Top 15 Anne Hathaway Movies, Ranked

There’s a version of Anne Hathaway’s career where she stays in princess comedies forever, and thank goodness that’s not what happened. From a Garry Marshall audition that involved an accidental chair fall to a live-recorded musical performance that left entire theaters stunned, she has consistently pushed into territory that surprised people. At TV Hulk, we ranked these performances based on how completely she disappears into a role and how long the character sticks with you after the credits roll. Some of these picks are the ones everyone knows. A few are genuinely underrated. All fifteen are worth your time.

15. Get Smart (2008)

Agent 99 is the straight-woman anchor that makes the whole movie work, and Hathaway plays her with a dry, precise exasperation that keeps Steve Carell’s chaos from spinning completely off the rails. There’s a running joke throughout the film where 99 has to watch Maxwell Smart blunder through situations she could handle in half the time, and her micro-expressions during those moments are funnier than any of the scripted punchlines. Her action sequences also proved she could handle physically demanding blockbuster work with real conviction, which mattered for where her career was heading. The film earned $230 million worldwide, and while it’s a lighter entry in her filmography, Agent 99 is a flat-out fun performance that showed a different gear entirely.

14. Armageddon Time (2022)

Esther Graff is the kind of mother who makes you feel loved and watched simultaneously, and Hathaway finds that specific tension without ever tipping too far in either direction. In James Gray’s semi-autobiographical film, she plays warmth and quiet suffocation as two sides of the same coin, and her dinner table scenes carry a low-level pressure that feels completely lived-in. The moments she shares with Anthony Hopkins as her father have a particular emotional weight, two people who understand each other in ways the younger characters in the room can’t quite access. It’s a supporting role in someone else’s memory, but Esther never feels like a supporting character when Hathaway is on screen.

13. The Idea of You (2024)

Solène Marchand could have easily become a wish-fulfillment fantasy, but Hathaway anchors her in something more grounded and specific. The performance works because she plays a 40-year-old woman rediscovering desire with real ambivalence, not just joy. As Solène faces the relentless public scrutiny that comes with her new relationship, Hathaway captures exactly what the film is trying to say about the tension between private life and living under a microscope. The Prime Video hit connected with audiences in a big way, and the reason is that Solène feels like a real person navigating something messy rather than a romantic heroine hitting her marks.

12. Eileen (2023)

Rebecca Saint John walks into this bleak 1960s prison drama like she’s from a different planet entirely, and that’s precisely the point. Hathaway plays her with a magnetic, slightly unsettling glamour: the red lips, the slow cigarette, the way every room seems to shrink around Rebecca until she’s the only person in it who knows what’s actually going on. The film’s best scenes are built around watching Thomasin McKenzie’s Eileen fall completely under her spell, and Hathaway calibrates Rebecca’s danger carefully enough that you understand the pull even as the warning signs stack up. It’s a quietly threatening performance that lingers in uncomfortable ways.

11. Colossal (2016)

Gloria is a disaster. She’s unemployed, she’s drinking too much, she’s burning every relationship she has, and it turns out she’s also somehow controlling a giant monster that’s leveling Seoul. Hathaway commits to every layer of that absurd premise without winking at the camera, and the result is the most adventurous creative choice of her career. Nacho Vigalondo’s script asks her to play genuine addiction and self-loathing inside a kaiju movie framework, and she never loses the thread of Gloria’s real pain even when the film goes to its strangest places. The moment she realizes the physical connection between her movements and the monster’s is played with a horror that’s completely earned, because she’s made Gloria’s self-destruction feel real from the first scene.

10. The Intern (2015)

Jules Ostin is running a startup, holding together a marriage, and quietly questioning every choice she’s made, and Hathaway plays all three of those things at once without making it feel like a juggling act. The warmth she builds with Robert De Niro’s Ben develops gradually and believably across the film. There’s a scene in a hotel room where Jules finally lets herself fall apart that hits harder than you’d expect from a Nancy Meyers comedy. The film earned $194 million worldwide and became one of her most beloved crowd-pleasers, largely because she plays Jules’s competence and vulnerability with equal conviction. Neither quality cancels the other out, which is harder to pull off than it sounds.

9. Love & Other Drugs (2010)

Maggie Murdock refuses to be a symbol of anything, and that refusal is where the performance lives. Hathaway earned a Golden Globe nomination for a role that treats early-onset Parkinson’s with real anger and dark humor rather than soft-focus sentimentality. There’s a scene where Maggie lashes out at Jamie for trying to fix her, and the frustration in that moment feels completely unscripted, like something that had been building for a long time. Her chemistry with Jake Gyllenhaal gives the film an emotional honesty that lifts it well above standard romantic drama territory. It’s the kind of adult love story Hollywood rarely greenlit even then, and she’s the primary reason it holds up.

8. Ocean’s 8 (2018)

Daphne Kluger is a gloriously self-aware parody of a certain kind of celebrity, and the casting is clever precisely because Hathaway leans into it so hard. She plays the vain, oblivious movie star with perfect comic timing, and then the film pulls the rug out to reveal Daphne is considerably sharper than anyone gave her credit for. In a movie packed with scene-stealers, she’s the one who actually steals it, partly because she’s the only cast member playing someone who seems to be having the most fun in the room. The film earned $297 million worldwide, and her performance is the best thing to come out of the franchise’s spin-off era: big, funny, and completely in on the joke.

