In 2015, acclaimed film journalist Hubert Cohen offered one of the most intriguing and disturbed statements about movies uttered since Maxim Gorky’s 1896, “Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows” — with some paraphrasing, Cohen claimed that Ryan Gosling was the final movie star. His explanation was that acting used to be an unrecreatable dance of charisma that gradually got lost to the realism of the person next door — that actors today are meant to be empathetically awkward, gorgeous people. But Audrey Hepburn, Marlon Brando, and Gosling are not; their levels of charisma and perfection breach “human,” finding hybridizations of recognizable beauty standards yet divine and inaccessible charm (for better or worse).
So, is it reasonable to claim that Gosling is the last movie star? What is it about Gosling that concocts that level of alienhood, and how does it impact the movies he’s in? This is an investigative list that doesn’t exactly order his performances, but offers a unique ranking: how good are these movies themselves, and how much do these movies’ quality have to do with Gosling’s universally comforting mystique? As we count down the days until his next project, such as the recently announced Ocean’s 11 prequel co-starring Barbie co-star Margot Robbie, here’s a closer look at Gosling’s filmography.
Updated August 25, 2022: If you love Ryan Gosling, you’ll be happy to know we’ve updated this article with additional content and entries.
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11 The Gray Man (2022)
AGBO
Avengers directors Anthony and Joe Russo have brought Mark Greaney’s The Gray Man espionage thriller to the big screen for an action-packed thrill ride, and at its center is none other than Gosling for his first on-screen effort in years. Characters chase each other around the world in huge set pieces while wracking up a massive body count. The storyline begins in 2003 with CIA black ops recruiter Donald Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton) giving a wise-alleck inmate (Gosling) a unique opportunity: Stay in jail for decades, or join an assassin training program called Sierra. Years later, Sierra Six (Gosling) arrives in Bangkok to team up with a sharp agent (Ana de Armas) to eliminate a traitor. Six ignores orders from the CIA Chief (Regé-Jean Page) about collateral damage, so Carmichael unleashes a former agent (Chris Evans), dismissed for torture and psychopathic tendencies, to eliminate Six. With a Gosling-starring sequel now in the works, The Gray Man is certainly worth a Netflix tune-in, despite the somewhat murky script.
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10 Remember the Titans (2000)
Walt Disney Pictures
As what may be today the most culturally prevalent movie among white Americans concerning racism, Remember the Titans has had an outstanding impact. Where movies like Do the Right Thing, Boyz n the Hood, and Malcolm X provoked layered, intellectual discussions about race in the 1990s, Titans responded by being simple and digestible enough for white audience members: a plethora of white faces and the template of a sports movie allowing acknowledgements of racism via a corn-fed Trojan Horse. This movie has absolutely no impact from Gosling’s role — his character a pretty face that introduces Gosling more than utilizes him — so it incidentally rests at 10th just for its merits.
9 The Nice Guys (2016)
Silver Pictures
The universal agreement about The Nice Guys is that it’s a fun movie about 1970s L.A. — not reaching the complex delights of Boogie Nights’ take on the porn industry, but not reaching the dismal convolutions of Inherent Vice’s take on the murder mystery. Much of Gosling’s impact here is in his juxtapositions with Russell Crowe, his “partner,” and Angourie Rice, his daughter: Crowe’s muscles mold Gosling into the penetrable brains of the operation, Rice’s intelligence remold Gosling into being just penetrable. The funny uncoolness of Gosling’s character against the inherent coolness of Gosling at times feels dissonant, like the five o’clock shadows adorning the high schoolers of Grease, but can ultimately be written off as an attempt at a new type for the actor — and works if you’re willing to help it do so.
8 Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011)
Carousel Productions
This movie knew what to do. Steve Carrell is the 40-Year-Old Near-Virgin coming out of a divorce from his high school sweetheart with no comprehension of mating rituals; Gosling is the Rembrandt of sex agreeing to My Fair Lady Carrell into bigger and brighter beds. The twist is that Gosling has a love interest (Emma Stone) for which he is once again foreign to romance — only knowing how to be perfect and not a fellow human (Stone gawks in frustration and refers to his body as “photoshopped”). Crazy, Stupid, Love’s fun and Gosling’s only one cog in it, but it knew how to use him well both as the Miyagi and the Kid.
7 The Notebook (2004)
New Line Cinema
If Titans was Gosling’s Mystic Pizza then The Notebook was his Pretty Woman. Overnight, he went from being a no-name to a heartthrob with more potency than a sex symbol: somebody you want to grow old with as your brain curdles with dementia. From the start of the movie, Gosling’s character Noah is predatory and manipulative to Rachel McAdams’ Allie, threatening suicide if she doesn’t date him, as most 17-year-old boys are ought to do. He then writes to her daily for a year with no responses, which, while not being Allie’s intentions, would still be grounds for a deserved and emotionally restorative restraining order. And then he builds her a house as she prepares for her wedding to a successful lawyer slash fortune heir — in any other world and with almost any other actor, The Notebook would be a Southern Taxi Driver, but only with Gosling’s kind eyes and terrific bone structure, the delirious demands of seemingly unreciprocated advances read as sincere, not sin.
