Matt Damon Movies Ranked: The Best Films of His Career

20. School Ties (1992)

Matt Damon is essentially a bland dish that requires the right spice truly to zing, which means he is often at his best when playing beastly. His flagrantly nasty turn as one of the antisemitic bullies who makes prep school life hell for a secretly Jewish classmate (Brendan Fraser) offers an early indication that Damon realised this, too.

19. Courage Under Fire (1996)

Damon lost about 25kg for a handful of scenes as the traumatised, heroin-addicted young Gulf war veteran recalling a rescue mission in which his commanding officer (Meg Ryan) was killed. The sudden weight loss left him reeling: “I was looking for something to set me apart: ‘Look what I’ll do, I’ll kill myself!’” It paid off. “Directors took note of it.”

18. Syriana (2005)

In this scattershot political thriller, Damon’s storyline has a crisp moral complexity. He plays Bryan Woodman, an energy analyst whose oldest son dies accidentally during a party at the home of a Middle Eastern emir. Woodman is later mollified with a lucrative contract from the emir’s family. “How much for my other kid?” he asks caustically – before accepting the offer. That’s capitalism.

17. Contagion (2011)

Reunited with Gwyneth Paltrow from The Talented Mr Ripley, though not for long. She plays Damon’s wife, who brings back from her Hong Kong business trip something more original than a giant Toblerone: a deadly virus. She expires messily soon after, as does their son, leaving Damon to fend for himself and their teenage daughter amid the ensuing pandemic. Steven Soderbergh’s 1970s-style all-star disaster movie was a hit on release, then found its second wind during Covid.

16. Stuck on You (2003)

Team America: World Police is a work of genius, but it is wide of the mark in presenting Damon as a humourless lobotomised hunk. His comic sparkle is crucial to the charm of the Farrelly brothers’ Stuck on You, in which he and Greg Kinnear play conjoined twins who work harmoniously together as ice-hockey goalkeepers and short-order cooks. All is well until Kinnear’s acting ambitions lead them to Hollywood. First stop: a porn movie called Pavlov’s Dong.

15. Oppenheimer (2023)

Gruffness and warmth combine beautifully in Damon’s portrayal of Gen Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, who hires J Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) to beat the Nazis in building an atomic weapon. Informed that the chances of destroying the world are near-zero, and asked what more he wants, he shoots back: “Zero would be nice.”

14. Saving Private Ryan (1998)

Damon bagged the title role of the soldier who is made the target of a rescue mission after his brothers are killed in action during the second world war. He gets a delayed and memorably casual entrance: after all the huffing and puffing that has gone into finding him in the first half of the movie, he simply pops up out of the tall grass in a field.

13. The Martian (2015)

A third Oscar nomination for acting – after Good Will Hunting and Invictus – came Damon’s way for playing astronaut and botanist Mark Watney, who is left behind on Mars and assumed dead after his colleagues flee in a storm. As he establishes his survival plans, he keeps a sassy video diary (“In your face, Neil Armstrong!”), almost as if he knows he’s a movie character. This is intercut with scenes of the frantic Nasa team 140m miles away, which weaken the picture’s sense of isolation: what with all the cutaways to Earth, Watney never seems very alone.

12. The Informant! (2009)

Steven Soderbergh has given Damon a diverse array of roles – larking around in the Ocean’s trilogy, cosying up to Michael Douglas in Behind the Candelabra, even a cameo (termed “inexplicable” by Empire magazine) as a priest in Che: Part Two. But the pair have never made merry like they do in The Informant!, a farcical whistleblower yarn that deliberately punctures the gravitas of films like its near-namesake The Insider. As the deluded snitch, Damon’s doofus act is a scream.

11. Good Will Hunting (1997)

Despairing of their faltering acting careers, Damon and Ben Affleck wrote their own ticket to the big time – and won a screenwriting Oscar – with this dopey drama about an unsung genius (played by Damon at his brattiest and sexiest) toiling as a janitor at MIT. Producer Harvey Weinstein tried to foist hack directors on the pair but Damon stood his ground and demanded the indie auteur Gus Van Sant instead. “You’re a nobody!” raged Weinstein, aghast at the actor’s impertinence. “I’m a nobody,” replied Damon, “but I’m a nobody with director approval.” How did Weinstein like them apples? Quite a lot, probably, once Good Will Hunting became one of Miramax’s most profitable releases.

10. The Bourne Identity (2002)

“I don’t know who I am. I don’t know where I’m going.” The confusion expressed by amnesiac assassin Jason Bourne could double as a cri de coeur from Damon himself, who was all at sea after flops such as The Legend of Bagger Vance and All the Pretty Horses. Despite being so mired in reshoots that the gossip mill had it pegged as a disaster, the opening instalment in the Bourne action franchise became a slow-burning hit and did for Damon what The Matrix had done for Keanu Reeves. At this point, the series hadn’t properly developed a breakneck visual style to match the neck-breaking action – the final romantic reunion at a beachfront bar looks absurdly like an outtake from an old-school Bond movie – but Damon had found the ideal vehicle for his cultivated blankness.

9. Interstellar (2014)

When Damon pops up unannounced, it’s usually for comic effect: in the two most recent Thor movies, he is a stage actor playing in the plays-within-the-films, while Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back finds him selling out by making Good Will Hunting 2: Hunting Season. Not so in Interstellar, his first film for Christopher Nolan (after turning down the role of Two-Face in The Dark Knight). Damon is the baleful Dr Mann, who leads the Lazarus expedition through a wormhole to locate habitable planets, falsifies the data to suggest he has found one, settles down in cryostasis then tries to kill the astronaut who wakes him up. Rude!

