Every Margot Robbie Movie, Ranked From Worst to Best

From The Wolf of Wall Street to Birds of Prey, here are Margot Robbie’s movies ranked from the very worst to the very best. In the space of only eight years, Australian actress Margot Robbie has come to dominate Hollywood. Like many stars from her country, Robbie got her start on the soap opera Neighbours, but when she made the leap to America she almost immediately became one to watch. While some actors spend years working in bit-parts and underseen projects before breaking out into the big leagues, Robbie was catapulted to the top of the pile in a staggeringly short amount of time, landing a role in the much-hyped but quickly canceled ABC series Pan Am before stealing scenes in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. She then landed the role of one of the most popular female characters in modern comic book history – Dr. Harleen Quinzel, a.k.a. Harley Quinn – and quickly became one of the true stars of DC.

Initially, Margot Robbie was categorized as a mega-beauty ready to be the new sex symbol of Hollywood, but she had much bigger plans than that. She demonstrated a real shrewdness for the industry, establishing her own production company and picking a number of prestigious projects as well as taking control of Harley Quinn in a way that no other actor signed up to the DCEU was able to. On top of that, she’s also committed to providing opportunities for up-and-coming women writers and directors,  such as Cathy Yan and Emerald Fennell.

Coming up next, Robbie has the second Peter Rabbit movie, which was pushed back from its initial release date due to the coronavirus, and The Suicide Squad, James Gunn’s soft reboot of the property, which sees Robbie as one of a tiny handful of stars returning from the first movie. Before all that, we’re taking a look at the films of Margot Robbie and ranking them from worst to best. (Disclaimer: This list does not include cameo appearances in movies like The Big Short, or the movie Dreamland, which has not yet received a substantial U.S. release despite premiering last year at the Tribeca Film Festival.)

#17  Suicide Squad

Robbie lucked out by being one of the tiny handful of people to emerge from the disastrous 2017 movie Suicide Squad unscathed. By now, everyone knows the behind-the-scenes drama that befell David Ayer’s contribution to what was then the beginnings of the first phase of the DCEU: dramatic and costly reshoots to change the film’s tone, multiple edits including one done by a trailer company, and the continuing panic from Warner Bros. over the expensive mega-franchise’s ultimate direction. Suicide Squad suffers from its startling lack of cohesion on every level. The editing is nigh-on incomprehensible at times (an inevitable side-effect of so many cuts by different people), the dour style clashes awkwardly with the shoe-horned in neon overlays and reshoot jokes, and the plot seems to give up multiple times before it reaches the end. Robbie ends up being a lone bright spot for much of Suicide Squad as she proves herself to be the perfect Harley Quinn (even if her Joker is somewhat lacking.) It’s no wonder Warner Bros. let Robbie have full reign over the character after this, even as they reboot the Suicide Squad property with James Gunn at the helm.

#16 ICU

Margot Robbie’s movie debut came in the form of a little-seen Australian horror movie named I.C.U. She played one of a trio of teenagers who ended up being the unsuspecting voyeurs to a murder while spying on their neighbors. It’s one of hundreds of Rear Window knock-offs, and it’s also one of the least interesting versions of that classic film. There’s a reason this one is typically overlooked in discussions of Robbie’s career.

#15 Terminal

On paper, the appeal of 2018’s Terminal to Robbie seems clear: a stylish neo-noir thriller about assassins featuring a major twist and tons of stylish costumes. The final product, however, is a dull mess of rehashed ideas that have all been far better executed in other movies. The Tarantino influences/rip-offs are clear and the movie doesn’t have anywhere near the skill to pull them off. It’s a classic case of style over substance but the style isn’t especially impressive. Robbie is fine and certainly has it in her to be a classic femme fatale in the mold of Barbara Stanwyck or Lauren Bacall, but Terminal doesn’t give her the room to breathe. She’s reduced to window dressing, which feels like the biggest crime of all in Terminal.

