico, and Japan, respectively. Pitt plays Richard, an American vacationing in Morocco with his wife Susan (Cate Blanchett) in the wake of their infant son’s death. The grief-stricken couple have traveled to the other side of the world in an effort to heal, but, this being an Alejandro Innaritu film, more random tragedy awaits. Richard is a largely thankless role, but Pitt internalizes his character’s pain and desperation and then transfers it to us. This is the conclusion of Innaritu’s so-called “Death Trilogy” (after Amores Perros and 21 Grams), and audience and characters alike are fittingly punished by the random cruelty of the filmmaker’s uncaring universe. Fortunately, Pitt, along with Blanchett, Rinko Kikuchi, and Adriana Barraza, make the brutal journey worth it.

5) Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood (2019)

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Image via Sony Pictures

Quentin Tarantino’s love letter to 1960s Hollywood has divided audiences and critics, many of whom don’t know what to make of the film’s meandering, low-key approach to its dark story, or that batshit-crazy revisionist ending. But everyone seems to agree on one thing: As aging stuntman Cliff Booth, Brad Pitt completely owns every second of screen time, exuding his trademark effortless cool augmented by the weathered, world-weary physicality of his age (he’s 55 now). Pitt has aged like a fine wine, and Once Upon a Time is one of his richest pours to date.

4) Moneyball (2011)

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Image via Sony Pictures

Even if you have no interest in baseball, there’s much to love about Moneyball. Bennett Miller’s adaptation of the non-fiction book by Michael Lewis recounts how the struggling Oakland Athletics, led by general manager Billy Beane (Pitt), disrupted the old-school scouting paradigm by using statistical analysis to overcome a lack of funding and build a line-up that could compete against big-market teams. Sounds wonky, but Miller and screenwriters Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin take a gentle, humanist approach to the material, focusing on Beane’s internal motivations that go beyond the desire to simply win. With quiet restraint, Pitt imbues the character with a permanent melancholy, using his eyes and voice to suggest a once-large ego humbled by years of disappointment.

3) Inglourious Basterds

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Image via The Weinstein Company

In careers littered with memorable characters, Lt. Aldo Raine is one of the greatest achievements of both Brad Pitt and Quentin Tarantino—endlessly quotable, frequently hilarious, and fully realized. Christoph Waltz rightly won the Oscar (along with all the other awards) for playing Raine’s SS foil, Colonel Hans “The Jew Hunter” Landa, but Pitt’s performance is equally memorable. As the fearless leader of a motley crew of Nazi killers, he completely disappears into character, adopting an Appalachian drawl to complement a pensive, tightly wound face that suggests skepticism, confusion, resolve and constipation all at once.

2) Fight Club (1999)

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Image via 20th Century Fox

Before white male privilege had a name, there was Fight Club, David Fincher’s ‘roided out, ultraviolent satire of consumer culture. Since its release, the world has grown more cynical, and Fight Club’s message about the spiritual bankruptcy and emasculation that comes with a life devoted to material comfort now feels dated and a bit obvious. So much of it still lands, though, and Pitt turns in an iconic, scene-chewing performance for the ages as Tyler Durden, the freewheeling anarchist who teaches Edward Norton’s repressed Jack how to fight, fuck and blow shit up. Perhaps owing to its propulsive action movie aesthetics and gallows humor, this is one of those movies that risks being celebrated “for the wrong reasons” by a certain subset of dude-bros, but it’s hard to think of a better takedown of toxic masculinity than Fight Club.

1) The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

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Image via Warner Bros.

Andrew Dominik’s epic Western about the last days of Jesse James (Pitt) is a meditative pastoral that has more in common with the films of Terrence Malick than John Ford or Clint Eastwood. This is, far and away, Pitt’s best performance; he plays the legendary outlaw as a brooding cypher whose contemplative nature belies layers of sadness, bitterness and menace. Casey Affleck, at the time still mostly known as Ben’s brother, is a revelation as Robert Ford, the James gang runt-turned-boss killer. But it’s Pitt’s cold gravitas that carries the movie, which deserves to be regarded in the same stratosphere as Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterpiece There Will Be Blood. Alas, the film didn’t connect with audiences and barely made $15 million dollars worldwide, or half of its $30 million budget. Still, it’s a gift this movie even exists. History will be kind to it.