10 Best Bob Hoskins Movies, Ranked

A singular acting force to be reckoned with, Bob Hoskins was a legendary British character actor who was so good at being a character actor, he graduated – in a sense – to become an unlikely leading man. Throughout his acting career, he thrived in both supporting and lead roles, first coming to prominence on the big screen in the early 1980s, and continuing to work until shortly before his passing in 2014, at the age of 71.

There’s no other actor who brings the same unique pairing of energy and screen presence to film as Bob Hoskins did, and for that reason, his most notable movies are worth celebrating, many of them holding up well to this day. Some of his very best titles are ranked below, showcasing his talents as an actor while also generally being very good (or sometimes simply underrated) films, starting with the good and ending with the great.

10 'Hook' (1991)

Director: Steven Spielberg

Look, Hook is not flawless by any means, and at best is probably definable as an over-hated Steven Spielberg movie, given it’s one with its fair share of detractors. That being said, some people don’t put much weight on the movie's problems (it is overlong and tonally a bit messy), and instead enjoy the imaginative story about a grown-up Peter Pan and plenty of the film’s entertainingly over-the-top performances.

Robin Williams was an odd casting choice for the lead role, but he makes it work, and Dustin Hoffman hams it up successfully as Captain Hook. Similarly great is Bob Hoskins appearing here as Smee, a rather perfect casting decision with Hoskins having enough fun in the role to make all the scenes centering on him and Hoffman entertaining. Hook’s uneven, sure, but it definitely has its moments, and Hoskins is involved in a good number of them.

Hook

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9 'Stay' (2005)

Director: Marc Forster

Stay has sort of stayed in the public consciousness in the years since its release, defined as a kind of cult movie that was fairly unsuccessful when it first hit theaters, but has managed a decent amount of acclaim following said original release. It certainly has an impressive cast, given it stars Ewan McGregor, Ryan Gosling, Naomi Watts, and Bob Hoskins.

As for the narrative found in Stay, that’s a little harder to effectively summarize, given this is a twist-filled mystery/psychological thriller film about a psychiatrist and an unable young patient, and the way the two impact each other’s lives. It’s challenging and a little overblown at times, but Stay does have enough intriguing elements to be worth watching for those who like their thrillers twisty and aren’t intimidated by stories that don’t always make 100% logical sense.

Rent on Apple TV

8 'Enemy at the Gates' (2001)

Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud

Enemy at the Gates is an underrated war movie overall; not perfect by any means, but a little stronger and more compelling than its reputation might suggest it is. It principally revolves around two soldiers during the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II: one a German, and one a Russian, and the extended/intense battle of both wits and endurance they engage in, given both are snipers. Further scenes aside from this central battle also provide context and backstory where needed.

Jude Law and Joseph Fiennes play the two lead roles here, with Bob Hoskins’s role being another memorable one where he’s a supporting player. He portrays the real-life Soviet Lieutenant-General Nikita Khrushchev, who went on to lead the Soviet Union following Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, though Enemy at the Gates takes place when he was in the military. With the entire movie, one has to move past the fact that English and American actors are playing Germans/Russians, but once that’s done, it’s easy to appreciate the performances and engagingly tense story being told here.

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7 'Mermaids' (1990)

Director: Richard Benjamin

Admittedly, Mermaids is most notable for its female cast, with the lead characters here being played by Winona Ryder, Cher, and Christina Ricci. Ryder and Ricci play two siblings who have a tumultuous lifestyle thanks to their mother, played by Cher, given she often moves their family unit from town to town, with both sisters hoping that one day they’ll all be able to settle for good.

Bob Hoskins plays a romantic interest for Cher’s character, and someone who has the potential to give such a character a reason to stop moving around and at last make a small town something approaching a permanent home. Mermaids is a solid romance/family dramedy with the entire cast – both its old and young members – collectively firing on all cylinders and ensuring the entire film is appropriately engaging and even moving when it needs to be.

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6 'Nixon' (1995)

Director: Oliver Stone

Four years after JFK, Oliver Stone made another 3+ hour political film that moves at a rapid pace and feels overwhelming in all the best ways: an unconventional biopic about Richard Nixon, simply called Nixon. It has a great Anthony Hopkins performance at its center, with him playing the titular role while the premise, broadly speaking, focuses on the infamous President’s rise and fall, the latter being particularly linked with the Watergate scandal.

