Until he was in his thirties, George Clooney was absolutely skint. Then along came ER and a run of bangers with Steven Soderbergh, and he became the leading man’s leading man. Slicker than an eel in a vat of WD40, by turns laconic and wounded, he was a turn-of-the-millennium Cary Grant mixed with a bit of Dean Martin. During his first sprint of big-screen success – between Out of Sight and Ocean’s Twelve – Clooney’s default mode was smirking cool. But then, a little like fellow hunk-with-a-heart Robert Redford before him, he cultivated a harder, worthier edge to his picks alongside screwball stuff like The Men Who Stare at Goats. Behind the big, soft eyes there’s a deep, liberal conscience in there.
Clooney also has a bit of a thing for playing the hurt husband or boyfriend trying to make good. Danny Ocean, Ulysses Everitt McGill, Ryan Bingham from Up In The Air, Chris Kelvin in Solaris: if you need someone to look both rueful and dishy at the same time, get Clooney. And, on top of that, he’s usually the first to bring up Batman And Robin and the bat-nipples, which you’ve got to admire.
As he returns in romcom mode with his regular co-star Julia Roberts in Ticket To Paradise, check out Empire’s list of his 10 best films.
The 10 Best George Clooney Movies
1 of 1010. From Dusk Till Dawn
Written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Robert Rodriguez, From Dusk Till Dawn is exactly as splenetic, mega-violent and delightfully pulpy as you’d hope. There are shades of Pulp Fiction in the set-up – two bad dudes who like wearing black suits breeze into town with a nefarious scheme on the go – but it swerves pretty sharply off-piste from there. Tarantino and Clooney are brothers Richie and Seth Gecko, who are lying low after robbing (and accidentally exploding) a liquor store. Grabbing a couple of hostages to smuggle them over the border to Mexico, the Geckos hit their rendez-vous point – a strip club in the desert which is actually, it turns out, a nest of vampires. These days, you’re unlikely to see Clooney in a lurid, blood-and-guts monster movie – but he suits it surprisingly well.
2 of 109. Fantastic Mr Fox
In his second voice acting role – he cameoed as a dog in South Park way back when, having been an early fan of Trey Stone and Matt Parker’s work – Clooney led Wes Anderson’s rustic stopmotion treat. It’s a sweet riff on his own Danny Ocean from Ocean’s Eleven but this time, the charming, semi-retired gentleman thief surrounded by a semi-competent gang is hoping to swipe farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean’s chickens, ducks, geese and turkeys rather than mountains of cash from casino bank vaults. Beautiful to look at and painstakingly crafted in a very homespun, tactile kind of way (Mr Fox’s double-breasted corduroy suit is a particular joy), the standard issue Anderson quirk is harnessed in the service of Roald Dahl’s story.
3 of 108. Gravity
Not one for the easily nauseated, Alfonso Cuaron’s head-spinning orbital disaster movie took The Poseidon Adventure and stuck it on board the Space Shuttle. Up there, Clooney is the breezily self-assured veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski, who’s guiding Sandra Bullock’s newbie Dr Ryan Stone through her first trip. Everything’s going pretty great until a cloud of space debris smashes into the shuttle and leaves the pair of them marooned, floating around their tin can. As much as it’s a mind-boggling technological achievement and a real-time 90-minute thriller, Gravity’s also a meditation on grief and how to press on through it to find a way back to life again. Clooney’s wise-cracking, country and western-loving Kowalski is wide-eyed with the beauty of the world, and points a way back to Earth for Stone.
4 of 107. Up In The Air
Bouncing around the country on flight after flight, hard-nosed Ryan Bingham is good at two things: sacking people on behalf of their employers, and giving talks about how possessions and relationships are a suffocating trap. His motto: “The slower we move, the faster we die.” Charming. But after a life living out of a suitcase and dropping commitments quicker than he would a moist towelette into a flight attendant’s binbag, the lifelong lone wolf realises he’s been missing the big picture. Bingham is probably Clooney’s most straightforwardly awful character and yet somehow – somehow! – his flippant cynicism never feels sour. Coming after the financial crash of 2008, it’s also a plea to corporate America to feel something for the legions of people who’d lost their jobs. Slightly less successful there.
