Every Dev Patel Movie, Ranked
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THOUGH IT MIGHT be surprising to see the lanky, often sweet-natured Dev Patel kicking ass in the action thriller Monkey Man, the film actually calls back to his roots: as a kid, he medaled in a series of martial arts championships, only entering the acting world as a relative novice after nailing auditions for the British coming-of-age TV series Skins (which subsequently tailored the role to his personality). The daughter of director Danny Boyle was a fan of the show, and so when her dad was unsatisfied during his search for a young man to play the Indian lead in his film Slumdog Millionaire, she pointed him in Patel’s direction.
You probably know what happened next: Patel’s feature film debut also won Best Picture, catapulting him into a big-screen career (though he did later dip back into TV for The Newsroom). Despite the immediate attention from the town’s biggest awards, Hollywood hasn’t always known what to do with a charming and increasingly handsome British-Indian actor. But Patel has steadily built up an impressive filmography anyway, even when Hollywood cluelessness was compounded by some early misfortune (like getting cast in a big-budget M. Night Shyamalan movie–which, against odds, turned out to be the filmmaker’s worst movie by a mile). He had to play plenty of wide-eyed young men along the way, but Patel’s characters took on additional depth as he aged into leading-man status.
Monkey Man, which Patel also directed and co-wrote, would appear to mark a new phase in his versatile career, confirming him as the rare teen-show player able to become a bigger, far less gawky star without losing some of the innate qualities that made him pop for audiences in the beginning. It will almost certainly win over some new fans and reignite interest from old ones. Viewers from either category might want to peruse this list of every live-action movie he appears in, ranked from worst to best, as a guide to a career with a wide range of both style and quality. This group of 15 includes some old-fashioned crowd-pleasers, brilliant experiments, winsome indies, and fascinating disasters.
In other words, it’s the filmography of a star.
The Road Within (2014)
A well-intentioned but deeply tedious young adult story has Patel overacting up a storm as Alex, the OCD-afflicted roommate of Tourette syndrome patient Vincent (Robert Sheehan) at an experimental behavioral facility; the two boys steal an administrator’s car and go on an impromptu (and fairly aimless) road trip with a recovering anorexic (Zoë Kravitz). It’s ostensibly to spread the ashes of Vincent’s mother at the ocean, but mostly it involves a lot of yelling—among the three youngsters, and, worse, between the adults (Robert Patrick and Kyra Sedgwick) on their tail in a particularly punishing subplot. The most endearing aspects of the movie are Kravitz as an anorexic pixie dream girl and Patel’s repeated and increasingly irritable reminders that he is British (“not Pakistani, not Native American!”). So, in other words, minor-at-best pleasures on a meandering journey
About Cherry (2012)
Almost everyone involved in this Stephen Elliott movie deserves better than, well, this Stephen Elliott movie. (Franco, who would go on to play Elliott, probably deserves what he got here.) Elliott, a novelist and founder of the website The Rumpus, made his directorial debut about the only thing a young memoirist might potentially find more fascinating than himself: the porn industry. That’s where Angelina (Hinshaw) winds up after moving to San Francisco in a bid to leave her downtrodden teenage life behind. Patel, sporting a rare-for-him American accent, plays her best friend and literal bedmate, albeit platonic. He’s typically likable, but undone by the movie’s narrow conception of his character; his damaged nice-guy judgments just aren’t as compelling to Elliott as more overtly skeezy white guys with scraggly facial hair. Moreover, Elliott has nothing novel or interesting to say about porn, voyeurism, or female agency, and his movie manages to be eager to titillate, indulgent of porn-biz clichés, and kinda dull, all at once.
The Last Airbender (2010)
Look, most of M. Night Shyamalan’s slump-era projects have something to recommend within them, like the R-rated loopiness of The Happening or the kids-adventure craft of After Earth. The best that can be said of The Last Airbender, Shyamalan’s messed-with adaptation of the popular Nickelodeon animated series, is that it’s sometimes pretty to look at, courtesy of Lord of the Rings cinematographer Andrew Lesnie. Patel spends much of the movie in a snit as the evil Prince Zuko, but it’s far from his fault; no one gets out of this weirdly humorless and leaden mistranslation of such a richly imaginative show.
