Top 13 Ana de Armas Movies, Ranked

There’s a moment in Knives Out where Marta Cabrera realizes she might actually get away with it, and Ana de Armas plays the flicker of hope and horror crossing her face so fast you almost miss it. That’s the kind of performance this list is built around: the moments where de Armas makes you forget you’re watching a movie. At TV Hulk, we ranked these thirteen films by how fully she disappeared into each role, how much her performance drove the conversation, and how long it stayed with us after the credits rolled. From a chaotic English-language debut to one of the most scrutinized casting challenges in modern Hollywood, this is her work at its most memorable.

13. Sergio (2020)

Carolina Larriera could easily have been a passive figure in this Netflix biopic about UN diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello, but de Armas brings a quiet, grounded warmth to the role that keeps the film’s more formulaic instincts in check. There’s a scene where Carolina sits across from Sergio in a Beirut hotel, trying to hold space for someone who can’t stop moving toward danger, and de Armas plays the restraint beautifully: she’s not pleading, she’s just present, which somehow makes it sadder. The film around her plays it frustratingly safe, hitting the expected beats of the based-on-a-true-story genre without much surprise. Her portrayal of a real person’s grief and resilience is handled with genuine care, and any complete survey of her filmography should include it.

12. Deep Water (2022)

Melinda Van Allen is designed to unsettle everyone around her, and de Armas leans into that with real commitment. Watch the dinner party scene early in the film, where Melinda introduces her husband to her latest lover with a smile that’s equal parts bored and predatory: de Armas holds the moment just long enough to make the room feel genuinely dangerous. Adrian Lyne’s erotic thriller is a messy film that can’t quite decide what it wants to be, but she never wavers in her read on Melinda as a woman who has weaponized her husband’s obsession. Her real-life dynamic with Ben Affleck at the time of filming adds an uncomfortable texture to their scenes that no script could have manufactured. The movie doesn’t fully deserve her, but she’s magnetic throughout.

11. Hands of Stone (2016)

Felicidad Iglesias spends much of this Roberto Durán biopic watching the men around her make increasingly self-destructive choices, and de Armas plays that position with a fierce, grounded loyalty that gives the film its emotional backbone. In a scene where she confronts Durán after one of his more humiliating public failures, she doesn’t soften the blow or reach for melodrama: she’s direct, hurt, and completely believable as someone who has built her life around a man she loves and can’t fully reach. Edgar Ramírez and Robert De Niro take up most of the oxygen in the room, but critics at the time singled out her work as one of the film’s few consistent strengths. It’s an early signal that she could anchor biographical drama long before the industry was paying close attention.

10. Wasp Network (2019)

Ana Margarita is a woman navigating a marriage that is slowly revealing itself to be something she never agreed to, and de Armas plays the dawning realization with a politically charged, deeply personal energy. The confrontation scene has a fury rooted in something specific: de Armas connects Ana Margarita’s Cuban identity and sense of betrayal in a way that goes beyond the script’s surface. Olivier Assayas’ espionage drama premiered at Venice and remains one of the more underappreciated entries in her filmography, partly because it got lost in a very busy 2019 for her. What sticks with you is how de Armas keeps Ana Margarita’s anger quiet and controlled right up until it isn’t, which makes the eventual break feel completely earned.

9. Knock Knock (2015)

Bel arrives at Evan Webber’s door soaking wet and harmless-looking, and de Armas spends the rest of Knock Knock dismantling that impression piece by piece. Her English-language debut in Eli Roth’s home-invasion thriller is a full-commitment performance: she goes feral in the film’s back half, flipping between manipulative sweetness and genuine menace so fast that the tonal whiplash becomes its own kind of entertainment. There’s a scene where Bel records a video confession on Evan’s phone, and de Armas plays it with gleeful, almost theatrical cruelty that gets under your skin. Critics largely dismissed the film on release, but it built a real cult following on streaming. Watching it now with the knowledge of where her career went, Bel reads like a star-in-waiting moment that was hiding in plain sight all along.

8. War Dogs (2016)

Iz is not the center of Todd Phillips’ arms-dealing dark comedy, and de Armas knows it: she plays the role with a grounded, no-nonsense presence that keeps Miles Teller’s increasingly erratic David tethered to something real. The scene where Iz discovers the full scope of what her husband has been doing is the one that sticks — de Armas plays the confrontation with quiet, controlled anger, never tipping into melodrama, letting the stillness do the work. In a fast-talking, bro-heavy film that could easily have pushed her to the margins, she holds the emotional center of every scene she’s in without ever seeming like she’s fighting for it.