5 of 106. Three Kings
The first Gulf War is winding up and Clooney’s disaffected Major Archie Gates is drifting toward the end of his tour of duty in David O. Russell’s droll and occasionally horrifying black comedy. His barely competent troops are kicking their heels and gagging for a proper shooting war; he’s seen so much horror he’s numb to it. One thing does perk him up though: word of a stash of Kuwaiti bullion buried in the desert. “You mean like them little cubes you put in hot water to make soup?” asks one of his underlings. Not entirely surprisingly, the mission to retrieve it turns into a disaster. It’s a very Gen X update of Kelly’s Heroes, and the only thing drier than the bare, stark desert which surrounds the troops are the laughs in the script, which dances on the very edge of a straightforward war-is-hell flick and an out-and-out farce.
6 of 105. Good Night, And Good Luck
Clooney’s second directing gig ushered in the Second Age of Clooney. His output turned more serious, and he turned his dishiness to the service of big civic ideas and worthy causes. Good Night, And Good Luck is one such passion project, which he mortgaged his own house to make. He plays Fred Friendly, journalist and producer working on Ed Murrow’s current affairs show. In 1953 Murrow is one of America’s most respected newsmen and his reporting brings him into the orbit of rabidly anti-communist Senator Joe McCarthy, whose witch-hunt for communists in the American establishment have – in the journalists’ eyes – poisoned public life. The morality here is as black-and-white as the film itself, but there are shades of grey teased out in Murrow and his crew. Taut, well-crafted stuff.
7 of 104. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
A reimagining of Homer’s Odyssey as a caper ranging across Mississippi during the Great Depression – packing in close-harmony singing, the Ku Klux Klan, and a case of mistaken identity involving a frog – wasn’t an obvious next move after Three Kings. But the Coen brothers’ endearingly daft follow-up to The Big Lebowski cemented Clooney as the leading man you go to when you want a bit of dash cut with knowing silliness. He and fellow escaped prisoners Pete and Delmar (John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson) set off on a quest for buried loot, only to get sidetracked by the thing Ulysses is really after: his family. Bruised and nearly broken, Clooney wears Ulysses’ wounded pride with a light touch and has a great feel for the snap of the Coens’ script. He’s a Dapper Dan man!
Read Empire's review of O Brother, Where Art Thou?
8 of 103. Michael Clayton
Legal thriller Clooney is one of the lesser-spotted varieties, but Michael Clayton suggests he should drop by the courtroom more often. Clayton is a shady fixer type for a law firm in New York, playing dirty and working legal loopholes that have got the firm’s clients snared up. Then one night, it turns out that he’s not quite as bulletproof as he thought he was, and there’s a price on his head from some deeply bad dudes. To get out of it, Clayton realises he’s going to have to start relying on the legal system he’s spent his professional life running rings around, and bring down a gigantic, evil agrobusiness corporation while he’s at it. Bourne trilogy writer Tony Gilroy – currently waging some Star Wars with his Rogue One spin-off Andor – is on directing duties and keeps the tension up throughout the twisting, barrelling action.
9 of 102. Out Of Sight
Before Danny Ocean, there was Jack Foley. He’s a bank robber who’s escaped from prison and is on the tail of a cache of diamonds he heard about on the inside – but he needs to stay a step ahead of both the law and a rival gang who want the jewels for themselves. After leaving ER, Out Of Sight was the point where Clooney’s easy charm started to catalyse into a particularly unstoppable form of star power. The scene where Foley bluffs his way through a bank robbery could easily have landed as threatening or cruel ("Your first time being robbed? You're doing great") but he plays it with such lightness and twinkle it’s hard not to melt. Steven Soderbergh and Clooney’s definitive heist flick was to come, but Out Of Sight is a treat of its own.
10 of 101. Ocean’s Eleven
If cinema’s taught us anything, it’s that getting involved in a heist is an incredibly stressful way of making an easy living. And yet if any slick kingpin’s going to convince you to put your liberty on the line to rob three casinos in one night, it’s going to be Clooney’s Danny Ocean. Like all great heist masterminds he’s fresh out of prison, and he’s reacting to his ex-wife getting a new boyf in the most mature way possible: by rinsing him of $160 million. The stacked cast (Julia Roberts, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Andy Garcia, Carl Reiner) bring their A-game, and Soderbergh’s stylish homage to mid-sixties Vegas glitz clicks into place so smoothly and confidently – powered by Clooney at the very apex of his most raffish, sauciest years, sparring with Brad Pitt’s Rusty – that it’s irresistible.