The 25 greatest George Clooney roles, ranked

Clooney took his “next Cary Grant” hype out for a walk in this agreeable if uninspired romantic comedy that pairs him with the great Michelle Pfeiffer. Clooney’s comedic timing is spot-on, and he generates real chemistry with Pfeiffer, but the material is so limp and formulaic that the film never once takes flight. Twenty-three years later, it’s memorable only as a missed opportunity.

The popular NBC sitcom was beginning to wheeze a bit in its seventh season when the easy-on-the-eyes George Burnett (Clooney) turned up to help Mrs. Garrett and the girls fix up the fire-damaged “Edna’s Edibles." The Cloon-dog rocked a heavy-duty mullet as Burnett, but that was the style back in 1985. From his very first episode, Clooney set hearts a-flutter (though he never romanced any of the girls), and sent TV producers scrambling to get the Kentucky-born hunk cast on their shows.

Wolfgang Petersen’s adaptation of Sebastian Junger’s bestseller was Clooney’s first non-critically-drubbed box office smash (sorry “Batman and Robin”), though it wasn’t sold on his name as much as the terrifyingly big wave on the poster. It’s a ho-hum, soundstage-bound movie, but Clooney grounds the Andrea Gail scenes with his convincingly gruff sea captain demeanor.

Bill Murray’s made-for-Netflix Christmas special concludes with a grand production of “Santa Claus Wants Some Lovin’” sung with almost tuneful gusto by Murray and his special guest George Clooney. The idea of celebrity has been so thoroughly cheapened over the last decade that it’s rare to find anyone capable of making it seem attractive or fun. Clooney does this whenever he drops by a late night talk show, and he brings that ingratiatingly sly let’s-throw-a-party exuberance to this holiday lark.

Clooney’s directorial debut is a stylistically bold biopic about the alleged CIA wetwork background of “The Gong Show” host Chuck Barris. Sam Rockwell is aces as the seductive, slightly off game show emcee who is recruited into the exciting world of international assassination by U.S. government agent Jim Byrd — played with mischievous malevolence by Clooney.

Clooney directed this film based on the play by Beau Willimon (who went on to create a little show called "House of Cards") and takes the least showy role in the film as a Democratic presidential primary candidate willing to do anything to get an edge over his political opponent. Most of the acting fireworks are generated by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti as rival campaign strategists, but Clooney is subtly effective as a man who has cast aside principles in the pursuit of a key primary victory.

Clooney plays the movie star in the Coen brothers’ madcap Hollywood satire, but he’s just one part of an all-star ensemble cast that includes Scarlett Johansson, Josh Brolin and Tilda Swinton. As kidnapped-by-communists actor Baird Whitlock, Clooney summons up the humorlessness of biblical epic stars like Charlton Heston, while layering on the dopiness that he typically brings to his Coen characters. The highlight: Whitlock’s monologue about shaving Danny Kaye’s back.

Sold as a two-hander about a pair of astronauts stranded on a crippled space station, “Gravity” winds up mostly being a solo showcase for Sandra Bullock. There aren’t many movie stars who’d take a role where they’re killed off in the first act, but, as he’s proved time and again throughout his career, Clooney is a selfless artist who loves to see his costars shine. 

Steven Soderbergh almost directed this 1920s-set pro football comedy in the late 1990s, but the project languished in development hell until Clooney took it on as his directorial follow-up to “Good Night, and Good Luck." He also stars as the team captain of the Duluth Bulldogs, Jimmy “Dodge” Connelly, who winds up in a love triangle with his promising young recruit, Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski), and newspaper reporter, Lexie Littleton (Renée Zellweger). It’s a hit-or-miss affair, but Clooney and Zellweger shoot off some serious sparks in their scenes together.  

Clooney was in his fourth season of “ER” when he took his first crack at big-screen stardom in this gonzo vampire flick from Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. Clooney cuts a convincingly menacing figure as Seth Gecko, a career criminal murdering his way across the U.S. — and, misguidedly, into Mexico — with his brother, Richard (Tarantino). Clooney’s bobblehead-TV tics had yet to be drummed out of him, but his movie-star magnetism is undeniable.

Divorce attorney Miles Massey may be the most mentally agile character Clooney has played for the Coen brothers. The inventor of the foolproof “Massey Pre-nup," Miles meets his match when he goes up against multiple-divorcee Marilyn Rexworth (Catherine Zeta-Jones). This zany screwball comedy isn’t top-tier Coens, but Clooney is having the time of his life as the dental hygiene-obsessed Massey.

When corporations downsize, Ryan Bingham is the smooth-talking liaison sent in to motivate the newly jobless into seizing the dreadful day as the first step in the next great adventure of their lives. But along the way, Bingham has forgotten to live a life of his own, something he recognizes when his company teams him with a young woman (Anna Kendrick) with a new, less personal way of severing people from their livelihoods. Clooney is terrific as a carefree cad staring into the abyss of a future he never prepared for, but the movie is too glib and self-satisfied to drive home Bingham’s despair.

As the son of a broadcaster, this drama about Edward R. Murrow’s doggedly critical coverage of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s overzealous anti-Communist crusade was a labor of love for Clooney. He not only directed and co-wrote the screenplay (receiving Oscar nominations in both categories), but also turned in a terrific supporting performance as Murrow’s loyal producer, Fred Friendly. 