7. Eden (2024)

Eloise Bosquet De Wagner Wehrhorn is a real historical figure, a European socialite who followed a charismatic visionary to the Galápagos Islands and found herself trapped in something far darker than the utopia she was promised. De Armas plays the character’s gradual disillusionment with a layered, slow-burning intensity: there’s a scene mid-film where Eloise realizes the community’s leader is not going to protect her, and the way she recalibrates in real time, deciding silently to survive on her own terms, is the best acting in Ron Howard’s film. Critics who found the movie uneven still consistently pointed to her performance as the reason to watch. It’s her most complex ensemble dramatic role in years, and it sits well outside the action-thriller lane she’s most often associated with.

6. The Gray Man (2022)

Dani Miranda is introduced as a CIA handler who may or may not be trustworthy, and de Armas plays that ambiguity with a scrappy, grounded toughness that makes her the most watchable person in a very expensive frame. The Prague rooftop sequence is the clearest proof: she’s not backing Ryan Gosling’s Sierra Six up, she’s operating alongside him, and the physical and tactical confidence she brings to the choreography positions Dani as a peer rather than a sidekick. The Russo brothers’ spy thriller landed as one of Netflix’s most-viewed films of 2022, and a significant portion of the audience conversation afterward was specifically about her. For a film that stacked its cast with established names, she’s the one people wanted more of.

5. Ballerina (2025)

Eve is the role that answers a question audiences have been asking since No Time to Die: can Ana de Armas carry a major Hollywood action franchise on her own? This John Wick universe spinoff hands her the keys outright, no A-list co-star to share the load, no scene-stealing cameo to hide behind. Early footage shows her moving with a coiled, deliberate precision — every strike looks considered rather than choreographed, and her eyes stay cold even when the rest of her is in motion, which is exactly the kind of detail that separates a convincing action lead from someone just hitting marks. Eve is the defining test of this chapter of her career, and the anticipation surrounding the film is built almost entirely on the credibility she’s earned to get here.

4. No Time to Die (2021)

Paloma has roughly fifteen minutes of screen time in No Time to Die and walks away as one of the most beloved Bond characters in years. De Armas plays her as a newly trained CIA operative who is technically inexperienced and practically unstoppable, and the Havana cocktail party sequence is a full showcase: she’s funny, she’s charming, she sells the physical comedy of a woman in an evening gown dispatching trained killers, and then cranks the action up until the whole sequence feels like its own short film. The contrast between Paloma’s cheerful self-deprecation about her three weeks of training and the absolute chaos she leaves behind is perfectly calibrated, and de Armas nails every beat. Audiences were demanding a spinoff before the credits rolled.

3. Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Joi is a holographic AI who exists entirely to ease K’s loneliness, and the challenge is making that feel like something other than a sad premise. De Armas meets it through pure warmth and restraint, playing Joi’s love not as programming but as genuine longing. The scene where Joi merges her projection with another woman’s body so she and K can be physically together is heartbreaking precisely because de Armas plays it with such uncomplicated tenderness. She’s on screen for a fraction of Villeneuve’s visually overwhelming runtime, yet Joi became one of the film’s most discussed elements after release. Making a non-human character feel like the emotional center of a modern sci-fi classic is difficult to pull off, and she does it almost entirely through her eyes and the softness in her voice.

2. Blonde (2022)

Playing Norma Jeane Mortenson, the woman behind the Marilyn Monroe mythology, is one of Hollywood’s most scrutinized casting challenges, and de Armas made it entirely her own. The film is deliberately punishing, and she’s in virtually every frame of its nearly three-hour runtime, cycling through Marilyn’s public radiance and Norma Jeane’s private devastation without letting one fully eclipse the other. The scene on the set of The Seven Year Itch, where Monroe performs for the cameras while something behind her eyes quietly breaks, is the film’s emotional core, and de Armas holds it with extraordinary control. Her Academy Award nomination for Best Actress was a genuine cultural moment, and even viewers who found Andrew Dominik’s approach too brutal largely agreed that her transformation was something else entirely.

1. Knives Out (2019)

Marta Cabrera is the moral center of Rian Johnson’s whodunit, a nurse who literally cannot lie without getting sick, and the genius of the role is that de Armas has to play someone fundamentally good while surrounded by people who are fundamentally not. Watch the scene where Marta realizes she may have accidentally given Harlan Thrombey the wrong medication: de Armas plays the panic in real time, her face cycling through disbelief, grief, and desperate calculation while the audience roots for someone who might have just made a terrible mistake. She holds her own against Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Toni Collette without ever getting swallowed by them. The film earned $312 million worldwide and turned de Armas into a household name. Marta is the role most people picture when they hear her name, and it’s easy to understand why: she’s in every scene, she carries every scene, and she makes a film full of delicious performances feel like it belongs entirely to her.

What’s striking about de Armas’s career, looking at it all together, is how rarely she’s played it safe. She went from a cult horror debut to a prestige sci-fi supporting role to a whodunit lead to Marilyn Monroe, and she brought something specific and committed to every single one. The range isn’t just impressive on paper: it shows up on screen, in the choices she makes moment to moment, which is the only place it actually counts.