In the last five years, Jennifer Lawrence has gone from sitcom star to Oscar-winning thespian and integral component of two top-grossing film franchises — not to mention the sort of celebrity whose goofy, down-to-earth persona makes her irresistible to meme makers and late-night talk show booking agents. She has a lot to celebrate, in other words, and with The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1arriving in theaters this weekend, we decided now would be a perfect time to pay tribute to some of the brighter critical highlights from a filmography that?s only getting started. Watch your step, because it’s time to Total Recall Jennifer Lawrence style!
10. THE POKER HOUSE 57%
Lawrence picked up her first major film role in
The Poker House, a grim drama marking
Tank Girl star Lori Petty’s debut as a writer-director. While few saw it at the time, there’s no denying Petty’s great taste in casting — aside from Lawrence, playing the oldest of three sisters subjected to deplorable living conditions by their deeply troubled mother (Selma Blair),
House also features an early appearance from Chloe Grace Moretz, as well as a disturbing turn from Bokeem Woodbine as the mother’s reprehensible pimp. “
The Poker House is one of the most personal, wounded films in years,” wrote John Wheeler for L.A. Weekly. “That it is also one of the most confused reflects how deeply it springs from the psyche of its director.”
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9. THE BEAVER 61%
In the years after his fall from public grace following several bouts of bizarre and generally offensive and/or ill-advised behavior, Mel Gibson needed a project that could help regenerate a little goodwill by taking him out of his dramatic wheelhouse and reminding audiences that he could still act — and he got one in the form of
The Beaver, a directorial effort from Gibson’s friend Jodie Foster that gave the
Lethal Weapon star the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play a guy who responds to a series of horrible personal setbacks by developing what appears to be an alternate personality channeled through a beaver puppet on his hand. It’s the kind of left-field premise you have to see to believe, especially given that Foster rounded out her cast with likable pros like Anton Yelchin (as Gibson’s embarrassed son) and, of course, Jennifer Lawrence(as the classmate he’s afraid to get too close to because of his weirdo dad). Destined for the commercial margins and dismissed as too tonally disjointed by some critics,
The Beaver was nevertheless hailed as a dam fine film by the majority — including Lisa Kennedy of the Denver Post, who wrote, “The film is amusing, then melancholy, then weirdly funny, then not. It’s a quiet, measured work.”
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8. LIKE CRAZY 72%
Anyone who’s ever attempted a long-distance relationship knows they can be hell, and writer-director Drake Doremus knows that pain more intimately than most — as evidenced by
Like Crazy, the winsome romantic drama he and co-writer Ben York Jones weaved out of their real-life long-distance broken hearts and turned into a starring vehicle for Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones. When the movie opens, he lives in L.A. and she’s a visiting British exchange student, and although falling in love is easy, their permanent addresses aren’t — especially after she overstays her student visa and is exiled to the U.K., driving the couple apart long enough for him to start a new relationship with someone who doesn’t live across the Atlantic (Jennifer Lawrence). While the story’s broad contours may be familiar, Doremus and his sharp cast handle the formula with aplomb; the result is what the Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday deemed “A serious, deeply felt romance for an audience Hollywood most often bombards with raunchy sex comedies and video-game adaptations.”
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7. THE HUNGER GAMES 84%
Why stop at one blockbuster franchise when you can topline two? Already a prominent part of the rebooted
X-Men movies, Jennifer Lawrence took the lead for Lionsgate’s adaptation of
The Hunger Games, the first chapter in author Suzanne Collins’ bestselling YA book series about a dystopian future in which boys and girls are forced to fight to the death for a nation’s amusement. Starring as the archer Katniss Everdeen, Lawrence anchored the book’s rather grim story with a soulful performance that helped launch several sequels — and won praise from critics like the Houston Chronicle’s Amy Biancolli, who wrote, “It features a functioning creative imagination and lots of honest-to-goodness acting by its star, Jennifer Lawrence, who brings her usual toughness and emotional transparency to the archer-heroine Katniss.”
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6. X-MEN: FIRST CLASS 87%
A year after scoring her breakout role in
Winter’s Bone, Lawrence achieved the 21st century version of “making it big” in Hollywood — landing a part in a superhero franchise. And not just any part, either: Lawrence signed on to play the new Mystique in the freshly rebooted
X-Men series, committing herself to several films’ worth of CGI action sequences (and slinking around in little more than a blue bodysuit). Joining her on Fox’s mission to resuscitate the flagging franchise was a rather incredible ensemble cast that included Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, and Kevin Bacon — and all that effort paid off with a movie that took the series back to its comics origins while restoring its box office luster and delivering a round of critical applause. “
First Class largely does what it sets out to do,” wrote the AV Club’s Tasha Robinson, “by turning out another crowd-pleasing comic-book film designed to bring in new fans while gratifying the old ones.”
