David O. Russell is an interesting director to talk about. On the one hand, he’s made some truly great movies, winning awards and bringing in a massive audience while building an impressive bench of actors and actresses who return again and again to his movies. On the other hand, he has had plenty of issues getting along with said actors, often pushing people past their limits with his decidedly in-your-face directing style, which has bordered on abusive. Perhaps that’s why the release of his newest movie, 2022’s Amsterdam has been met with less excitement than you might expect for a director of his stature. Though he has certainly not been canceled in any real way, his power may not be what it was around the release of his smash hits, Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. That said, any movie starring Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, and Taylor-freaking-Swift is one that will garner its fair share of attention. In honor of Amsterdam’s release, we have ranked all of Russell’s movies, from worst to best.
9. I Heart Huckabees (2009)
I Heart Huckabees is yet another installment in Russell’s long legacy of high-concept, screwball, ensemble comedies. The plot of this movie is quite bonkers, including, among other things, bicycle-bound firefighters, poems about rocks, and existential detectives. The latter are played by a very game Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin who try their best to impart what exactly an existential detective truly is. Not much happens in Huckabees but that doesn’t mean it is boring, per se, just lacking a certain amount of focus. Again, Russell has brought together an impressive group of collaborative actors all doing their darndest, but as a movie I Heart Huckabees collapses under the weight of its complicated story. Though critics were mixed, audiences were less so and the film struggled to recoup its budget at the box office.
8. Joy (2015)
As we are all well aware, the world absolutely needed a biopic about Joy Mangano, the woman who invented the miracle mop. At least, that’s what Russell assumed when making Joy, starring Jennifer Lawrence. Of course, being Russell, Joy is not exactly your typical biopic, infusing plenty of his tricks and creating something zanier than you might expect. Mangano does find the success you imagine, eventually landing on QVC and becoming what she was always destined to become, but Lawrence injects enough of her distinct style to make it worth your while, even if it is far from a perfect movie.
7. Amsterdam (2022)
The relative quiet surrounding the release of Russell’s latest is certainly not a good sign as he looks to make a splash with his first feature since 2015’s Joy. After all, this continent-spanning madcap story features Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, and about a dozen other notable faces and yet, according to critics, this one doesn’t quite hit the mark. Loosely fictionalizing what is known as the Business Plot of 1933, Amsterdam centers around a failed coup against the U.S. government. While that may appear timely, it seems the movie suffers from glut more than anything else, featuring lots of people doing lots of things but rarely in service of a concise or riveting plot.
6. Spanking The Monkey (1994)
Spanking The Monkey was Russell’s first-ever feature film, and what a debut it was. Winning the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, Spanking The Monkey remains the strangest movie Russell has ever made, a title it is not likely to lose. Spanking The Monkey stars Jeremy Davies as Ray, a college student forced to forgo a prestigious internship to help take care of his ailing, lonely mother. To say Mother and son have an interesting relationship may be the understatement of the century. What starts out as a borderline psychologically abusive situation turns into something far queasier, as the two begin what can unfortunately only be described as a sexual relationship. If the point is to shock and scandalize, it mostly does the trick. The performances here are undoubtedly excellent, taking this raw, strange material and playing things as close to genuine as possible. Still, it’s hard to get past the primary conceit and fully embrace this kind of movie.
5. The Fighter (2013)
Seemingly every director gets his shot as a boxing movie and, for Russell, The Fighter is that rite of passage. Starring his frequent collaborator Mark Wahlburg, Christian Bale, and Amy Adams, The Fighter tells the story of Micky Ward, a Massachusetts boxer hoping to win big. We’ve seen this story before, but The Fighter is notable for the way it focuses so heavily on Ward’s family, most notably his manager/mother and his crack-addicted brother Dicky, played by Bale who, wait for it, physically transformed for the role. There’s also a film within the film, an HBO documentary tracking the epic fall Dicky, also a former boxer, has taken because of his addiction. The Fighter is noteworthy in Russell’s filmography for how prototypical the plot remains throughout. Sure, we get a decent love story between Adams and Wahlburg, but you see the conclusion coming from a mile away and things aren’t that surprising throughout. Bale, however, was pretty brilliant and, in turn, celebrated as such, winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his efforts.
