5 Best Florence Pugh Movies, According To Rotten Tomatoes

When Florence Pugh burst onto the scene in a big way in "Midsommar," Ari Aster's horror flick that released in 2019, she'd already appeared in projects like "The Falling," the underseen TV series "Marsella," and a 2018 BBC Two adaptation of William Shakespeare's King Lear. Still, projects like "Midsommar" — and a few you'll read about momentarily — are what put Pugh on the map, and the entertainment industry is better for it.

Pugh is a deeply charismatic, preternaturally talented, and absolutely winning performer who wholly inhabits any role you throw at her and, if we're all being honest, makes most projects better with her mere presence; even the seemingly cursed "Don't Worry Darling" is at least bearable because Pugh is giving it her all. So which of her films have the highest critical ratings on Rotten Tomatoes?

Obviously, we've excluded TV shows here, with apologies to "Hawkeye" and the miniseries "The Little Drummer Girl." We've also excluded Pugh's second highest-rated film, "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish," only because the movie doesn't center Pugh in the way that some of these other flicks do. Pugh is, all things considered, still at the relative beginning of her career, but she's still definitely racked up some critical wins ... so from an offbeat Marvel movie to a beloved literary adaptation, here are Florence Pugh's five highest-rated films according to the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.

The final film in Phase 5 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe made a decently large splash at the box office — but it was also a hit with critics, who came together to give the film a solid rating of 88% on Rotten Tomatoes and a critical consensus that says the film "returns to the tried-and-true blueprint of the MCU's best adventures." After we first meet Florence Pugh's Yelena Belova (who was almost played by Saoirse Ronan) in the standalone "Black Widow" movie, which released in 2021 — and the aforementioned debut season of "Hawkeye" that same year — she finally takes center stage in "Thunderbolts*," which sees the plucky trained Russian assassin assembling a specialized team of, well, misfits.

If you like MCU movies with particularly quirky, fallible lead characters, "Thunderbolts*" is definitely the pick for you. Pugh's Yelena is joined, in her mission to take down the contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and her traumatized captive Bob (Lewis Pullman), by a few familiar faces. Captain John Walker (Wyatt Russell), introduced in the TV series "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier," gets to be a "good" guy this time, as does Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), the titular Winter Soldier. Hannah John-Kamen's Ava Starr, whom we first met in "The Ant-Man and the Wasp," returns to join the Thunderbolts, as does Yelena's adoptive father of sorts, Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour), also known as Red Guardian, and Antonia Dreykov (Olga Kurylenko), who also first appeared in "Black Widow." 

If you haven't seen "Thunderbolts*" yet, I highly recommend it; it's one of the more irreverent movies in the MCU, incredibly fun, and it also has some surprisingly deep messages about personal trauma.

I buried the lede about "Lady Macbeth" in my introduction for a reason ... because this is arguably Florence Pugh's breakout role, but it's also one of her highest-rated projects on Rotten Tomatoes with a rating of 89% and a critical consensus that calls Pugh's performance both "mesmerizing" and "unforgiving." When "Lady Macbeth," directed by William Oldroyd and written by Alice Birch, hit theaters in 2016, moviegoers and critics alike sat up and took notice of Pugh, and for good reason.

Despite what the name suggests, this film has very little to do with the plot of William Shakespeare's famous tragedy "Macbeth." This story takes place in 1885 and centers around Pugh's Katherine, who elevates her social status by marrying the wealthy but cold Alexander Lester (Paul Hilton). Feeling pressured by her father-in-law Boris (Christopher Fairbank) to produce an heir — even though Alexander avoids all physical contact with Katherine — she begins an affair with Sebastian (future "Shōgun" star Cosmo Jarvis), a worker on her estate whom she caught abusing her maid Anna (Naomi Ackie) with a group of his cohorts.

I won't spoil the creepy, bizarre, and unsettling twists and turns of "Lady Macbeth" here, because truly, you should seek out this drama and watch it for yourself. "Lady Macbeth" is one of Pugh's earliest leading roles, and it's still one of her best.

