20. Indecent Proposal (1993)
Would you pimp out your beloved for $1m? This over-glossed kitsch-fest is like the board game Scruples in dumbed-down multiplex form, but don’t blame Moore. As the woman whose recession-hit husband (Woody Harrelson) consents to her night of paid passion with a plutocrat (Robert Redford), cinema’s supreme weeper gives it her moist-eyed all.
19. About Last Night … (1986)
A neutered adaptation of David Mamet’s prickly stage hit Sexual Perversity in Chicago. Jim Belushi and Elizabeth Perkins generate comic sparks in the bickering supporting roles, while Moore and Rob Lowe keep it real centre-stage as romance blossoms and commitment issues rear their head.
18. The Butcher’s Wife (1991)
The role of a clairvoyant who falls for a butcher was developed for Meg Ryan. When she jumped ship, Moore took over; the result is intermittently charming despite tensions between her and the director Terry Hughes, who told the press she was hard to handle. “I was fighting to make the movie good, not crying for orange juice on set,” she protested.
17. Wisdom (1986)
Moore’s then-boyfriend Emilio Estevez wrote and directed this lovers-on-the-run crime caper. Terrence Malick is rumoured to have offered guidance to the 23-year-old first-time film-maker, so no wonder it all plays like a bantamweight version of that director’s Badlands, which made a star of Estevez’s father, Martin Sheen.
16. GI Jane (1997)
“I’m expecting a certain amount of pain,” says Moore as Jordan O’Neill, who becomes the first woman permitted to try out for the Navy Seals. What she got instead for her gutsy performance was an abundance of ridicule, as well as a Razzie award for worst actress (her second, after winning in 1996 for The Juror and Striptease combined). Worth it, perhaps, for the scene in which she gets to scream: “Suck my dick!”
15. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022)
Moore agreed to this brief yet knowing cameo on the condition that she could wear her own Fendi yellow jumpsuit. She plays Nicolas Cage’s wife in a film-within-the-film, a reference to the fact that both actors had duelling movies out in the early 1990s about men nearly losing their wives to millionaires in Las Vegas: Cage with Honeymoon in Vegas, Moore with Indecent Proposal.
14. No Small Affair (1984)
Jerry Schatzberg is rightly admired for the lacerating dramas Scarecrow and The Panic in Needle Park, both with Al Pacino, but he brings convincing warmth to this bubbly teen love story. Jon Cryer (later to be Duckie in Pretty in Pink) is a precocious 16-year-old photographer, Moore the aspiring rock star who is the object of his affections.
13. Parasite (1982)
No relation to Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winner, this sharp-fanged 3D monster horror from exploitation king Charles Band gave Moore her first movie lead. She plays a lemon-grower who is plucky enough to give a plague of larva-like beasties what for. Cherie Currie, ex of the Runaways, turns blue from a bite to the leg.
12. Ghost (1990)
As a bogus medium, Whoopi Goldberg upstaged her earnest co-stars and won an Oscar to boot. If the rest of the movie has any weight, it is down to Demi Moore as Molly, grieving her murdered boyfriend (Patrick Swayze). “Demi Moore exudes toughness,” said the film’s writer, Bruce Joel Rubin. “I knew I couldn’t have people walk out of the theatre at the end worried that Molly wasn’t going to be able to get through life.”
11. One Crazy Summer (1986)
Before John Cusack’s career shifted up several gears, he goofed around merrily in teen comedies like this and Better Off Dead … (both directed by Savage Steve Holland). He plays a cartoonist while Moore is delightful as a singer set to lose her home to a lobster restaurant magnate. She manages not to be upstaged by a rabid killer dolphin and a pair of cartoon bunnies modelled on film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert.
10. A Few Good Men (1992)
Though both Moore and Tom Cruise were stars by the time they signed up for this film of Aaron Sorkin’s stage thriller, they feel like interns as the naval lawyers investigating the death of a marine. Jack Nicholson’s bellowing turn on the stand (“You can’t handle the truth!”) is rightly treasured, but there is sterling work too from Kevin Bacon and the late, glorious JT Walsh, one of US cinema’s finest specialists in the portraiture of moral corruption.
9. Deconstructing Harry (1997)
Above-average mid-period Woody Allen, inspired by Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. Allen is Harry Block, a novelist facing up to his flaws and his disgruntled friends and family, and encountering some of his own fictional creations. These include Moore, who turns up briefly as an amalgamation of Harry’s kvetching sister and his ex, alongside Billy Crystal as the devil (probably), and Robin Williams as a man perpetually out of focus.
