Every Film, Ranked Worst to Best
Born: December 28, 1989 | Killarney, County Kerry, Ireland | RADA Graduate | Oscar Winner 2026
Jessie Buckley is one of the finest screen actresses of her generation — a RADA-trained Irish performer who arrived in film almost fully formed and has spent less than a decade building one of the most interesting bodies of work in contemporary cinema. She became the first Irish woman to win the Academy Award for Best Actress, taking the Oscar in 2026 for her portrayal of Agnes Shakespeare in Hamnet. She has two Oscar nominations, a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, an Olivier, and a Mercury Prize shortlisting for a folk album made with Bernard Butler. She is also, by most accounts, the kind of actress other actors want to watch work.
What follows is every film she has appeared in, ranked from the bottom to the top. This is not a ranking of her performances — in almost every case her work rises above the material — but of the films themselves. Where she is in a supporting role, the ranking still reflects the overall film. This is her cinema, spread out and examined.
⬇ The Bottom ⬇
- Dolittle (2020) ★☆☆☆☆
The Robert Downey Jr. disaster that everyone involved would rather forget. Buckley plays a polar bear named Yoshi — voice only — in a film that seemed cursed from production through release. Nothing about it works. Her involvement is blameless and her contribution is entirely buried. The kindest thing to say about Dolittle is that it exists somewhere no one has to think about it.
- Scrooge: A Christmas Carol (2022) ★★☆☆☆
Netflix’s animated musical adaptation of Dickens gives Buckley the role of Emily, Scrooge’s lost love, and her singing voice is the best thing in the film. But the animation is oddly flat and the musical numbers never ignite. It is pleasant in the way a warm drink is pleasant — forgettable and temporary. Buckley deserved a better showcase for what is genuinely a remarkable singing voice.
- The Courier (2021) ★★★☆☆
A Cold War espionage thriller built around Benedict Cumberbatch and the real-life story of Greville Wynne. Buckley plays his wife Sheila — a woman who starts as a domestic figure and slowly reveals real depth as she pieces together what her husband is actually doing. It’s a solid performance in a solidly unremarkable film. The Courier is the kind of film you watch, respect, and entirely forget within a fortnight.
- Judy (2019) ★★★☆☆
Renée Zellweger won the Oscar for her Judy Garland and she deserved it. Buckley plays Rosalyn, one of Garland’s assistants during her late London run, and she brings warmth and specificity to a role that could easily have been wallpaper. The film around her is a competent biopic that does the obvious things competently. Buckley is one of the reasons it has slightly more life than the genre usually allows.
- Misbehaviour (2020) ★★★☆☆
Based on the true story of the women who disrupted the 1970 Miss World contest, Misbehaviour gives Buckley the co-lead alongside Keira Knightley. She plays Jo Robinson, an activist with more fire than diplomacy, and she is the more interesting presence in the film — harder, funnier, less concerned with being liked. The film is too well-behaved for its subject. Buckley tries to break free of that and almost manages it.
→ The Middle ←
- Fingernails (2023) ★★★☆☆
Jessie Buckley and Jeremy Allen White in a near-future love story about a device that can test whether two people are truly in love. The premise is good and Buckley is quietly devastating as a woman whose test comes back wrong. The film around her is somewhat underwritten — it has a great idea and doesn’t entirely know what to do with it. But the two lead performances are the reason to watch, and Buckley in particular does something remarkable with very little dialogue.
- Wicked Little Letters (2023) ★★★★☆
A dark comedy based on the true story of poison pen letters sent to residents of 1920s Littlehampton. Olivia Colman gets the attention and deserves it, but Buckley as Rose Gooding — the foul-mouthed Irish immigrant everyone assumes is responsible — is the funnier, more alive performance. She has a physicality and a comic timing here that the rest of her filmography doesn’t quite prepare you for. Genuinely very funny in a way that looks effortless and isn’t.
