Keira Knightley at 40: her best 20 best films – ranked!

The Guardian

20-03-2025

Knightley's first big role was in this teen thriller, about four private school kids partying in a bomb shelter, where it all goes predictably haywire. It's a horror, and not just for the sheer dominance of low-rise bootcut jeans. Even in its more hysterical moments, Knightley brings nuance to the posh-girl stereotype.
Ostensibly about the poet Dylan Thomas, this ended up being more about the complicated relationship between his wife, Caitlin (Sienna Miller), and his ex-girlfriend, Vera. As a film, it is a bit of a mess and struggles to soar, but the performances, and particularly Knightley's turn as the glamorous Vera, help to lift it.
The first of two films in which Knightley has to navigate the end of the world, and one of the bleakest conceits for a Christmas comedy ever thought up. While Knightley is perfectly at ease with a thriller or a period drama, this gruesome dinner-party piece shows she can do uptight country house black comedy, too.
As the decoy and 'loyal bodyguard' to Natalie Portman's Queen Amidala, Knightley gets to act the part of an actor, of sorts. She spends most of the film cloaked in black, in heavy makeup, delivering lines with a regal monotony, but it was a splashy start to her big Hollywood career.
Conceptually ahead of its time and with a cast far better than you might expect, Lorene Scafaria's film sees Knightley again hanging out at the apocalypse, this time accompanying Steve Carell. Watching his dopey misanthropic energy collide with Knightley doing her best manic Brits-y dream girl is quite the ride.
This noir-ish take on the infamous serial killer and the journalist who gave him his moniker sees Knightley playing a hard-boiled, tenacious reporter. Ultimately, the film is less about the killer/s than it is about the victims, and about journalist Loretta McLaughlin's uphill battle to have the case, and herself, taken seriously.
Knightley was 17 when she played Juliet, the subject of Andrew Lincoln's silent, card-holding declaration of his affections towards his best mate's wife, which is either disgusting or romantic, depending on how you look at it (Knightley has hedged her bets, calling it 'creepy and sweet'). She doesn't have to do a lot here, but the film, and that scene, have taken on a seemingly endless afterlife of their own.
This likable ensemble saw Knightley playing the real-life historian and activist Sally Alexander. It took the rise of second-wave feminism and the plot to disrupt the 1970 Miss World pageant, and used them as a semi-screwball caper. Knightley was more of a straight woman, but its playful underbelly was a way for it to make some complex points about the protest and who was included, or not, in the uproar.
She recently called the films 'a very confused place in her head', but this was the blockbuster franchise that made her a box office star. As Elizabeth Swann, Knightley gamely swashbuckled her way through the high seas in a sort of high-end, big-budget, crowd-pleasing panto.
On paper, it should have been unbearably twee, but it's a crowd-pleaser, and then some. Knightley sings her way through this modern-day fairytale about a recently dumped folk singer who crosses paths with Mark Ruffalo's recently fired A&R man. Is it possible for them to sidestep the corporate machine? She plays a lot of songs in a lot of different places to try to find out.
David Cronenberg takes Knightley's long-established proficiency in a corset and, well, Cronenbergs it. As Sabina Spielrein, one of Carl Jung's psychiatric patients, and later one of the first women to become a psychoanalyst, Knightley does some serious acting. It is a film stuffed with big performances, and she more than holds her own.
She shines as the titular and put-upon Georgiana, who at 17 is married off to the Duke of Devonshire and set to work to produce an heir. It has all the elements of the key Knightley roles: a country house and a woman who rejects social expectations while strapped into some heavy corsetry and also being somewhat doomed, despite a steady display of defiance.
It was perhaps inevitable that Knightley would end up taking on Tolstoy's complex heroine in this faithful period drama, albeit seen through the less conventional lens of director and regular collaborator Joe Wright. It is a formidable task, and she delivers a performance that cuts through some of its more experimental flourishes.
Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, about clones created in a lab and raised as organ donors, is now a school curriculum staple. While Carey Mulligan takes the lead as Kathy, Knightley is more spirited as her best friend and occasional foil, Ruth. Despite the heavy subject matter, the film chooses a taciturn, almost workaday approach, but Knightley embodies its quiet, steady sense of tragedy.
If Knightley sometimes errs towards stiff-upper-lip restraint, then she lets loose in this retelling of the French author's first book, published under her husband's name, Willy. When the marriage becomes toxic and she rejects his controlling ways and finds her own voice, she starts to explore big and exuberant questions about sex, talent and fame.
This slow-burn fan favourite continues to win new aficionados today, two decades after its low-key release. The film belongs to Parminder Nagra's Jess, but as sidekick Jules, Knightley gives heart and depth to the footballing tomboy fighting her mother's expectations of who she should be.
The first of Knightley's two Oscar nominations came for her Elizabeth Bennet, in Joe Wright's starry and elegant Austen adaptation. There are so many versions of the character on screen that it can be difficult to find a new way in, but Knightley employs every one of her skills here, carrying the movie with her abrasive yet impossibly charming Lizzie.
Her second Oscar nomination was for best supporting actress in the accomplished Alan Turing biopic, in which she plays Turing's friend, colleague in code-breaking and – briefly – fiancee, Joan Clarke. As Turing, Benedict Cumberbatch finds a perfect scene partner in Knightley, who ups the cut-glass vowels and finds a magnetic, brittle veneer of her own.
The vowels are even more clipped and regal in Wright's period masterpiece, which took Ian McEwan's novel and transformed it into gorgeous, rich cinema. It may be where Knightley's key oeuvre – posh, tragic and spirited – flourished first; as the glamorous and doomed Cecilia, it is certainly where it reaches perfection.
Out of period costume, Knightley was at her career best in this underrated film about Katharine Gun, the GCHQ translator and whistleblower who felt compelled to leak documents about the US manipulation of evidence for the impending Iraq war. The friction between moral and professional duty is remarkable, and it showed she could offer a totally different interpretation of posh, tragic and spirited.