7. Brokeback Mountain (2005)

Lureen Newsome Twist has maybe fifteen minutes of total screen time, and one of those minutes ranks among the most quietly devastating in the entire film. The phone call scene, where Lureen tells Ennis how Jack died, is a study in what an actor can do with almost nothing. Her voice stays flat and composed while her eyes tell a completely different story, and you understand in that moment exactly how much she knows and how long she’s known it. Hathaway’s contribution to the film’s emotional architecture is easy to overlook because it’s so controlled. This was the role that first signaled she was capable of something much deeper than the work she’d been doing, and it arrived at exactly the right moment.

6. The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Selina Kyle carries the weight of Michelle Pfeiffer’s iconic 1992 version into every scene, and Hathaway sidesteps the comparison entirely by playing her as sleek, dry, and morally slippery in ways that fit Christopher Nolan’s grounded Gotham perfectly. Her line delivery has a wit that the rest of the film doesn’t quite match, and the motorcycle chase sequences show a physicality that looks dangerous rather than choreographed. There’s a moment at a society party early in the film where Selina shifts from trembling victim to cool operator in about three seconds flat, and it’s the best encapsulation of what makes this version of the character work. The film crossed $1 billion at the box office, and she’s the most entertaining element in it.

5. Interstellar (2014)

Dr. Amelia Brand gets one of the most debated speeches in Christopher Nolan’s filmography, arguing that love might function as a literal navigational force across dimensions, and Hathaway sells it completely. It’s a scene that could read as absurd, but she plays it with such unguarded conviction that you believe it in the moment even if you’re skeptical afterward. In a film full of enormous ideas and set pieces, Brand holds her own as the emotional counterweight to Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper, and their dynamic gives the movie its human stakes. By the final act, when Brand is alone on Edmund’s planet and that earlier speech quietly pays off, Hathaway makes you feel the full weight of everything she chose and everything she lost, which is no small thing in a movie this big.

4. The Princess Diaries Franchise (2001–2004)

Mia Thermopolis is the role that started everything, and the story of how it happened is almost as good as the movie itself. Garry Marshall cast Hathaway after an audition where she accidentally fell off her chair and kept going — that instinct to commit fully even when things go sideways is exactly what Mia needed. The transformation from frizzy-haired klutz to reluctant princess works because she plays both versions with equal sincerity, never condescending to the awkward Mia or overselling the polished one. The sequel kept the franchise alive and gave a whole generation a character they came of age alongside. What sticks is how she makes Mia’s stumbling, wide-eyed panic in the early scenes feel just as genuine as the composure she finds by the end.

3. Rachel Getting Married (2008)

Kym Buchman is not trying to make you like her, and that’s the whole point. Hathaway plays a woman fresh out of rehab who arrives at her sister’s wedding and proceeds to make almost every situation worse, and she never softens Kym’s edges to make the character easier to root for. Jonathan Demme’s handheld, documentary-style filmmaking strips away every safety net, and there’s a dishwasher-loading competition scene that somehow becomes one of the most uncomfortable moments in the film because of how badly Kym needs to win it. This performance earned her first Oscar nomination and reshaped how Hollywood saw her, not as the princess or the girl next door, but as someone willing to go to deeply uncomfortable places and stay there.

2. Les Misérables (2012)

Fantine appears for maybe twenty minutes of screen time, and somehow the entire film belongs to her. Recording the musical performances live on set rather than lip-syncing to a pre-recorded track was a significant creative gamble, and Hathaway’s “I Dreamed a Dream” is the moment that makes the whole approach worth it. The performance is raw and deliberately unpolished, her voice cracking in places a more controlled recording would have smoothed over, and that imperfection is what makes it so hard to watch. She swept the Academy Award, BAFTA, and Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress, a clean sweep that felt less like a coronation than a collective acknowledgment that something truly extraordinary had happened on screen. Fantine’s decline is physical as much as emotional, and Hathaway disappears into it so completely that the character’s desperation feels real rather than performed.

1. The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

Andy Sachs is the role most people picture when they think of Anne Hathaway, and nearly two decades later it’s easy to understand why. She walks into Miranda Priestly’s world as an outsider who thinks fashion is beneath her, and the film’s sharpest trick is watching Andy slowly realize she’s become exactly what she claimed to despise, with Hathaway tracking that shift in small, specific ways rather than announcing it. Holding your own opposite Meryl Streep requires a particular kind of confidence, and she has it from the first scene. Andy’s nervous energy in the Runway offices feels completely real, and so does the quiet competence that replaces it by the third act. The film became a genuine cultural phenomenon that people still quote when talking about ambition and compromise. It’s funny, sharp, and emotionally honest in ways fashion comedies rarely manage, with Andy Sachs at the center making every choice feel earned.

What’s striking about Hathaway’s career is how often she’s chosen the harder version of a role when an easier one was available. She could have played Fantine safely, made Kym more sympathetic, coasted on Andy Sachs for years. Instead, she keeps finding the specific uncomfortable truth in a character and leaning into it, which is why her best performances feel less like acting and more like someone you actually know.