An elegant, sun-soaked Patricia Highsmith adaptation with fine work from Viggo Mortensen as a con man and Dunst as his wife, holidaying in early 1960s Athens when they meet an American tour guide (Oscar Isaac). It seems tantalisingly unclear at first whether his designs are on the chirpy young bride or her shady older husband.
The opening instalment in Sam Raimi’s trilogy featured that ingenious upside-down kiss, with MJ (Dunst) suggestively unpeeling the mask of Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire) as he dangles beside her in an alleyway. But the middle movie gives her a few more notes to play – disgruntlement, vanity, that ambiguous final closeup – even if the whole thing ultimately comes down to her being rescued yet again, this time from the tentacles of Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina).
18. Small Soldiers (1998)
Director Joe Dante taps into the spirit of his earlier Gremlins in another tale of gifts run amok, as toys fitted with US military microchips become sentient – and savage. Dunst is the teen menaced by her own collection of scissor-wielding “Gwendy” dolls. “Now it’s our turn to play with you!” they announce as they swarm over her like Lilliputians on Gulliver. Then, among themselves: “Let’s see if her head comes off …”
David Mamet’s script could be torn from today’s front pages. Dustin Hoffman is the blowhard movie producer who helps a spin doctor (Robert De Niro) manufacture a war against Albania to distract from the president’s underage sex scandal. That means creating fake news footage, which is where Dunst comes in as the actor playing an Albanian villager fleeing terrorists while cradling a bag of tortilla chips – which the SFX team duly transforms into a kitten.
From one imaginary war to another: the US is tearing itself apart under an authoritarian president, and Dunst is the war photographer capturing the country as it disintegrates. “This movie is so terrifying and effective because it’s set in America, a place where you never feel like this could happen,” she said – a remark that has dated not only poorly but with alarming speed.
15. Little Women (1994)
Gillian Armstrong’s adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel has been unfairly overshadowed by Greta Gerwig’s 2019 take, but it remains a strong reading (the Independent on Sunday called it the best studio picture of 1995, the year it opened in the UK) with an enviable cast: Winona Ryder as Jo, Christian Bale as Laurie, Claire Danes as Beth and Dunst as the headstrong younger Amy. Shot in Vancouver over a scorching summer, the cast dripped sweat in the winter clothes they wore for the Christmas scenes. “I think I threw up,” said Dunst.
14. Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)
The English-language dub of the Studio Ghibli charmer, recorded in 1997 when Dunst was 15, casts her as Kiki, the teenage witch hired as a broomstick-riding courier for an artisan bakery. Dunst nails the adolescent mood swings between giddiness and gloom. The mid-section of the film, where she mooches around with a woodland-dwelling bestie (Janeane Garofalo), morphs into a charming borderline-lesbian buddy movie. Tremendous value, too, is Phil Hartman, whose drily funny turn as Kiki’s sarcastic cat Jiji was to be one of his final roles (along with Small Soldiers, above).
Enjoyably prickly mockumentary about a teen beauty pageant in Mount Rose, Minnesota (pop 5,076). Dunst is Amber, a pageant hopeful who lives in a trailer with her alcoholic, chain-smoking mother (Ellen Barkin) and works as a mortician, practising her tap-dancing steps at work in front of a captive if necessarily unresponsive audience. Denise Richards, Brittany Murphy and Amy Adams play rival contestants.
Peter Bogdanovich’s Old Hollywood shindig brings together star names including Charlie Chaplin (Eddie Izzard), William Randolph Hearst (Edward Herrmann) and his mistress, the actor Marion Davies (Dunst), for a seaborne whodunnit hinging on the real-life death – or murder – of the producer Thomas Ince (Cary Elwes) on board Hearst’s luxury yacht in 1924. As the starlet later played by Amanda Seyfried in David Fincher’s Mank, Dunst shows sophistication and killer timing as well as compassion for a woman often given short shrift elsewhere.
“It’s about teenagers in Versailles,” observed Sofia Coppola of her lavishly embellished gateau of a movie based on Antonia Fraser’s biography. As the regal rabbit-in-the-headlights who must grow up in public after being married off to the future Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman), Dunst does her best to foster intimacy with the camera, but the movie, rather than any one performer, is the star here. For closer acquaintance with the granular detail of Dunst’s craft, check out the Making Of documentary – shot by Coppola’s mother, Eleanor – which includes umpteen skilfully modulated servings of the “Let them eat cake” scene.
The focus in Jane Campion’s movies has never been as singularly male as it is in this homoerotic western set in 1920s Montana. Dunst plays Rose, the inn-keeper who is mother to a queer son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and wife to a good-egg ranch-owner (Jesse Plemons, Dunst’s real-life partner, whom she met when they played happily married murderers in the second series of Fargo). She gets short-changed in the second half as the focus shifts to the tension between her son and her bullying brother-in-law (Benedict Cumberbatch). When Rose succumbs to alcoholism, it is as if the film has slipped her a Mickey Finn. Dunst still got an Oscar nomination (her first), but we’re left craving a more intensive collaboration between actor and director.
Dunst radiates hard-won wisdom and experience as the churchgoing single mum whose life starts looking up when she falls for a charming stranger, played by Channing Tatum. What she doesn’t know is that he is an escaped prisoner who lives secretly in the branch of Toys “R” Us where she works. Director Derek Cianfrance tries to neutralise the creepier elements of his factually based film, though the repeated shots of Tatum watching Dunst on the store’s CCTV cameras come across as voyeuristic rather than protective. What matters, and raises the film’s emotional stakes, is that Dunst’s every scene rings true.