Hotel Mumbai (2018)
Checking into a less adorable facility than the Best Exotic Marigold one, Patel plays Arjun, a waiter at a hotel in Mumbai that’s attacked by terrorists in this reality-based thriller. Arjun performs well above the call of customer service as he attempts to keep people safe amidst the chaos; Patel makes a strong anchor in this role, but the movie itself is one of those harrowing, effective thrillers that nonetheless feels vaguely unseemly in its attempts to bring real-life horror to the screen.
Lion (2016)
Patel’s second Best Picture nominee is about Saroo, a young Indian boy separated from his family at the age of five and eventually adopted by an Australian couple. Patel plays the adult version of Saroo, who Google Earths his way through an attempt to find his birth mother. It’s a sweet story, well-acted by Patel, earning him his first Oscar nomination, and Nicole Kidman, also Oscar-nominated for playing Saroo’s adoptive mom, But the movie doesn’t quite have the stylistic juice to make an elaborate internet search feature-level compelling.
Chappie (2015)
With this and The Last Airbender on Patel’s resume, we might reasonably expect a third installment in his fantasy-boondoggle trilogy sometime in the future, though it wouldn’t be surprising if he was scared off from this sort of project entirely. At least Chappie is a more compelling disaster than Airbender, with some truly impressive visual effects bringing its robot hero to Short Circuit-y life. It’s hard for Patel himself to get much traction, though, in a movie featuring Hugh Jackman in khaki shorts, the peerlessly irritating members of Die Antwoord, and Chappie himself—in other words, a series of bizarre spectacles that make Chappie into an extremely watchable mess, at least.
The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015)
Call it the Chappie line: from here forward, there’s a big jump up in respectability for Patel’s movies, and also in his overall screentime. And what could be more respectable (and screentime-heavy) than a classy, somewhat dusty biopic about a mathematician? In The Man Who Knew Infinity, Patel plays Srinivasa Ramanujan who, like several other Patel characters, grows up poor in India and works his way somewhere else—in this case, Cambridge, where he studies under G.H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons) to become a pioneering figure in theoretical mathematics. There’s a pleasantly nerdy, academic buzz in the scenes between Irons and Patel, and of course the movie is instructive (if not exactly surprising) in its depiction of the prejudices Ramanujan faced in early 20th century England. Now, is this movie as genuinely entertaining as Chappie? Well, no, not really. But it’s made with straightforward craft.
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012)
The older demo may best know Patel as the young Indian fellow amidst a sea of celebrity olds in this comedy about a bunch of British retirees (including Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, and the late Tom Wilkinson) relocating to a dilapidated hotel in Jaipur, India. He plays Sonny, the relentlessly optimistic proprietor of the facility, which means it falls on him to personify local charm (check) and help facilitate the personal growth and cross-cultural wonder of a bunch of white people (double check, and sigh), who in turn help guide his own life decisions (double sigh). Sonny does get his own in-and-out subplot involving his disapproving mother and more modern-minded girlfriend, material that Patel gamely plays with loose-limbed energy, like a clichéd but likable rom-com is happening in the margins of this golden-aged soul-searching. But in a big ensemble full of powerhouse elder statespeople, he ultimately feels like a secondary concern.
The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015)
Honestly, the order here could probably be swapped; as a movie, it’s hard not to agree with the title and note that this is, precisely, the second-best Exotic Marigold Hotel movie. As a Dev Patel movie, though, the sequel gets to relax (having introduced all of its characters) and put the hotel owner closer to the forefront while continuing his romantic storyline from the first film, as Sonny is torn between attending to the expansion of his old-folks retirement-hotel chain and helping to plan his wedding to Sunaina (Tina Desai). Their storyline, which sometimes appeared marginal in the first film, feels more substantial here; on the other hand, this isn’t the rare sequel that makes up for the missing novelty of the first time. So, call it a tie or a toss-up. If you’re in this for Dev Patel, you might only want to watch one—but if you’re a huge fan of his, you might wind up compelled to check out both.