#14 Peter Rabbit

If you’re one of the millions of people who grew up reading Beatrix Potter’s beloved tales of adorable animals in the quaint British countryside then the chances are that you felt just a little aggrieved when you saw the trailer for the Hollywoodized adaptation of Peter Rabbit. The deliberate quietness of the stories had been replaced by a veritable assembly line of kids’ movie clichés, all of which were loud and obnoxious and painfully derivative. James Corden voices the eponymous bunny and turns him into an appallingly irritating bro. The real-life humans, particularly Domhnall Gleeson, fare better, but it’s hard not to watch Peter Rabbit and think of the Paddington movies. Where they tell heartfelt and hilarious family stories that respect the source material, Peter Rabbit feels like it actively hates Potter’s books. All that and Robbie doesn’t even get much to do as the voice of Flopsy Rabbit.

#13 The Legend of Tarzan

Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan stories have been the stuff of film history for decades, so it’s no surprise that Hollywood is so keen to reboot it in the blockbuster age. 2016’s The Legend of Tarzan attempted to launch a mega-franchise centered on the ape-man icon, but the project was dead on arrival. Audiences simply weren’t interested in seeing yet another version of this character, and the film’s attempts to circumnavigate the deep-seated colonialist themes of the stories was noble but stumbled in execution. Everyone on-screen looked bored with the material, and it didn’t help that the color palate was so drab. The Legend of Tarzan ends up being too tedious to even hate.

#12 Bombshell

When it was announced that Jay Roach and Charles Randolph were making a film about the epidemic of sexual harassment at Fox News under the rule of Roger Ailes, many wondered if it was simply too soon to tackle such a topic. Whether or not you think it was too soon to make Bombshell, the movie does little to win over those skeptics. The film seems utterly uninterested in tackling the true horrors and long-lasting damage created by Fox News and instead goes for a ‘you-go-girl’ faux-empowerment tale of rich white women standing up to a bad man. Megyn Kelly, of all people, gets no interiority or complexity beyond the central focus on her relationship with Ailes. It’s utterly disingenuous to watch a scene where Gretchen Carlson, who made her name working for a network defined by its hostilities and open attacks on anything vaguely left-wing, lectures a heckler by saying the mark of someone’s worth is how they treat people who disagree with them. Robbie fares better, but she’s also playing a fictional character, which ends up undercutting the supposed edge of the narrative. The central trio of actresses are all excellent – the prosthetics put on Charlize Theron to make her look like Megyn Kelly are scarily good – but Bombshell as a whole is a dishearteningly simplistic take on a much trickier issue, and it does nobody any favors to reduce the entire case to such a black-and-white perspective.

#11 Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Based on a book by journalist Kim Barker, Tina Fey stars as a dissatisfied journalist who takes a short assignment as a war correspondent in Afghanistan and finds her calling amid the chaos of the American occupation of the country during their war on global terrorism. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is aiming for something sharper than it ultimately ends of being and often seems too timid to tackle the rawness of its central hook. The stark contrast between the hard-partying of the well-protected American journalists to the backdrop of an endlessly bombed nation isn’t given the room it needs to breathe, and the focus primarily falls on Barker’s tale of a quirky white female empowerment fantasy. The jokes are also just not that funny, even with Fey trying her hardest. Robbie doesn’t get much to do either, playing a BBC correspondent who befriends Fey.

#10 Focus

One of the brief highlights of Suicide Squad was the chemistry between Robbie and Will Smith, so if you enjoyed that then Focus is the movie for you. Taking its inspiration from conman capers like Charade, Focus paired up Smith and Robbie as a pair of grifters with Robbie being trained in the tutelage of the scam by Smith’s seasoned veteran. The locations are sunny and gorgeous, the banter is fun, and the crimes themselves are juicy to watch unfold. It’s a good, if not great, movie that’s buoyed by the crackling sparks between its two highly attractive and charming stars.

#9 Goodbye Christopher Robin

Don’t expect anything especially radical in this biopic of beloved children’s author A.A. Milne and his son for whom the world of Winnie the Pooh was created. It stridently follows the rulebook of the biographical genre, right down to shoving Robbie into a thankless spouse role that seems mandatory for such narratives. What lifts the Goodbye Christopher Robin up is its examination of the impact that celebrity has one the lives of the famous and their families. The media frenzy that followed Milne and would plague his son well into adulthood thanks to the popularity of the books inspired by his childhood is shown as a fracturing and contradictory force. If only the entire film was as gutsy as these elements.