6 La La Land (2016)
Summit Entertainment
This movie plays so deeply into the mystique of Gosling that it contends in a Dune-esque foreign-savior fashion that Gosling’s Sebastian is the one true white man who will save jazz. With Gosling’s charm, what was underneath a clear appropriation became so disguised with earnest fanaticism and appreciation for the music that the film became a Best Picture winner until the Academy instituted instant replay. Is La La Land amazing? It’s enjoyable and interesting and plenty of times original, but calling it amazing is like calling strawberry your favorite ice cream flavor — it’s great you’re exploring, but please explore further.
5 Blue Valentine (2010)
The Weinstein Company
This is where the list dives into the realm of truly fantastic movies. Blue Valentine looks at Dean (Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams) between their times of courtship and separation. Ultimately, the “love sometimes doesn’t work in the end” movie has been done well, and repeatedly, but the niche of this one is that love sometimes doesn’t work at any point and yet you stay together for warmth. Blue Valentine’s characters are banally cruel to one another out of carelessness, not malice, and while there are often somewhat sexist readings of this film that claim Dean was not supported adequately through a substance use disorder, was mistreated and left in the cold by his wife, etc., Dean’s reciprocated harm should be recognized not by how Dean maneuvers (seemingly with Gosling charm), but what he does (allowing his quaking jealousy to smother Cindy). The magic of Blue Valentine is that plenty of couples have the obvious villain and the hidden one, and Gosling’s allure is perfectly utilized as the mask that many real partners as well use to hide their meanness.
4 The Big Short (2015)
Regency Enterprises
Given this is clearly divulging from the investigation of Gosling as the last movie star, even exceeding puff piece terrain into accidental Cultland, USA, it’s a pleasure to say that The Big Short uses Gosling’s appeal as more of a cameo and not as its front page — that the movie’s position here is because it’s that outstanding. Trying to depict to moviegoers the fifty Beamer pileup that caused The Great Recession would have been one task, trying to depict the financial intricacies between Wall Street and poor homeowners would have been a greater one, but trying to depict the economists who predicted that the housing market’s illegitimate loan grading system could be a lucrative exploit against the collapse of the world economy was like asking an astronomer to explain neutron stars to a hungry toddler. For Adam McKay to pivot from Anchorman and Step Brothers to Capitalism 101 was a dazzling and maybe even dire move — using Margot Robbie in a bubble bath to strangle audience members until they swallowed even a drop of the medicine. Gosling’s barely there as a douchey executive with strains of racism and monsoons of classism; this movie’s here because it rocks.
3 Drive (2011)
Bold Films
As a director, Refn’s made a name for disregarding the line between beauty and gore, contending that the two aren’t opposites but capable of aiding one another — beauty is an alien mystery, both in its incomprehensibility and horror. Having Gosling and Refn bringing the Driver to life was the smartest pairing the production could’ve done, Gosling’s Under the Skin-like, clinical demure breathing warm life into that thesis. It’s important to note, as many critics have, that the brutality of Drive is never for shock value, but to appreciate that the romanticism of misdeeds and ruggedness can’t censor the most electric moments.
2 The Place Beyond the Pines (2012)
Sydney Kimmel Entertainment
From Derek Cianfrance of Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines is a generational tale about the sins of our fathers. Gosling is a bank robber, Bradley Cooper a cop trying not to collapse into imminent corruption and prejudice, their stories intersecting as one would expect. But when their sons become acquainted at school, the desire to recreate their blueprints comes full circle. Pines is a triumph on a series of performance levels, but placing Gosling as the tattooed face of crime facilitates a hard lesson that crime is for a rare few a desired life, and for most a demand of economic inequality and over-policing. That celebrated kindness of Gosling’s eyes is a necessity in order to pierce through audience prejudice about the stereotypical facial tattoos and bleached hair — Pines knows we’d empathize with most quality actors no matter what, but for Gosling we’ll champion those painful realities.
1 Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
Columbia Pictures
This entire movie is about the intersection between cold robotics and warm humanity — how those ideas not only coexist, but can occupy the same sprite. Set 30 years after Ridley Scott’s okay adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s awful book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner 2049 proposes that prior to his death, the Steve Jobs of Susan Calvins—Eldon Tyrell—created an android capable of procreation with a human: the final move from building to birthing, cogs to cognition, ecto to endo. Gosling is KD6-3.7, or K, a replicant blade runner set out to kill rogue replicants, who gradually learns there may be more to his humanity than a facade. For Denis Villeneuve to have Gosling play K wasn’t just smart to the success of the film, it was a casting opus; every incredible detail that works in 2049 works around Gosling’s soft stoicism. The alienness of neon L.A., the nostalgia of desecrated San Diego, the legacy of lonely Las Vegas — all those worlds can be explored by Gosling with the audience feeling “he may have been here before” because Gosling is inherently capable of both friendly presence and outsider distance. He may be the only actor capable of it—a dance truly unrecreatable and unique in a world of film actors that exist dichotomously as either human or artwork—rejecting the traditional hybridization expected upon reaching celebrity.
