Every Daniel Day-Lewis Movie, Ranked

Rotten Tomatoes score: 39%

The lone musical of Day-Lewis’ career is also his lowest-rated film, critically speaking. It doesn’t help that it’s based on “8½,” one of the most adored films of all time.

In it, he plays Italian director Guido Contini (loosely based on Federico Fellini), who is experiencing writer’s block. To help himself out of a rut, he runs back through his life and his previous relationships to find inspiration.

Keith Uhlich of Time Out New York called the film “a migraine-inducing maelstrom.”

Rotten Tomatoes score: 46%

“Anemone” isn’t the first time Day-Lewis has worked with a family member — the off-kilter family drama “The Ballad of Jack and Rose” was written and directed by his wife, Rebecca Miller.

In it, Day-Lewis plays a single father, Jack, whose daughter Rose (Camilla Belle) has grown up in near-isolation, and as such, has grown a bit too … fond of her father, shall we say.

“Doesn’t succeed in everything it sets out to do, but as a statement about the death rattle of ’60s counterculture it’s thoughtful and affecting,” wrote Jonathan Rosenbaum for the Chicago Reader.

Rotten Tomatoes score: 54%

Eight years after he announced his retirement from acting at age 60, Day-Lewis returned to the big screen with “Anemone,” a film directed by his son, Ronan Day-Lewis. The elder Day-Lewis also cowrote the film with his son.

In the film, the three-time Oscar winner plays Ray, an older man living a solitary lifestyle — that is, until his brother Jem (Sean Bean) asks him to come home.

“In his feature-directing debut, the younger Day-Lewis gives the dense Irish woodlands a claustrophobic majesty and elicits a furiously magnetic performance from his father. That the performance feels bigger than the film that contains it hardly matters,” wrote NPR’s Bob Mondello.

Rotten Tomatoes score: 72%

While “The Crucible” might not be Day-Lewis’ most critically acclaimed film, it might be his most important — when visiting Arthur Miller, playwright of “The Crucible,” he met Miller’s daughter Rebecca, whom he went on to marry in 1996. They’re still together today.

But back to the film: Day-Lewis plays John Proctor, the story’s famed protagonist, who is accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials.

“There’s an awful, piercing truth in the performances of Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder, Joan Allen and Paul Scofield as members of a community destroyed by guilt, paranoia and betrayal,” wrote Edward Guthmann for The San Francisco Chronicle.

Rotten Tomatoes score: 72%

Day-Lewis’ second collaboration with Martin Scorsese was “Gangs of New York,” a decadeslong epic telling the story of, well, the gangs of New York City in the 1840s through the 1860s.

Day-Lewis received his third Oscar nomination for playing Bill the Butcher, the terrifying leader of the Confederation of American Natives.

Empire Magazine’s Angie Errigo called it “an ironic, emotional, gory revision of the American Experiment, marred by narrative problems but sufficiently awesome in its ambitious scale and intentions to rate as a must-see.”

Rotten Tomatoes score: 74%

Day-Lewis has a supporting role in “The Bounty,” which tells the real story of the 1789 mutiny of the HMS Bounty. He plays one of the members of the crew who remained loyal to the ship’s commanding officer, Lieutenant William Bligh (Anthony Hopkins).

Roger Ebert called the film “a great adventure, a lush romance, and a good movie.”

Rotten Tomatoes score: 81%

Just a few years after playing someone who was wrongfully accused of being part of the IRA, Day-Lewis plays a former IRA volunteer who wants to leave that life behind in “The Boxer.”

He was nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance.

“Day-Lewis and [director Jim] Sheridan, even in ‘The Boxer,’ have the kind of actor-director rapport that goes way beyond ‘chemistry.’ They seem to find totally fresh ways of inspiring each other (unlike, say, the vaunted Scorsese-De Niro pairing, which has grown punch-drunk),” wrote Peter Rainer for the Dallas Observer.

Rotten Tomatoes score: 83%

A young Day-Lewis has a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo as a young teenager graffitiing cars in this film about a truly complicated love triangle between two men and a woman in London.

“For me, ‘Sunday, Bloody Sunday’ is far and away the best film John Schlesinger has ever made: the surest, the truest, the most uncluttered,” wrote Margaret Hinxman for The Daily Telegraph.

Rotten Tomatoes score: 86%

In “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” Day-Lewis plays Tomas, a surgeon living in ’60s Czechoslovakia. He has relationships with two different women: Sabina (Lena Olin), a freewheeling artist, and Tereza (Juliette Binoche), a waitress who is desperate for something more exciting than her current life.

Variety called the film, which was based on the 1984 novel by Milan Kundera, a “richly satisfying adaptation.”

Rotten Tomatoes score: 88%

In Day-Lewis’ long career, he’s appeared in many costume dramas but only one true action film: “The Last of the Mohicans,” directed by Michael Mann.

