Usually an actor has several small parts in films to allow them to get used to working on the big screen, before they reveal who they are and what they can do. Not Florence Pugh.
In 2015, when she suddenly appeared as the co-lead in The Falling, a woozy allegorical drama about a fainting outbreak in a 1960s English girls’ school, Pugh was still in school herself. Her performance as the more advanced of two intensely connected best friends led stunned reviewers to declare her a star, and they were right: ten years on she’s appeared in highly acclaimed dramas and big commercial hits. Her new film, Dune: Part Two, is both at once. Find out where to watch our pick of the ten best Florence Pugh movies below.
Pugh followed up The Falling with an even stronger turn in Lady Macbeth, a hard-as-nails domestic drama set in Northumberland in 1865. Not a Shakespeare story and arguably more brutal and shocking than anything the Bard ever came up with, the film is powered by Pugh as a woman who escapes her loveless marriage and nightmarish home life by resorting to violence and much else besides. It’s a movie that requires complete conviction from its lead actress, and Pugh never wavers.
Pugh subsequently popped up in the post-Taken Liam Neeson thriller The Commuter, and returned to historical drama for Outlaw King. After that, however, she took a left turn by topping the bill in Fighting with My Family, Stephen Merchant’s true-life comedy drama about the British wrestler Saraya Bevis, who makes it as a WWE star at the expense of her supposedly more talented brother. Pugh was still playing a young woman defying expectations, but this film was a palatable mainstream crowd-pleaser.
That made Pugh a big enough name for her to be cast alongside Emma Watson and Saoirse Ronan in Little Women, helmed by future Barbie director Greta Gerwig, and to become a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe by starring opposite Scarlett Johansson in Black Widow - a sequel to that movie, Thunderbolts, is on the way. She also makes a brief but important appearance in current awards favourite Oppenheimer.
Pugh’s great strength, however, remains films that are beguiling and enveloping to the point of being overwhelming, preferably with an element of folk horror. She’s an English nurse visiting Ireland to witness an alleged miracle in The Wonder, a tale full of religious fervour and creeping dread.
Our choice of the best Florence Pugh movie goes some way beyond mere dread. Pugh takes the lead in Midsommar, a simply unforgettable nightmare of a film in which she plays Dani, a traumatised American student whose visit to a rural Swedish commune turns into a symphony of psychological unease and horrifically imaginative violence, as the countryside gathering reveals itself to be a crazed cult. Pugh’s face in the final shot is what really stays with you - and as an A-list film actor, Pugh is certainly here to stay. See where to stream our ten best Florence Pugh movies in the list below.