“He’s very handsome.” “He knows it.” This exchange from the pilot episode of “ER” is in reference to Clooney’s Dr. Doug Ross, the womanizing physician who would — to the surprise of no one — become the breakout character of the show’s sensational first season. Ten years after his first credited TV appearance (as a thug on “Riptide”), Clooney had finally arrived as a full-blown superstar. As careless as Ross could be personally with the hearts of others, we were always drawn to the character’s professional compassion and expertise — and those darn good looks. He really was very handsome.

“Are you cussing with me?” Clooney gives vigorous voice to the eponymous paterfamilias of a canid brood trying to survive without getting their tails (or worse) shot off by the farmers whose food they steal. This is Clooney’s only major voiceover acting performance (he contributed a few lines as a doctor in “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut”), and while it’s hard to think of an animated character more suited to his velvet-throated delivery, we’d love to see him give it another go.

This Hawaii-set family dramedy from Alexander Payne stars Clooney as a husband struggling to hold his family together after a boating accident leaves his wife in a coma. It’s bad enough that his teenage daughter (Shailene Woodley) is in the throes of a drug-addicted downward spiral; it all hits rock bottom when he learns his wife was having an affair with another man before her incapacitation. Clooney accesses the ridiculousness of Ulysses Everett McGill from “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” but reins those histrionics in to paint a compassionate and deeply human portrait of a man finally learning how to be a father.

Pure pleasure. Clooney and Soderbergh rounded up their movie star buddies for this all-star remake of the Rat Pack heist classic about a crew of suave criminals pulling off a logistically complex multi-casino robbery. It’s intentionally ephemeral escapism, but it’s so cleverly plotted and stylishly shot that you don’t mind the weightlessness. Clooney is all movie star charm as he wittily schemes with Brad Pitt and romances his old flame played by Julia Roberts.

David O. Russell’s Gulf War opus casts Clooney as Major Archie Gates, an ethically challenged U.S. soldier leading a small group of soldiers on an illicit mission to abscond with a stash of gold bullion (not the little cubes you put in hot water to make soup). Clooney’s the anchor of the film — no thanks to O. Russell, who put the start through an absurdly torturous pre-production process to break him of his television actor habits. 

One of Clooney’s most endearing qualities is his willingness to play the fool, and it’s hard to think of a more mentally inadequate character in his filmography than Harry Pfarrer, the sex-addicted U.S. Marshal in the Coen brothers’ darkly hilarious Beltway comedy. Clooney plays Pfarrer to the type-A hilt; he’s a high-strung sex maniac who, when he’s not screwing or trying “to get a run in," seems to be constructing something nefarious in his basement. Clooney’s sole encounter with his “Ocean’s” series cohort Brad Pitt is mind-blowingly hilarious.

Clooney grew a beard and packed on 30 pounds to play CIA operative Bob Barnes (loosely based on real-life spook Robert Baer) in Stephen Gaghan’s sprawling, morally murky drama about oil and power in the post-9/11 Middle East. The physically impressive performance earned Clooney the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, and left him with a severe spinal injury — incurred during the shooting of the film’s harrowing torture scene — that resulted in numerous operations and pain so debilitating that he contemplated suicide.

A nasty change of pace for Clooney, this Anton Corbijn-directed existential action flick casts him as a cold-blooded hitman cornered in a mountain village in Southern Italy. Corbijn’s film is more of a character sketch than a study, but Clooney is absolutely mesmerizing as a murderer desperate to slip the noose and disappear. It’s a mostly quiet and austere movie, leaving Clooney an unusual amount of space to inhabit an uncharacteristically vicious and unredeemable person. He’s never been more emotionally remote onscreen, and that’s not easy for a natural extrovert like Clooney.

Clooney plays a pomaded Ulysses in the Coen brothers’ redneck-musical rendition of Homer’s "The Odyssey" and while he wasn’t quite up to crooning “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow” for the soundtrack (he’s lip-syncing Dan Tyminski’s vocals), his non-singing performance is a constant marvel of outsized physical comedy and goofball facial expressions that verge on Looney Tunes broadness without ever devolving into Jim Carrey-esque mugging. It’s a bona-fide brilliant turn in the Coens’ most joyous and hopeful film.

A year after the gaudy debacle of “Batman and Robin," Clooney finally made good on his leading man promise as charismatic bank robber Jack Foley in Steven Soderbergh’s brilliant adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s crime novel. Clooney’s over-confident crook sets off sexual sparks with U.S. Marshal, Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) who he briefly kidnaps during a prison break, an attraction that is consummated in one of the most elegantly edited sex scenes in film history. It’s a beautiful slow burn of a movie, and it ignited Clooney’s big-screen career.

Psychologist Chris Kelvin takes off into the cosmos, ready for anything — except for coming into contact with the reincarnation of his deceased wife, Rheya (Natasha McElhone). Steven Soderbergh’s surprisingly spiritual riff on Stanislaw Lem’s agnostic sci-fi novel throws most of the heavy lifting on Clooney as a logic-bound man attempting to comprehend the incomprehensible whilst orbiting a strange planet way out in the cosmos. Clooney is a marvel: perplexed, terrified and vulnerable in ways few movie stars have ever allowed themselves to be.

Clooney received his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor as the world-weary law firm fixer who uncovers a corporate-sponsored murder conspiracy when one of his co-workers (Tom Wilkinson) turns up dead. Tony Gilroy’s legal thriller possesses the sinister paranoid shadings of ‘70s classics like “The Parallax View” and “Three Days of the Condor." It’s the perfect throwback film for a throwback movie star like Clooney, and he thrives here as a defeated man looking to throw one last righteous punch.