This film takes place during the French and Indian War, and stars Day-Lewis as Nathaniel Poe, aka Hawkeye, as a half-white, half-Native American man who falls in love with Cora (Madeleine Stowe), a woman he’s meant to be protecting. However, they’re falling in love in the midst of a bloody war.

“Anchored by a performance of almost Zen-like calm and focus by a lithe Daniel Day-Lewis and another of muted but fierce intensity by Madeleine Stowe, it is nothing less than a cinematic second coming,” wrote Catherine Dunphy for The Toronto Star.

Rotten Tomatoes score: 88%

Day-Lewis, arguably the greatest living actor, teamed up with Martin Scorsese, arguably the greatest living director, for the first time with “The Age of Innocence,” based on the Edith Wharton novel of the same name.

In the film, Day-Lewis plays Newland Archer, a young man who is engaged to May Welland (Winona Ryder), but secretly, he pines for May’s cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), who is still married to an abusive ex-husband.

“Life in the New York of the eighteen-seventies may have been constrained, but it was never dull — not if Scorsese’s camera is anything to go by,” wrote The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane.

Rotten Tomatoes score: 89%

Day-Lewis has a small part as Colin, a young British man who harasses Mahatma Gandhi (Ben Kingsley) in the street in this epic about Gandhi’s rise to power as a nonviolent activist in the right for India’s independence.

“Like the man himself, ‘Gandhi’ is not totally successful, but it comes closer to perfection than most,” wrote Michael Maza for The Arizona Republic.

Rotten Tomatoes score: 89%

Day-Lewis completely disappears into the role of our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln. The film, directed by Steven Spielberg, is about the last four months of Lincoln’s life as he worked tirelessly to pass the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in the US.

For the role, he won his third Academy Award, becoming the only person with three best-actor Oscars. (Jack Nicholson and Walter Brennan also each have three acting Academy Awards, but some were in the best-supporting actor category.)

“[Spielberg is] a man on a mission. And his not so secret weapon is Day-Lewis, an actor so charismatic it’s hard to think clearly while he’s on screen,” wrote The London Standard’s Charlotte O’Sullivan.

Rotten Tomatoes score: 91%

Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s opus about American greed, oil, masculinity, and milkshakes stars Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview, a man determined to win at all costs — in his own words, he has “a competition” in him. That means sacrificing everything, including a relationship with his adopted son, H.W.

This was Day-Lewis’ second Academy Award win.

“Someday, we’re probably going to look back at ‘There Will Be Blood,’ Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic about greed, lies, manipulation and insanity, and call it his masterpiece,” wrote Christy Lemire for the Associated Press.

Rotten Tomatoes score: 91%

In 2018, Day-Lewis received his sixth (and, as of now, final) best-actor Oscar nomination for playing the, shall we say, particular fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock living in ’50s London. While he begins the film as a committed bachelor, meeting a young waitress, Alma (Vicky Krieps), makes him reconsider his set-in-stone ways.

This also marked his final film role until 2025’s “Anemone.”

“Reynolds is the perfect role for Day-Lewis, who is likewise famous both for his obsessive meticulousness and for the lengthy sabbaticals he has used to recharge between films,” wrote The Atlantic’s Christopher Orr.

Rotten Tomatoes score: 94%

Day-Lewis received his second Academy Award nomination for “In the Name of the Father.” In the film, he plays Gerry Conlon, one of the “Guildford Four,” who spent 15 years in prison after he was wrongfully accused of being a bomber for the Provisional IRA in 1974. His lawyer, Gareth, who eventually secured his release, is played by Emma Thompson.

“Day-Lewis, so intricately repressed in ‘The Age of Innocence,’ here offers a role reversal in an unreserved and emotional performance that throws caution and inhibition to the winds,” wrote Desmond Ryan of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Rotten Tomatoes score: 96%

In “My Beautiful Laundrette,” Day-Lewis plays a young British man named Johnny who enters into a relationship with his former childhood friend, Omar (Gordon Warnecke). However, as this movie takes place in 1980s South London and Omar is Pakistani, their relationship doesn’t always go smoothly.

“It is a sharp, smart picture, with English eccentricity, sly quirk and political subversion, that represents a brilliant and almost unique engagement with contemporary history in 80s British cinema,” wrote Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian.

Rotten Tomatoes score: 100%

Based on the 1908 E. M. Forster novel of the same name, “A Room with a View” stars Helena Bonham Carter as Lucy, a young woman on vacation in Italy with her cousin Charlotte (Maggie Smith).

During her holiday, she meets the free-spirited George (Julian Sands) and begins a passionate affair with him, but it’s short-lived, as Charlotte doesn’t approve. Instead, she drags Lucy back home to England, where she gets engaged to Day-Lewis’ character, Cecil. But memories of George linger …

“It is an intellectual film, but intellectual about emotions: It encourages us to think about how we feel, instead of simply acting on our feelings,” wrote Roger Ebert.