Margot Robbie is back on movie screens this month in “Saltburn” writer-director Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights.”
The new, gothic and extravagant take on Emily Brontë’s enduring 1847 novel has already proven to be plenty divisive online among casual viewers, critics and devoted fans of its source material. Lost amid the ongoing discourse surrounding the film, though, is that “Wuthering Heights” is just the latest audacious auteurist vision Robbie has helped bring to life. The three-time Oscar nominee has, in fact, built her career over the last 13 years on big swings just like “Wuthering Heights,” and more of them have connected than not.
Here are Margot Robbie’s best movies, ranked.
Honorable Mention: “Birds of Prey” (2020)
Margot Robbie’s adventures in the DC Extended Universe may not be the films that she is best remembered for, but her performance as the insane, relentless Harley Quinn is as good an embodiment of the actress’ luminous, wild screen presence as any other she has given. No DC film lets her shine as much as “Birds of Prey” does, either. Director Cathy Yan’s scrappy, hopped-up “Suicide Squad” spinoff is a deranged action comedy that lives and dies on the infectious, irrepressible energy of Robbie’s lead performance.
Released just a month before the COVID-19 pandemic shut the world down and only a few years before the DCEU was altogether abandoned, “Birds of Prey” has been somewhat lost to time. A film as good as this deserves a better fate than that, though, and it feels just a little bit like a crime that we have not gotten many, many more movies featuring Robbie’s Harley (are you listening, James Gunn?).
5. “Asteroid City” (2023)
It may be a cheat to include “Asteroid City” on this list, given that Robbie herself only has one scene in it, but so what? Not only is it one of the best films she has ever starred in, but Robbie’s single scene in “Asteroid City” is also the dramedy’s most powerful and unforgettable. A one-sided conversation between Robbie and Jason Schwartzman’s characters that is shot in gorgeous black and white by cinematographer Robert Yeoman and cut to perfection by editor Barney Pilling, the scene is the lynchpin of “Asteroid City,” a post-COVID fantasy about feeling stuck, lost and losing hope.
Just when both of Schwartman’s characters, the fictional war photographer Augie Steenbeck and Jones Hall, the Broadway actor playing him, are at their most desperate and unmoored, in comes Robbie’s unnamed actress to row them back to shore. Robbie carries the entire scene on her back, playing every note with delicate grace. In doing so, she proves one of the core ideas of “Asteroid City” right. Sometimes, all you need is a little help to find your way again.
4. “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013)
“The Wolf of Wall Street” was the movie that put Margot Robbie on the map. 13 years later, it’s no wonder why. Director Martin Scorsese’s epic, adrenaline-fueled account of the life and crimes of former Wall Street broker and convicted fraudster Jordan Belfort (a career-best Leonardo DiCaprio) is an overwhelming, mostly nude tableau of corruption, greed and debauchery. Outside of DiCaprio, who transforms himself more on screen than he ever has before, it would have been very easy for every other actor in “The Wolf of Wall Street” to be overshadowed by the sheer, purposeful gratuity of it all.
But not Margot Robbie. Playing Belfort’s second wife, Robbie arrives in the film like a meteor — crash landing with such force that she leaves a massive crater in her wake. Despite “Wolf” being one of her first movies, Robbie matches the high-wire energy of her more experienced co-stars with an undaunted ferocity that makes it impossible to forget her. Looking back, it is hard to imagine a better possible announcement for the then-up-and-coming star.
3. “Barbie” (2023)
“Barbie” should not have worked. The fact that it did — and that’s putting it lightly — is thanks to both writer-director Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie. It is the former’s vision that turned “Barbie” from a soulless corporate cash grab into something genuinely interesting, but it is the latter’s go-for-broke, screwball performance as its lead doll-made-real that grounds the film and makes the audience buy in immediately to its world, style, aesthetic and fantastical, loose sense of logic.
Robbie is asked to find the right balance between absurd artificiality and genuine, deeply felt emotion over the course of “Barbie’s” two hours, and she does that with the same bold, unguarded spirit that she has brought to all of her best roles. Co-stars Ryan Gosling and America Ferrera may have been the only “Barbie” actors who earned Oscar nominations for their work in the film, but it is Robbie’s central performance that gives Gerwig’s surrealist comedy the heart and the soul that it needs to even work in the first place.
2. “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” (2019)
Before Quentin Tarantino‘s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” hit theaters in 2019, there was quite a lot of controversy surrounding Margot Robbie’s role in the film as real-life film star Sharon Tate and, specifically, her smaller number of lines compared to co-stars Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. All it takes is one watch of “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” to realize just how off-base that conversation was. Here, Robbie is asked to do something only movie stars are capable of doing, and that is be a presence. She is meant to simply be, and achieving that level of casual humanity and stillness on screen is easier said than done, but Robbie does it nonetheless.
Even more impressively, she makes it look easy, and emerges as the heart beating at the center of “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” She serves as a reminder of the humanity at stake in the film’s third act, and while “Once Upon a Time” might not be the consensus pick for Tarantino’s best film, there is certainly a case to be made that it is. That alone earns it a spot high on a list like this, and Robbie’s endearing turn plays as important a role in the unlikely, melancholic spell the film casts as anything — or anyone — else in it.
1. “Babylon” (2022)
“Babylon” occupies a unique place on this list. Unlike nearly every other entry listed above, writer-director Damien Chazelle’s 3-hour dramedy about the early rise of Hollywood and the transition from the Silent Era to that of the talkies was largely rejected by general moviegoers when it was released in late 2022. The film had an immediate base of passionate fans, though. The support for it has only steadily grown since then, and for good reason. “Babylon” is a brazen, messy and passionately felt epic that excavates Hollywood’s early days and finds little more than discarded bodies buried beneath the industry’s foundation.
One of these turns out to be Margot Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy, a stand-in for real-life It Girl Clara Bow, whose unchecked ambition and innate charisma makes her an immediate silent film star. It is hard to imagine any other contemporary actress playing Nellie. Few, at least, could have brought to the role the same combination of shrewd ingenuity and earnest belief in the Hollywood Dream that Robbie did. She commands your attention at every turn — the destructive, all-consuming vortex at the center of so many of the film’s storms. No other movie better showcases Robbie’s full-on, astonishing fearlessness as a performer.
