The Best and Worst of Bryce Dallas Howard

“The Best and Worst of” series chronicles the career highlights and lowlights of an actor starring in one of the week's new theatrical releases. This week, I take a look at the filmography of “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” star Bryce Dallas Howard.

Films starring Bryce Dallas Howard that I've seen:
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
The Village
Lady in the Water
Spider-Man 3
Terminator Salvation
The Help
50/50
Jurassic World
Gold

Best Performance: The Help (2011)
While it's not quite on the level of the award-caliber work from Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and Emma Stone, Howard's performance in The Help is still notably great. Her turn as Hilly Walter Holbrook, a deceitful, highly prejudiced Mississippi socialite that employs Spencer's character as a maid, was a thoroughly convincing departure from the largely unassuming characters she'd played up to that point in her career.  

Worst Performance: The Village (2004)
The Village was Howard's first substantial film role, and boy did it show. Her performance as a kind-hearted blind woman that stumbles upon a colonial village's bizarre, long-kept secret is as laughably terrible as the twist M.Night Shyamalan concocted for this misguided mystery thriller.

Best Film: 50/50 (2011)
If I were to compose a list of the most underrated films of the 2010's so far, there's a very strong chance that 50/50 would top it. Thanks to an outstanding, largely autobiographical script from Will Reiser and its terrific ensemble cast (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen, Howard, Anna Kendrick, Angellica Houston, Phillip Baker Hall), this borderline flawless dramedy is able to seamlessly blend gut-busting R-rated humor with heartfelt sentiments about mortality, love and the significant toll cancer takes on a patient and their loved ones.

Worst Film: Lady in the Water (2006)
Virtuoso filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan managed to follow up The Village with a project that was even more poorly-acted and unintentionally hilarious. Lady in the Water, which is currently the infamous writer/director's lone foray into the world of fantasy, is a pretty much unprecedented exercise in rapidly-escalating ridiculousness. Just about every plot development in this wanna-be epic fairy tale is so gloriously dumb that I almost have to commend Shyamalan for making something that is so unabashedly, balls-to-wall preposterous.        

Thank you for reading this week's edition of “The Best and Worst of”. The next victim of my praise and ire will be “Sicario: Day of the Soldado” star Josh Brolin.