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5. THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE 89%
The first
Hunger Games didn’t exactly want for positive reviews or box-office clout, and when the franchise’s second installment arrived in 2013, expectations were dauntingly high — especially given that post-
Silver Linings Playbook, this became the rare YA film adaptation whose cast boasted an Oscar-winning actress in the leading role. Along similar lines,
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire ended up being one of the few second installments that successfully ramped up an ongoing story arc while still keeping plenty of action in reserve for subsequent chapters. Grantland’s Wesley Morris offered it some of the highest sequel praise imaginable, arguing, “This is
Empire Strikes Back stuff. It has that second
Star Warsmovie’s kick of confidence.”
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4. SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK 92%
How do you make a seriocomedy about mental illness without coming across as obnoxious or insensitive? It’s obviously easier said than done (just ask anyone who’s seen
Mixed Nuts), but David O. Russell found a way with 2012’s
Silver Linings Playbook, starring Lawrence and Bradley Cooper as a couple of bruised souls who meet cute after enduring terrible personal tragedies and somehow manage to nurture a connection in spite of the many emotional and circumstantial obstacles between them. While a few critics certainly questioned the wisdom of trying to wring any sort of comedy from such a serious subject, the vast majority applauded
Playbook‘s deft treatment of sensitive material, and the Academy agreed — the movie picked up eight Oscar nominations, with Lawrence taking home Best Actress. “It’s Lawrence who knocked me sideways,” wrote David Edelstein for New York Magazine. “I loved her in
Winter’s Bone and
The Hunger Games but she’s very young — I didn’t think she had this kind of deep-toned, layered weirdness in her.”
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3. X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST 93%
Hollywood gives us so many of them these days that it’s easy to forget how tricky it can be to put together a truly compelling sequel — and that goes at least double when you’re talking about a follow-up to an already-sprawling franchise starring an unwieldy cast of superpowered characters. Toss in a time-travel storyline that follows up one sequel while undoing the damage wrought by another
andfeatures stars from the first trilogy as well as its reboot, and you’re putting an awful lot of plates in the air; fortunately, with
X-Men: Days of Future Past, director Bryan Singer proved himself more than up to the task. Of course, it didn’t hurt that he had a lot of talent to work with, not least Jennifer Lawrence as the troubled — and quite lethal — shape-shifting mutant known as Mystique. The end result blended sheer action thrills almost seamlessly with the sociopolitical subtext the series has always been known for; as the Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern marveled, “Everything is of a piece, and it’s dazzling.”
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2. AMERICAN HUSTLE 93%
Wigs and prosthetics are often a dead giveaway that an actor (or a movie in general) is trying way too hard to make a sale, and David O. Russell’s
American Hustle is full of ’em. Fortunately, all that artifice stops on the surface. David O. Russell’s ’70s period piece, about a real-life FBI sting operation that used a pair of con artists (played by Christian Bale and Amy Adams) to target corrupt politicians, lays the garish hair and wardrobe on thick, but it makes sense in context, and it’s all backed up by a wall of solid performances; just about the entire cast was nominated for Oscars, including Lawrence for her work as Bale’s unstable wife. Perhaps most importantly, it’s a lot of fun: as Colin Covert wrote for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “Even at two hours and 20 minutes, the movie doesn’t wear you down. It carries you along with heedless momentum, giddy and exhilarated at its all-American ambition and scam-artist confidence.”
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1. WINTER’S BONE 94%
Aside from hardcore fans of
The Bill Engvall Show, not many people knew who Jennifer Lawrence was in 2009 — but that all changed the following year with the release of
Winter’s Bone, writer-director Debra Granik’s harrowing portrayal of a teenage girl who embarks on a perilous effort to locate her missing father in order to save her disabled mother and younger siblings from being evicted from their meager Ozarks home. Bleak stuff for sure, but limned with a subtle, yet resolute hope — not to mention the ferocity of Lawrence’s Oscar-nominated performance. “
Winter’s Bone is a genuine triumph,” wrote Bill Goodykoontz of the Arizona Republic, paying it the ultimate compliment by adding that it’s “a great movie with astounding performances so natural, so genuine, that you forget it’s a movie.”