#8 About Time

For some film fans, the work of Richard Curtis will always be utterly unbearable. If you have a low tolerance for hefty scoops of sentimentality then Curtis is your cinematic kryptonite. For everyone else, however, he is a key figure in the rom-com genre and About Time sees him on top form. Domhnall Gleeson, who seems tailor-made for the Hugh Grant-esque leading role, plays a man who finds out that all the men of his family have the secret ability to travel back in time, which he uses to try and improve his life. The luminous Rachel McAdams is the real draw here, and it’s yet another movie where Robbie has a small but key role. Still, if you need a good old-fashioned weepie romance to curl up with on a rainy weekend. About Time is exactly what you need.

#7 Mary Queen of Scots

Josie Rourke’s reimagining of the rivalry between Mary Stuart and Queen Elizabeth I plays it pretty loose with historical fact: Mary has a Scottish accent when it would have been French in reality; the casting is thankfully more racially diverse than the average period drama; and the decision to show the two women as former friends turned rivals poisoned by the patriarchy they found themselves smothered by made more than a few historians raise an eyebrow. Adherence to the truth is not really the point of Mary Queen of Scots, however: This is a subversion of well-worn stories that allows for an examination of how the tales of women of the past are typically diluted into nothingness. It also has a keen awareness of how women’s bodies were weaponized, be it the status of Elizabeth as the virgin queen or Mary being shamed by the clergy for her alleged wantonness. Robbie and Saoirse Ronan chew the scenery, adding some soapy delights to what could have been a staid history lesson. Robbie in particular seems to be heartily enjoying herself as a highly theatrical woman who always gets her own way.

#6 Suite Française

Suite française is a novel written by Irène Némirovsky, a Jewish-French writer who was murdered at Auschwitz and whose work wasn’t published until 1998, wherein it immediately became a literary phenomenon. The film adaptation was hyped up as an awards winner in the making but fell by the wayside in large part thanks to the ineptitude and eventual scandals of its original distributor, The Weinstein Company. It’s a shame because Suite Française is an understated and old-school period drama. Robbie has a very small role, and the movie is mostly a vehicle for the always exemplary Michelle Williams. The romance subplot may prove too saccharine for some but as a story of a community held in the growing stranglehold of fascism, it is often intensely compelling.

#5 Z for Zachariah

Robert C. O’Brien’s post-apocalyptic children’s novel Z for Zachariah is a classic of the genre and one that has delighted and terrified kids for decades. For the film adaptation, director Craig Zobel (The Hunt) aged up the protagonist, played by Robbie, and added an entirely new character to what is normally a two-person tale. Indeed, the movie of Z for Zachariah doesn’t bear much resemblance to the book it’s adapted from, but that doesn’t make the film itself a disappointment. Robbie’s grounded performance and her chemistry with both Chris Pine and Chiwetel Ejiofor keep the story grounded in a bleakness and ceaseless anxiety that nails the tone of the novel.

#4 Birds of Prey

Robbie produced and helped to shepherd Birds of Prey to the big-screen, and the end result is one of the best movies of the modern DC era. Director Cathy Yan and screenwriter Christina Hodson concocted an eye-burning mish-mash of rowdy girl gang movie, riotous comedy, bloody pastel music video, and Looney Tunes cartoon. Robbie is given way more room to explore the manic energy and conflicted ambition of Harley, and she has an incredible cast to bounce off of, including Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Ewan McGregor, Rosie Perez, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead. It’s a real delight to see a modern superhero movie so wholeheartedly embrace its feminine energy as well as the aesthetic of a teenage girl’s trapper keeper, albeit with a lot more violence. There’s a fizziness to Birds of Prey that carefully conceals a deeper emotional core, tackling the importance of family in whatever form it takes. It’s a shame that the film didn’t set the box office alight as it deserved, but thanks to its success on VOD and DVD, we may see more of Yan and Robbie’s vision for Harley and DC in the near future.