One of the most surprisingly heartfelt and warm movies to release in 2019, the comedy-drama "Fighting with My Family" raised Florence Pugh's profile significantly ... and it's partially based on a true story. Adapted from a 2012 documentary by Max Fisher called "The Wrestlers: Fighting with My Family," the film, written and directed by British comedian and writer Stephen Merchant, centers around the Knights, a family of (duh) wrestlers. Mom and dad Julia and Ricky (Lena Headey and Nick Frost) hope their two kids, Saraya and Zak (Pugh and Jack Lowden), will follow in their footsteps, to the point where Julia's stage name as a wrestler is "Sweet Saraya." 

As Saraya enters the family business, she and her brother apply to the WWE and are chosen by trainer Hutch Morgan (Vince Vaughn) to train over Zak. WWE has her adopt the moniker "Paige" to differentiate herself from her family, and the newly rechristened Paige must now find her own identity.

"Fighting with My Family" is an unexpectedly sweet and genuinely funny movie, thanks in large part to the central performances from Headey, Frost, Lowden, and Pugh. With Dwayne Johnson on hand as himself, this movie will delight wrestling fans and total newbies alike, and it earned a 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a critical consensus that says the film "muscles past clichés with a potent blend of energy and committed acting that should leave audiences cheering."

Out of all the films on this list, Christopher Nolan's historical drama "Oppenheimer" does, arguably, feature Florence Pugh the least. For understandable reasons, she gets less screen time than, say, the titular physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt), and the coterie of scientists that surround him as he works on the atomic bomb eventually dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. Pugh portrays Jean Tatlock, a real historical figure, psychiatrist, and member of the illicit Communist Party who may or may not have been engaging in an extramarital affair with Oppenheimer for years, and Nolan introduces this relationship in quite a sensational way. I'm not kidding: in the middle of an intimate scene, Pugh demands that her lover read something to her in Sanskrit, at which point he intones, "I am death, the destroyer of worlds."

Like the real Tatlock, Pugh's Jean dies under strange and tragic circumstances. Though her death is presented as a suicide, it's also left up for debate due to her ties to said Communist Party, an affiliation that also famously gets Oppenheimer into hot water during the film. Pugh isn't a main character in "Oppenheimer" by any standard, but her presence looms large over the narrative, especially for Kitty and Oppenheimer himself. For her part, though, Pugh was just thrilled to be included. "Working with Christopher Nolan was quite possibly one of the most thrilling experiences in a different way, partly because he works with professionals. He is a professional," Pugh told the BBC during a radio interview (via IndieWire). "But his dedication to the craft of filmmaking and old filmmaking is just magical to watch."

I am so glad that Greta Gerwig's audacious, beautiful, and fulfilling adaptation of "Little Women" is Florence Pugh's top-ranked film on Rotten Tomatoes; not only is that completely correct, but Pugh is absolutely astonishing in this film. While I'm aware that a legion of "Little Women" fans are unfailingly loyal to the version featuring Christian Bale and Winona Ryder, I ride for Gerwig's take on this classic novel, which splits its narrative between dual timelines but keeps the same actors in their roles. Saoirse Ronan, a frequent Gerwig collaborator, is a phenomenal, willful Jo March — and another Gerwig regular, Timothée Chalamet, matches her energy beautifully as Theodore "Laurie" Laurence — and Emma Watson and Eliza Scanlon round out the titular little women as Meg and Beth, respectively, with Laura Dern as their mother Marmee.

I'm not forgetting Pugh. She deserves her own paragraph. For well over a century, Amy March has been a one-dimensional, shallow teenager and borderline villain; in the capable hands of Gerwig and Pugh, she's a shallow young woman at first who grows up to be canny, pragmatic, and firm in her convictions. This is, for my money, the only version of "Little Women" where you not only like Amy, but you understand her choices and understand why Laurie ends up with her. In large part, this is thanks to Amy's stunning second-act speech to Laurie about her future — "I'm not a poet, I'm just a woman" — that likely scored Pugh her first Oscar nomination, but Pugh shines in both timelines, proving that Amy can be a heroine if portrayed perfectly. This film has 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, and for my part? I'll never, ever hear a single word against it (and it should have won best adapted screenplay for Gerwig).