There may be an MOR ballad to conveniently signal every moment of emotional crisis in this culture-clash love story, but the authenticity of the performances wins out. Dunst is the congressman’s daughter whose privilege permits her to veer repeatedly off the rails, Jay Hernandez the poor-but-diligent Latino schoolmate whose academic chances are jeopardised by their relationship; this prompts a never-seen-before movie moment in which a teenage girl’s father (the excellent Bruce Davison) warns her boyfriend to stay away because she might hurt his grades. Dunst uses her full expressive range to play this damaged but unjustly sidelined soul. Beautifully matched, she and Hernandez are contenders for the most crazily beautiful screen couple of the early 2000s.
Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet meet and fall in love, not realising they have already been through one romance with each other and had it wiped from their memories at the Lacuna clinic after breaking up. Poignant though that narrative is, it is the subplot, involving Dunst as the clinic’s receptionist and Tom Wilkinson as her avuncular boss, that pierces the heart like a needle in the movie’s final straight.
Not merely an adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s Beat novel, Walter Salles’s cruelly underrated film is also an interrogation of its elisions and shortcomings. There is no Beat generation here without its beaten-down counterpart – usually female. The first time we meet Marylou (Kristen Stewart), teenage wife of Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund), he is ordering her into the kitchen. Dunst plays his second wife, Camille: while Dean and Sal (Sam Riley) goof around, the camera shows how her life has shrunk to the dimensions of her child’s cot. The picture measures, down to the last teardrop, the historical cost to women of the freedom of these men.
In the first of Dunst’s dreamy quartet of films for Coppola (including The Bling Ring, in which the actor briefly appears as herself), she plays Lux, the oldest of the five doomed Lisbon sisters. Coppola, who mixes the DNA of Picnic at Hanging Rock and 1970s shampoo commercials, is stronger on mood than motivation: in a shot of Lux arriving home from the school dance in the early hours of the morning, Dunst resembles a downtrodden Cinderella forced to take a cab now her carriage is a pumpkin once more. Having Coppola as a cheerleader stood the actor in good stead for negotiating the choppy waters of self-esteem in Hollywood: “I had Sofia at 16, who thought I was so cool and pretty when I didn’t.”
4. Dick (1999)
History is rewritten with magic markers in this silly-smart pink-and-pistachio-coloured comedy, which was unfairly dispatched straight to DVD in the UK. Dunst and Michelle Williams play bubblegum-brained teenagers who inadvertently expose the Watergate scandal. Hoping to keep tabs on them, a haggard President Nixon (Dan Hedaya) hires them to be official White House dog-walkers, after which they bring the Vietnam war to an end, ease US-Soviet relations with hash cookies and become the “Deep Throat” sources of Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein (Bruce McCulloch) and Bob Woodward (Will Ferrell). Resistance is futile in the face of the leads’ joyful performances, or the scene in which they make their disillusionment with Nixon public. “I hate Dick! Dick just disgusts me now!” cries Williams, to which Dunst adds: “You can’t let Dick run your life!”
According to director Neil Jordan, Brad Pitt was chagrined to discover that Tom Cruise, rather than the hoped-for Daniel Day-Lewis, would be playing his fellow bloodsucker. On the bright side, he had a formidable scene partner in the shape of 11-year-old Dunst. She gives one of the great child performances of all time as Claudia, transformed into a vampire by the gay-dad duo of Cruise’s Lestat and Pitt’s Louis. Her poise, self-possession and gravitas are staggering, as is the rage when she realises they have saddled her with immortality. “I haven’t tears enough for what you’ve done to me!” she screams at Louis. Kissing an adult co-star made the experience extra creepy. “I was a little girl and [Pitt] was like a brother to me,” she said. “It was very weird … I was very not into it.”
Dunst has been uniformly superb in her films for Coppola, but she is especially subtle and highly charged in this simmering erotic psychodrama about an injured Union soldier (Colin Farrell) taking shelter at a girls’ seminary in Virginia during the US civil war. The atmosphere is sticky with veiled threats and loaded glances as pupils and teachers alike – among them headteacher Miss Martha (Nicole Kidman) and prim teacher Edwina (Dunst) – compete for their guest’s attention. “I haven’t seen that lovely pin on you since Christmas,” observes one student of Edwina, causing her to blanch at the insinuation that she is dolling herself up – but also to exhibit a little crinkle of delight.
When I asked Plemons in 2021 to name his favourite Dunst performance, he didn’t take long to single out Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, for which she won the best actress prize at Cannes. “That’s just shattering,” he said. “She’s unbelievable in that.” Dunst is Justine, the newlywed who is resigned to the Earth’s imminent collision with another planet. Her immediate responses include cheating on her new husband (Alexander Skarsgård, who played her spouse again on TV in the barbed comedy On Becoming a God in Central Florida) and taking a bath in her veil when she should be cutting the cake. Dunst, who was suggested for the role by Paul Thomas Anderson, rises to the challenge of embodying Justine’s immovable depression. There is black comedy in her listlessness – her sister, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, has to toss the wedding bouquet on her behalf – as well as a relief in her misery, as the external apocalypse finally puts the rest of the world in step with how she feels inside. “The Earth is evil,” she says flatly. “We don’t need to grieve for it. No one will miss it.”
The film was overshadowed at the time by its Cannes press conference, where Von Trier jokingly declared an affinity for Hitler. Dunst, sitting beside him, did stunning work in the role of Silently Horrified Actor Trying Not to Scream; she even attempted to cut short his toxic babble, only for Von Trier to dismiss her intervention. His edgelord act scuppered her chances of an Oscar nomination, but no matter: her laser-focused performance in Melancholia will endure until the world’s end.
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