The Wedding Guest (2018)
It’s titled and even premised like a romantic comedy—albeit a problematic one: gun-for-hire Jay (Patel) kidnaps Samira (Radhika Apte) just before her arranged marriage, at the behest of her boyfriend, only to develop some kind of feelings for her when the scheme doesn’t go as planned. But The Wedding Guest isn’t a rom-com; it’s a minimalist, vaguely noirish thriller from Michael Winterbottom, who’s basically England’s answer to Steven Soderbergh. The movie’s detail-oriented methodical slow-burn can be transfixing, but you also may find yourself wishing it turned up the heat between Jay and Samira a little sooner—not least because they both smolder pretty well. The role isn’t really detailed enough to qualify as one of Patel’s best, but it does feel like a turning point in his leading-man career. A decade after Slumdog, he’s well and truly grown up here, and it’s not shocking that some fans talked about him playing James Bond after this particular film.
Monkey Man (2024)
For his directorial debut, Patel channels the intensity he’s developed as a grown-up performer into something at once rawer, quieter, and more physical. Though the movie itself name-checks John Wick for a laugh line, the roaring rampage of revenge undertaken by Patel’s unnamed character sometimes recalls Kill Bill Vol. 1, in its bloody force and variety of action-movie combat if not necessarily its tone or style. Patel’s directorial approach feels more akin to a more frenetic Danny Boyle, zeroing in on the action choreography with handheld close-ups, whipping the camera around with a speed that matches the bodies zipping, dodging, and splattering around it. The story is pretty boilerplate: Boy experiences horrific trauma, revealed gradually in flashback, that inspires his grim determination for revenge as a furious young man. But when Monkey Man unleashes for two extended sequences of multi-location mayhem (one in the middle, the other at the end), it offers sustained visceral thrills as Patel proves his mettle as both an action star and a filmmaker.
The Personal History of David Copperfield (2020)
It’s a shame that this Dickens adaptation from Armando Iannucci (Veep) snuck into U.S. theaters just as they were slowly and prematurely opening back up in the summer of 2020 (!), because it’s a slyly witty and entertaining version of David Copperfield that feels modern in its sensibilities—and its casting of Patel as the title character—without exiting its 19th-century setting. Of Patel’s five best movies, it’s easily the most underseen.
Slumdog Millionaire (2008)
Danny Boyle’s adaptation of a novel about a young man from India recounting his eventful life story over the course of a high-stakes game show eventually received the usual Best Picture backlash: too corny, too sensational, too little substance in its culture-crossing-and-clashing narrative. Maybe that’s true compared to then-recent Oscar choices like The Departed and No Country for Old Men, but set against more questionable choices like The King’s Speech or Argo, Boyle’s movie is a kinetic crowdpleaser, and it wouldn’t work nearly as well without Patel’s earnest, unaffected performance.
The Green Knight (2021)
Rather than checking in for obligatory Marvel/DC/Star Wars duty (or completing that boondoggle trilogy), Patel signed up for a dreamlike medieval fantasy from writer-director David Lowery, based on 14th-century verse about a knight on a quest. Patel plays Sir Gaiwan, and though the role has potential to become a heroic-romantic archetype, it’s one of his more complex characters, a conflicted man in search of his own mythos, then faced with the consequences of his ambitions. Patel moves through the story’s episodic (and sometimes hallucinatory) adventures with real-world gravity, including a virtuosic extended end sequence that makes its ambiguities surprisingly satisfying.
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More (2024)
Maybe this is a cheat, in that Wes Anderson’s quartet of Roald Dahl adaptations were initially released as individual short films, rather than a feature anthology. But once Anderson got that Oscar for Best Live-Action Short for the first and longest of the bunch, Netflix compiled them into a feature. And when taken in as a full-length film, it’s a terrific one, with wonderful work inducting Patel into Anderson’s ever-expanding cast of soulfully deadpan players. In both the Oscar-winning “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” and the more intense “Poison,” Patel is teamed with Benedict Cumberbatch, though he only shares the screen with him in the latter. In “Henry Sugar,” Patel plays a doctor, breathlessly narrating a story-within-the-story about a man who developed second sight; in “Poison,” he plays a friend to Cumberbatch’s character, helping him with a poisonous snake situation. In both cases, Patel’s reactions provide a crucial window into the outlandish action, especially because Anderson’s Dahl movie places so much emphasis on the presentational artifice of storytelling. Quietly expanding on a dynamic that informs much of his career, Patel has ability to project both presence within a story and understanding of how he exists outside of it—he's always aware of his own narrative.
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