- Women Talking (2022) ★★★★☆
Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Miriam Toews’ novel about women in an isolated religious community deciding whether to stay or go. Buckley plays Mariche, a woman whose anger is her only protection, and she is extraordinary — coiled, precise, frightening, and ultimately heartbreaking. The film is deliberately theatrical and intentionally difficult, and it demands a lot from its ensemble. Buckley rises to every demand. Her final scene is one of the most powerful things she has done on screen.
- Men (2022) ★★★★☆
Alex Garland’s folk horror film about a woman (Buckley) who travels to the English countryside after the death of her husband and finds herself confronted by the same man, wearing different faces, everywhere she goes. The film is strange and deliberately unresolved and has divided audiences sharply. But Buckley carries every frame — frightened, intelligent, refusing to be made smaller. It is the kind of film that only works if you believe her completely. You do.
★ The Great ★
- The Lost Daughter (2021) ★★★★☆
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut, based on Elena Ferrante’s novel. Olivia Colman plays Leda as an older woman; Buckley plays her as a younger one, in flashback. This is a supporting role by any technical measure but Buckley makes it the emotional engine of the film. Her Leda is not a sympathetic character — she is selfish, distracted, capable of cruelty — and Buckley plays every inch of that without flinching. Her Oscar nomination for Supporting Actress was one of the most deserved of that year.
- Wild Rose (2018) ★★★★★
The film that made the world sit up. Buckley plays Rose-Lynn Harlan, a Glaswegian mother of two fresh out of prison with an unshakeable dream of becoming a Nashville country singer. It is a performance of staggering energy and emotional truthfulness — funny, selfish, irresistible, infuriating, and finally devastating. The film earns its big emotional moments because Buckley earns them first. Her BAFTA nomination was the beginning of what would become one of the most watched careers in British-Irish cinema. And yes, she does all her own singing, and it is extraordinary.
- Beast (2017) ★★★★★
Her debut. Michael Pearce’s feature arrives as a genre film — a psychological thriller set in Jersey about a young woman drawn to a man suspected of murder — and quietly reveals itself as something much stranger and more interesting. Buckley plays Moll, a woman who has been suppressing something dangerous inside herself for a very long time. It is a performance of enormous complexity from an actress who had never before carried a film, and she carries it completely. Beast remains one of the most impressive debut performances of the last decade.
- I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020) ★★★★★
Charlie Kaufman’s adaptation of Iain Reid’s novel is one of the most genuinely disorienting films of its decade — an essay about memory and regret and the versions of ourselves we carry around disguised as a road trip to meet a boyfriend’s parents. Buckley plays a woman who is, depending on how you read the film, either a real person or a projection, or both. She changes names, accents, occupations between scenes. She plays the same woman differently in the same room. It is technically one of the most demanding performances ever asked of an actress in a film of this budget level. She makes it look inevitable.
- Hamnet (2025) ★★★★★
The summit. Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel gives Buckley the role of Agnes Shakespeare — Anne Hathaway as history actually knew her, a herbalist and healer and the woman at the centre of a grief that eventually became Hamlet. What Buckley does with this role is not just the finest performance of her career but one of the finest screen performances in recent memory. She plays a woman whose inner life was never considered important enough to record, and she makes that inner life so vivid and so complete that you feel the loss of it across four hundred years. She won the Golden Globe, the BAFTA, the Oscar, the SAG Award. She became the first Irish woman to win Best Actress at the Academy Awards. The performance earned every one of those. It is the kind of work that changes what you think film acting is for.
Jessie Buckley is 36 years old. She has two Oscar nominations and one win, a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, an Olivier Award, and a Mercury Prize shortlisting. She has never given a bad performance. In a more just world she would be the most famous actress on the planet. In this one she is something better: a serious artist doing serious work, building a filmography that will still be worth watching in thirty years. Whatever she does next, people will be paying attention.
14 films ranked | 2017–2025 | 2 Oscar nominations | 1 Oscar win | First Irish woman to win Best Actress