4. Flirting With Disaster (1996)
Starring Ben Stiller, Patricia Arquette, Tea Leoni, Alan Alda, and Lily Tomlin, Flirting With Disaster is a stacked ensemble comedy chock-full of hilarious scenes and set-ups that come tumbling from the mind of Russell. The main conceit of the film centers on Stiller’s Mel, a new father who decides that now is the time to locate his birth parents, who he never met. This quest leads him to an adoption agency where Leoni’s Tina offers to help track down Mel’s parents. This sparks one of the film’s driving forces, a burgeoning love triangle between Mel, his wife Nancy (Arquette), and Tina. Even if the characters themselves can’t quite see disaster coming, we surely can. The plot then leads the three all over the country, red herrings and misdirections aplenty as Mel desperately searches for his parents. When he does find them, it is played more for laughs than pathos but this is, at its heart, a screwball comedy, so Russell can surely be excused for skipping the tears. Flirting With Disaster marks Russell’s second feature, which definitely gave him a bigger budget than on Spanking The Monkey. That said, this was still a relatively modest movie but one that made its money back and then some, opening up future opportunities for Russell in Hollywood.
3. Three Kings (1999)
While Spanking The Monkey was the movie that first announced Russell as a young talent in the movie industry, Three Kings was the first film he was given a budget that matches his ever-expanding vision. Three Kings is, in its own way, a period piece. Released in 1999, it tells the story of the end of the Persian Gulf War, centering on soldiers occupying Iraq after the peace treaty was signed. What follows is a kind of treasure hunt, as a group of soldiers become aware of gold stolen from Kuwait by Saddamn Hussein, gold ripe for the taking. Three Kings’ greatest feat might be its ability to bring together four performers you would never expect to occupy the same movie. George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube, and Spike Jonze do not scream ensemble chemistry, and yet it works to an impressive degree here. Especially surprising is Jonze who is much better known as the director of movies like Being John Malkovich and Her than as an actor. The four are asked to do a lot here, as this movie is a true tour de force of action, dialogue, and rampant set-pieces. It can get a little clunky as Russell does his best to inject a message into what best serves as a heist film with an interesting setting rather than some kind of parable, but this is surely one of his crowning achievements.
2. American Hustle (2013)
Fresh off the success of Silver Linings Playbook (a movie we will get to later), Russell had all the cachet in the world going into American Hustle. We’ve seen several impressive ensembles on this list, but American Hustle might just be the most impressive. Starring Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Amy Adams, Jennifer Lawrence, and Jeremy Renner, this madcap movie moves at a hundred miles per hour, telling the fictionalized story of the FBI Abscam operation of the late 1970s and early 1980s. At times, this can feel a bit like Russell doing a Scorsese impression, with constantly moving scenes and clipped dialogue, but he makes it his own. Like Silver Linings Playbook before it, American Hustle was a hit with the Academy, receiving ten nominations in total, including Best Picture.
1. Silver Linings Playlist (2012)
Silver Linings Playbook is, without a doubt, Russell’s crowning achievement – the movie where his directorial style, ear for effective dialogue, and interest in nuanced love stories all come together. Starring Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, and Robert DeNiro, Silver Linings Playbook tells the story of Pat and Tiffany, two down-on-their-luck outsiders who find something resembling love in each other’s company. Pat is a man who suffers from bipolar disorder and was only recently released from the hospital. Tiffany is recently widowed and deemed a slut by the neighborhood, a classification she does not disagree with. The two begin a relationship, though it is not the kind we often see in romantic comedies of this type – or any other movie for that matter. They are, it is quite clear, both rather broken people, both obsessed with their former spouses and struggling with their mental health. At Tiffany’s insistence the two begin to practice for a ballroom dance competition, which brings them closer and closer. Silver Linings Playbook has many of the screwball qualities of Russell’s other work but finds a pathos within that many of his films are missing. Cooper and Lawrence are simply fantastic, the two displaying a chemistry that makes the movie shine in ways it simply wouldn’t otherwise. Silver Linings Playbook was nominated for the Academy Awards, with Lawrence becoming the second-youngest winner of the Best Actress award in Oscars history.