It's a film where you don’t just get Hopkins, but you also get Hoskins, with the latter portraying J. Edgar Hoover (a historical figure who’s also been played by the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Sheen). Hoskins is great, Hopkins is great, and there are too many other well-known actors here to count them all (the same can be said of JFK). As a film, Nixon can feel dangerously unwieldy and perhaps too chaotic at times, but the experience of watching it is also absorbing and effectively dizzying, and the acting’s strong across the board.

Rent on Apple TV

5 'Mona Lisa' (1986)

Director: Neil Jordan

Movies with Bob Hoskins in the lead role weren’t unheard of by any means, but they were still less common than those films in which he had a (frequently memorable) supporting role. Mona Lisa shines and stands out within his filmography because he is the main character here, and the film as a whole is also very compelling, blending thriller, neo-noir, crime, and romance genres seamlessly.

Narratively, Mona Lisa is about a man who gets into a situation far more complex than he could have ever foreseen once he takes on the job of being a driver for a high-class call-girl. It’s stylishly directed by the often dependable Neil Jordan, and if a great lead performance by Hoskins isn’t enough to entice you, Mona Lisa is also home to a memorable supporting turn from the great Michael Caine.

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4 'Pink Floyd: The Wall' (1982)

Director: Alan Parker

It’s hard to know how to categorize Pink Floyd: The Wall, given there’s not much else like it out there. It takes the iconic 1979 double album, The Wall, and provides visuals for its complex and oftentimes obscure narrative, which is about a troubled musician who feels unable to deal with both fame and his tragic past, and ends up isolating himself physically and emotionally from those around him.

The film features the album in its entirety, playing out like an extended music video for approximately an hour-and-a-half, and also feels something like a particularly dark and adult-themed musical, too. Bob Hoskins is only in the film briefly, as a band manager who forces the emotionally empty musician protagonist to perform no matter what, with this main sequence being memorable nonetheless because it features one of Pink Floyd’s greatest and most famous songs, “Uncomfortably Numb.”

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3 'Brazil' (1985)

Director: Terry Gilliam

Brazil represents the science fiction genre at its wildest and best, being a humorous yet distressing and stressful dystopian film about one man’s life spiraling rapidly out of control, all the while dreams and reality continually seem to clash. It’s overwhelming and even a little repetitive by design, but the experience of watching Brazil is hard to shake, for better or worse.

Jonathan Pryce plays the hapless protagonist, Sam Lowry, with various supporting actors showing up – usually briefly – and stealing certain scenes in the process. Bob Hoskins is one such actor in Brazil, playing a wonderfully evil and petty heating engineer, with Robert De Niro also impressing in a small role here, portraying a rebellious and oddly heroic heating engineer/air-conditioning repairman, who’s also an alleged terrorist. All that’s only scratching the surface of how wonderfully weird Brazil gets.

Brazil

Rent on Apple TV

2 'The Long Good Friday' (1980)

Director: John Mackenzie

In the pantheon of classic British gangster movies, few are quite as good as The Long Good Friday. This film’s also notable for being something of a star-making role for Bob Hoskins, and an early indication that he was absolutely capable of carrying a movie, here portraying an ambitious and unlucky gangster whose life unravels dramatically over a surprisingly short period of time.

It’s possible to see The Long Good Friday’sinfluence on future filmmakers like Guy Ritchie, and even on the crime genre as a whole, given its thrilling and distinctive blend of gritty thrills, dark humor, and hard-hitting drama. It’s easily worth considering as one of the very best Bob Hoskins movies, both for the strength of his central performance and for the fact that all the other elements of the film prove great, too.

The Long Good Friday

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1 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' (1988)

Director: Robert Zemeckis

It takes a good deal to usurp a movie as strong as The Long Good Friday from a ranking like this one, but 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a special kind of film. It functions as both a throwback to film noir movies of old and a broadly comedic partly-animated film, following a private detective getting wrapped up in a case that involves “toons;” cartoon characters brought to life that interact with a live-action depiction of 1940s Los Angeles.

It's a technical marvel of a movie, and one of the highlights within Robert Zemeckis’s technologically surprising (and usually compelling) filmography. Hoskins giving a great lead performance here is something that takes Who Framed Roger Rabbit from being very good to great, ultimately, given how straight he manages to play his role while continually (and convincingly) interacting with 2D-animated characters and objects. It’s an iconic film, and arguably the one that shines the brightest within Hoskins’s body of work.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

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NEXT: The Best Sean Connery Movies, Ranked

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