8. Striptease (1996)
Male contemporaries with skyrocketing pay packets were applauded while Moore was slapped with the nickname “Gimme Moore” for demanding to be paid what she was worth. In the case of Striptease, that was $12.5m. This comedy would have benefited from the more knowing hand of a John Waters at the helm, but Moore has fun as the single mother (her daughter Rumer plays her on-screen sprog) disrobing to Annie Lennox at the Eager Beaver strip-club.
7. Margin Call (2011)
The sub-prime crisis plays out at a fictional investment bank modelled on Lehman Brothers. Jeremy Irons is a vampiric CEO who instructs his staff to flog everything short of the carpets, Kevin Spacey a corporate veteran nursing his dying dog. Moore, as the only prominent female figure in this macho landscape, is compellingly clenched once the blame starts to lead back to her door.
6. Mortal Thoughts (1991)
The script for this female-centred drama did the rounds for years, but Moore was instrumental in getting it off the ground. She clashed with the original director, Claude Kerven, who was duly fired. Robert Altman associate Alan Rudolph replaced him, and out of the wreckage emerged a surprisingly tough story of two friends (Moore and Glenne Headly) and the murder of an uncouth, violent man (Moore’s then-husband Bruce Willis).
5. Please Baby Please (2022)
A vision in leopard print, Moore gets one movie-stealing scene as Andrea Riseborough’s glamorous upstairs neighbour in this sub-Lynchian fable of simmering violence and sexuality. Languishing in a flat of zinging Yves Klein blue, she complains about her domestic surroundings (“I’m a wife but I’m no wifey”), fantasises about being choked (“Just a little, not too tight”) and is by turns taunting, cryptic, sensual and sinister. The hyper-stylised look and tone of the film foreshadow The Substance, as does one of Moore’s last lines: “Don’t you worry about me because I’m going to Europe.”
4. Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1997)
There is a common misconception about Moore that she doesn’t do humour (unless you count the Austin Powers trilogy, which she co-produced). Naysayers must have overlooked her growling vocal turn as Dallas Grimes, whose husband Muddy (Willis) pays snickering cartoon sleaze-balls Beavis and Butt-Head $10,000 to “do” her, in a naughty nod to Indecent Proposal. Except that Muddy means kill.
3. Disclosure (1994)
Out of a dodgy Michael Crichton potboiler, the film-critic-turned-screenwriter Paul Attanasio (Quiz Show, Donnie Brasco) fashioned this crackling comic thriller about sexual harassment in the age of political correctness. Moore is Meredith Johnson, VP at a Seattle computer company, who preys on her emasculated colleague (Michael Douglas). The virtual reality sequence looked dodgy even at the time, but everything else still gleams with wit and naughtiness, not least Moore, who boasts: “I’m a sexually aggressive woman, and I like it.”
2. Corporate Animals (2019)
Stepping in at the 11th hour to replace Sharon Stone, Moore plays the CEO of an edible cutlery company, whose team-building spelunking exercise ends in gore, projectile vomiting, cannibalism, and a gaping leg wound that sings Britney Spears’s Toxic. Moore brings genuine relish to Sam (Peep Show) Bain’s script, whether asserting bogus Native American heritage (“I’ll be assuming the role of tribal elder for the duration of this trip”), gaslighting an abused male underling (“I never Weinstein’d you!”) or rationing the edible forks (“Take one prong each … and I’ll expect those handles back,” she hisses, sounding very Mark Corrigan). Her performance builds even more decisively on the wickedness of Disclosure and hints at where the third act of her career was heading.
1. The Substance (2024)
Moore’s performance in Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror phantasmagoria is a career-altering comeback on a par with Marlon Brando in The Godfather or John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, and so far ahead of everything else on this list that it deserves its own Ranked with 19 blank spaces separating it from its nearest rival. As the fading aerobics star Elisabeth Sparkle, who responds to being fired from her TV show by mainlining a black-market drug that spawns a younger alter-ego (Margaret Qualley), Moore draws on a whole career of being mocked, sidelined and underestimated. “Emotionally, [playing Elisabeth] wasn’t that big of a reach,” she said recently. “I really did understand her.” Even at her most monstrous, buried beneath layers of porridgy prosthetics that make Jeff Goldblum in The Fly look mildly carbuncular, she communicates depths of pathos, anguish and rage. Ironic that a film about the transience of youth and fame has guaranteed Moore’s own longevity.
• This article was first published on 10 November 2022 and updated on 24 February 2025 to include The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Please Baby Please and The Substance. Previous 18-20 entries (Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle, St Elmo’s Fire and The Juror) were deleted.
