Toni Collette Ranked

Welcome to "Ranked", a weekly series where I rank a franchise or filmography from worst to best and hand out assorted related superlatives. This week, I'm profiling the work of Toni Collette-whose latest project "Mickey 17" opens in theaters today. 

Toni Collette's Filmography Ranked:

20.Hereditary (D)

19.About a Boy (D)

18.Velvet Buzzsaw (D+)

17.Nightmare Alley (C-)

16.Tammy (C)

15.The Dead Girl (C)

14.Unlocked (C)

13.Krampus (C+)

12.Imperium (B-)

11.Fright Night (B-)

10.Shaft (B)

9.xXx: Return of Xander Cage (B)

8.The Way, Way Back (B)

7.Hearts Beat Loud (B)

6.Changing Lanes (B)

5.Juror #2 (B)

4.The Sixth Sense (B)

3.Little Miss Sunshine (B+)

2.Enough Said (B+)

1.Knives Out (A-)

Top Dog: Knives Out (2019)

Rian Johnson put the pain of The Last Jedi behind him by reinvigorating the whodunit genre with this stylish, hilarious and gripping affair that sees a stacked ensemble cast (Daniel Craig, Ana de Armas, Jamie Lee Curtis, Chris Evans, Michael Shannon, Collette, Don Johnson, Jaeden Martell, Katherine Langford, LaKeith Stanfield, Riki Lindhome, Edi Patterson, Frank Oz, Christopher Plummer) having a ball playing around with this Agatha Christie-esque material. It's equally awesome that Johnson has gotten the chance to turn Knives Out into a franchise that allows him to further build up the legend of Craig's brilliant private detective Benoit Blanc while further experimenting with different tones and narrative structures that provides each entry with its own unique identity.         

Bottom Feeder: Hereditary (2018)

As thrilled as I am that its success playing a huge role in Ari Aster gaining the juice in the industry to be able to command relatively large budgets to make bizarre, comically uncommercial films that will top out at $5 million at the box office, I'm no fan of Hereditary. While Collette's lead performance is quite good, I found the film to be nothing more than a really boring mediation on grief/generational trauma that eventually clunkily merges with a ridiculous supernatural horror movie in the final act. 

Most Underrated: Enough Said (2013)

What makes Nicole Holofcener's movies work so well is the sincerity of the storytelling along with the empathy that it treats its characters with. Enough Said does a particularly good job with these things as it explores what happens when a pair of middle-aged divorcees (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, James Gandolfini) who meet at a party hosted by a married couple (Ben Falcone, Collette) they're both friends with decide to start dating. Holofcener's smart, thoughtful script does a terrific job of examining how the scars of divorce makes committing to a romantic relationship even scarier than it was before the parties involved got married, Louis-Dreyfuss and Gandolfini are exceptional as two regular people who are eager to start a new chapter of their lives, but also don't want to get hurt again and the organic balance of comedy and drama really hammers home the thorny honesty and overdue self-reflection that comes with aging which drives this slice of life story.         

Most Overrated: Hereditary (2018)

For me, this is the most egregious case of indie horror movie hyperbole we've ever seen. There's not a single idea. image or sound in this film that elicited any sort of response in me that even vaguely resembled fear or anxiety. I would actually go as far to say that this is among least frightening horror films I've ever watched. The complete absence of spookiness is just one of the many problems I had with Hereditary as you just read above, so I'll wrap things up here by simply saying that I'd be stunned if I ever stopped viewing this film as anything other than an obscenely overrated outlier in Ari Aster's otherwise endearing filmography.