Best Angelina Jolie movies of all time: 'Girl, Interrupted', 'Maleficent' and more

Before she became one of the most recognisable faces on the planet, Angelina Jolie was simply one of the most electric actors of her generation. From Oscar-winning drama to blockbuster action, her filmography is one of the most varied and consistently watchable of any actor working today. Here are six films that prove there is nobody quite like her.

Set in a psychiatric institution in the late 1960s, the film follows Susanna Kaysen, a young woman committed after a suspected suicide attempt, who finds herself drawn into the orbit of Lisa Rowe, the ward's most dangerous and magnetic resident. Jolie plays Lisa with a raw, unnerving ferocity that won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and made it impossible to look at anyone else on screen. Winona Ryder leads the film, but Jolie owns every scene she walks into, and it is streaming on Prime Video.

The film reimagines Sleeping Beauty entirely from the villain's perspective, following a winged fairy whose capacity for darkness is born not from evil but from a betrayal so devastating it changed who she was forever. Jolie brings a regal, otherworldly ache to the role that elevates it far beyond a simple fairy tale retelling and makes Maleficent one of the most compelling figures in modern fantasy cinema. It is streaming on JioHotstar alongside its sequel, and both are worth watching back to back.

Two professional assassins who have been living as an ordinary married couple discover simultaneously that they have each been hired to kill the other, and what follows is one of the most stylish and genuinely funny action films of its decade. Jolie plays Jane Smith as the sharper, colder, more lethal half of the partnership, and the friction between her controlled precision and Brad Pitt's looser energy creates a chemistry that makes every scene crackle with something equal parts dangerous and irresistible. It is the rare action comedy that actually delivers on both, and if that combination sounds irresistible, it is streaming right now on JioHotstar.

From the moment a Russian defector walks into a CIA interrogation room and names Evelyn Salt as a deep-cover sleeper agent, the film never lets you settle into a comfortable read of who she really is or what she actually wants. Jolie plays Salt as a woman of pure controlled motion, someone who processes danger the way other people breathe, and her physical commitment to the role gives every chase and every confrontation a visceral, grounded intensity. It is one of the most propulsive spy thrillers of its era available on Netflix.

The film sends aristocratic archaeologist and combat expert Lara Croft racing across the globe against a secret society hunting for an ancient artefact capable of bending time itself, and it does so at the kind of pace that makes two hours feel like forty minutes. Jolie does not so much play Lara Croft as she becomes her, bringing a physicality, wit, and complete absence of self-doubt to the character that makes every impossible situation feel like something she has already accounted for. It remains one of the most convincing and entertaining video game adaptations ever made, and if action-adventure is your thing, it is waiting for you on Netflix, Prime Video and JioHotstar.

A young man trapped in a miserable office job discovers that his father, whom he believed had abandoned him, was actually the world's deadliest assassin and that a secret fraternity of killers has come to recruit him as the heir to that legacy. Jolie plays Fox, the fraternity's most feared operative, with the kind of quiet, unhurried authority that makes every other character in the room seem smaller the moment she enters it. She says less than almost anyone in the film and somehow commands more of your attention than all of them, and if that sounds like your kind of film, it is on JioHotstar and absolutely worth a watch tonight.