8. The Departed (2006)

Damon is usually more interesting as a traitor than a faithful, and there are few roles on his CV more treacherous than Colin, the gangster going undercover as a cop in Martin Scorsese’s remake of the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs. Leonardo DiCaprio is his opposite number, a cop infiltrating Boston’s organised crime gang, and both are tangled up with Vera Farmiga’s police psychiatrist. She gets to console Colin about his erectile dysfunction while he seethes quietly over breakfast. Other highlights include Colin’s porn-cinema confab with his boss (Jack Nicholson), who turns up brandishing a dildo.

7. The Good Shepherd (2006)

Robert De Niro executes this underrated CIA origin story with surgical precision. As Edward Wilson, a fictional spy recruited to the emergent agency straight from Yale, Damon’s civilised and even anonymous persona makes Wilson’s casual betrayals feel especially chilling. The misjudged casting of Eddie Redmayne, only 11 years Damon’s junior, makes it appear initially as though they are lovers rather than father and son. On the plus side, we get to see Damon in wig, dress and makeup for a college production of HMS Pinafore.

6. Behind the Candelabra (2013)

Sporting a Farrah Fawcett feather-cut, Damon plays Scott Thorson, who chauffeurs his bejewelled, fur-swaddled lover Liberace on stage in a cream Rolls-Royce. Michael Douglas nails the entertainer’s creosoted smarm, while Damon navigates Thorson’s descent from romantic bliss to frazzled insecurity in the decade between the couple meeting and Liberace’s death in 1987 from Aids-related illness. With sweaty humping and gruesome his’n’his cosmetic surgery, the director Steven Soderbergh spares no detail, though he might have been a touch less credulous in swallowing Thorson’s side of the story.

5. The Bourne Supremacy (2004)

It was this second Bourne adventure, with Paul Greengrass taking over from Bourne Identity director Doug Liman, that made the series the biggest influence on action cinema since the advent of the car chase (of which there is a fine example here, with Bourne gunning an increasingly battered yellow taxi through Moscow, demolition derby-style). Damon has never looked more at home than he does as the fugitive who has little memory of his time as a CIA assassin but has deduced from the way his erstwhile employers keep trying to kill him that a reference is out of the question. The addition of Joan Allen as one of his pursuers is inspired, and makes possible Bourne’s killer final line: “Get some rest, Pam. You look tired.”

4. Gerry (2003)

The only Matt Damon film to feature an end-credits shout-out to the Hungarian slow-cinema god Béla Tarr (who died this week), this bare-bones experiment about two friends, both called Gerry, lost in Death Valley, tests the patience, pushes the envelope and feeds the soul. Damon co-wrote the cryptic script with his co-star Casey Affleck and director Gus Van Sant. As the two Gerrys try, and repeatedly fail, to find their way back to their vehicle, this feels less like an existential Dude, Where’s My Car? and more like an extended desecration of Damon’s A-list status: his identity gradually blurs with Affleck’s, their faces charred and roasting under the sun. The scene in which Damon weeps solemnly from behind an improvised veil is among the finest in his career.

3. The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

“Jesus Christ. That’s Jason Bourne!” So gasps the CIA boss played by David Strathairn after watching a CCTV feed of Bourne (Damon) dispensing with five assailants in a stairwell at Waterloo Station. This threequel is the ne plus ultra of the whole franchise – far superior to either the Damon-less spin-off The Bourne Legacy or his 2016 return in the drably titled Jason Bourne. Director Paul Greengrass expertly finesses his kinetic visual style; the whip-pans, crash-zooms and handheld shaky-cam hurl us into the hubbub. Damon looks supremely confident, having settled fully into his character’s discomfort zone.

2. Margaret (2011)

Arguably the best US film of the century so far, at least in its three-hour cut, Kenneth Lonergan’s kaleidoscopic portrait of post-9/11 New York hinges on a teenage firebrand, Lisa (Anna Paquin), whose involvement in a fatal bus accident intensifies her belief that she is the centre of the universe. In a flawless cast, which also includes Jeannie Berlin, Mark Ruffalo and the Succession duo of J Smith-Cameron and Kieran Culkin, Damon shows once again that he excels at being untrustworthy or morally compromised. He plays Lisa’s initially well-meaning teacher, who, flattered by her romantic interest in him, abandons his principles and sleeps with her (“You’re a fucking idiot,” he hisses at himself). The mute panic on his face when she later confronts him, all but naming him in front of a colleague as the father of her aborted child, proves that Damon gives good squirm.

1. The Talented Mr Ripley (1999)

No one ever mistook Matt Damon for Alain Delon. But then Anthony Minghella’s radical take on Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley thrillers is as distinct from Plein Soleil as the sun is from the moon. This version of Tom Ripley is preppy, even buffoonish. Leeching on to caddish playboy Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law) in sun-splashed 1950s Italy, he is no calculating psychopath but a square who stumbles into murder as rashly as he spins his innocuous fibs. So much of the film seems to reflect Damon’s struggle to establish a vivid identity. Among the first words he speaks is a lament: “If I could rub everything out, starting with myself …” Other lines seem to comment on his persona. “You’re so white,” marvels Dickie on the beach, then amends it to: “Grey, actually.” Later, he provokes Tom to violence by taunting him about how boring he is. It’s like watching the actor’s own insecurities amplified. But his nervy performance shows definitively that blandness is his camouflage. The critic Manohla Dargis noted a smile “designed to hide something sinister, frightening, deadly”. Talented indeed.

The Rip is out 16 January on Netflix; The Odyssey is released 17 July