#3 I, Tonya

Robbie claims that she had no idea who the notorious figure skater Tonya Harding was when she got her hands on the script for I, Tonya. That didn’t stop her from putting in arguably her greatest performance in Craig Gillespie’s pitch-black biopic that blends the mockumentary style with brutal realism. The film takes a more sympathetic angle on Harding, focusing on her past as a domestic abuse victim and her struggle to be taken seriously in an infamously elitist sport. It’s simultaneously hilarious and hard-hitting, a tale of classism that forces audiences familiar with the Harding case to re-examine their own biases and the culture that turned her into a national joke even before Nancy Kerrigan came along. Some critics took umbrage with this stance, especially since Harding’s involvement in the Kerrigan case was never really up for debate, but the power of I, Tonya lies in its understanding of what it means to be an unruly woman. Robbie nails the pent-up resentment and desperation of Harding, a woman who nobody seems to like or root for even as she surpasses their expectations. Allison Janney may have been the one who took home all the awards for her scenery-chewing performance as Harding’s mother but this is Robbie’s movie through and through.

#2 The Wolf of Wall Street

Martin Scorsese has often been criticized for his lack of restraint in his work (a claim that overlooks the subtleties and deceptively light touch of many of his best movies), but seeing him completely commit to the frenetic frenzy of sex, drugs, and greed in The Wolf of Wall Street is exhausting in the best possible way. Clocking in at three hours long (Scorsese even claims he had trouble getting it cut down from four hours), this somewhat-true tale of conman stockbroker Jordan Belfort throws absolutely everything at the screen. Some critics questioned the film’s portrayal of Belfort and his fellow scammers, claiming it glorified their actions, but that seems too reductive a reading of the film. It invites you into this alluring world of excess, shows you how intoxicating it can be, then leaves you, along with Belfort himself, with the hangover, the loneliness, and the after-effects of his crimes. Its irreverence is a savvy cloak to conceal its morality and willingness to force its audience to question their own morals. Robbie has great chemistry with a top-notch Leonardo DiCaprio and her presence as the trophy wife of Belfort’s dreams reveals how often this sort of unchecked decadence relies on the exploitation of women (a theme further solidified in the scene where one worker has her head shaved and only the audience sees her obvious trauma afterward.) It’s not Scorsese’s best but it’s always a thrill to note that, even in his 70s, the director has lost none of his zeal.

#1 Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

While Robbie isn’t on-screen for long in Quentin Tarantino’s love letter to an era of Hollywood and movie-making in flux, she leaves an indelible impression on the drama whenever she does appear. As Sharon Tate, one of the 1960s’ most notable and tragic pop-culture icons, Robbie is given the unenviable task of playing a near-mythic figure in cinema history and making her a fully-rounded human even as the film focuses on her ethereal nature as a mascot of sorts to the period. Through sheer presence and irrepressible joy, Robbie conveys the spirit of Tate and makes you view the late actress as more than her horrific end. Of course, it helps that the rest of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is so excellent, with Tarantino making a solid case for this quietly epic tale being his best ever movie. It’s a multi-layered story of the end of the old ways of Hollywood and the precarity of what was yet to come. It’s less a love letter to that time and its people than a remix, typical of Tarantino’s delightfully unfaithful approach to history. The double-team of Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt is unbeatable. The pair have never been more fun on-screen. The huge ensemble of blink-and-you’ll-miss-them cameos adds further range to this expansive tale. Tarantino’s made more than his fair share of great films but there’s something indescribably special about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood that is sure to last the test of time.

About The Author

Kayleigh Donaldson
(473 Articles Published)

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Kayleigh Donaldson is a full-time pop culture and film writer from Scotland. A features contributor to Screen Rant, her work can also be found regularly on Pajiba and SYFY FANGRRLS. She also co-hosts The Hollywood Read podcast. Her favorite topics include star studies, classic Hollywood, box office analysis, industry gossip, and caring way too much about the Oscars. She can mostly be found on Twitter at @Ceilidhann.

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