Among the many stars of the bright Hollywood galaxy, Jennifer Lawrence is undoubtedly one of the most famous and beloved actresses in the current world movie industry.
Her unforgettable screen presence, talent at once raw and refined, along with the magnetic charisma and genuine naturalness of her performances, has conquered the audience quickly, propelling her to stardom, despite the challenges she has encountered in her steady evolution as an artist.
In the short span of her career, Jennifer Lawrence has built an extraordinary résumé, notable for the range of the difference and success of the many movies she has participated in, reaching no less than four Oscar nominations in just fifteen years of movies.
Besides her professional success, the public also loves her lively, humorous, and irreverent spirit that emerges in interviews, a quality acting as a perfect counterpoint to today’s obsession with celebrity.
Despite being a glamorous star, this young Kentucky girl proved unafraid to pursue more personal and meaningful projects exploring new challenges and opportunities as an actress.
However, which of her movies best represents Jennifer Lawrence’s journey in her short but dazzling rise as a movie diva?
Let’s look together at a few that I see as the most illustrative of her talent, adventures with very different genres and moods, but all united by the five-star charisma of this beautiful actress.
Table of contents
Causeway (2022)
We begin with a relatively recent and critically acclaimed movie, although ignored (if not unknown) to the general public, where we can admire an unusual side of Jennifer Lawrence’s talent.
The actress plays young Lynsey, a U.S. soldier and technical officer who must return home after an attack on the convoy she was traveling.
With a severe head injury, the girl must start from scratch forgetting the world she knew before and adapting to work humbly as a pool cleaner.
Her mother, Gloria, doesn’t seem to help her much, as she has always acted as an elusive figure coming and going in her life as she pleases, never giving her any trust.
Lynsey also has a younger brother, Justin, a chronic drug addict who’s been in jail for years, and she so far has never visited him.
Fortunately, she meets mechanic James Aucoin, with whom she begins to spend more and more time together, learning about his sad past as the sole survivor of a car accident where his little girl died.
These two wounded souls give each other consolation as Lynsey learns to cope with her condition until she unexpectedly decides to want to go back and fight in Afghanistan.
An excellent debut for director Lila Neugebauer, who chooses to avoid overly dramatic scenes to tell us about the ordinary everyday life of a war-disabled soldier.
Jennifer Lawrence abandons her explosive, sexy star glamour and jumps headlong into a powerful performance of silence and defiant modesty, perfectly matching Brian Tyree Henry‘s solid character.
A quiet evening with friends, able to get back on their feet without crying over themselves despite misfortune, for a tale of a rebound in the typical indifference of a country that quickly idolizes its heroes and even faster forgets and abandons them.
Don’t Look Up (2021)
For all lovers of Michael Bay‘s confusing (to say the least) Armageddon, here is another movie where Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence try to save the world from a devastating meteorite.
The star pair play doctoral student Kate Dibiasky and professor Randall Mindy, two scientists who try to warn the White House in time of the disaster.
Paradoxically, they are ostracized by Madam President Janie Orlean and her dim-witted son Jason, head of the Cabinet, played by the sublime Meryl Streep and Jonah Hill, who want to hide the news not to depress the American people.
Of course, it is not long before the fact becomes known to everyone as the media stokes fear by blowing on the fire with catastrophic news, and all kinds of speculators from industry or the military want to speculate on it.
The countdown has already begun, and something could be done to avert the apocalypse, but every attempt by NASA is sabotaged by the President, who instead intends to favor the crazy plan of entrepreneur Peter Isherwell, who proposes to crush the comet instead of destroying it, to harvest and exploit its valuable minerals.
Adam McKay directs a demented pre-apocalyptic comedy that works intermittently, certainly making an effective parody of political opportunism even in the face of human extinction, but not always with the best timing or jokes for a comedy.
What works without exception is the fantastic cast, with DiCaprio always on the mark and poor Jennifer Lawrence bullied throughout the movie by a hilarious Jonah Hill, so idiotic you can’t even believe it when you look at him.
Again, we are far from perfection or even from the better McKay of Anchorman or The Big Short; still, it’s a thousand times better than the Armageddon shenanigans with its impractical astronaut drillers.
Red Sparrow (2018)
Once again, we definitely change genres with a spy movie where Jennifer Lawrence plays a new version of Luc Besson‘s famous Nikita.
It all begins with young Dominika Egorova, a glamorous Moscow Bolshoi ballerina whose career suddenly ends when she seriously injures her leg.
To ensure her ailing mother’s survival, she accepts the proposal of her uncle Vanya Egorov, an influential intelligence official, and joins the Sparrows, a spy force of elite infiltrators working in every corner of the world.
The training transforms her both physically and psychologically, trapping in a world where she is encouraged to abuse her beauty and sensuality as weapons to manipulate the enemy.
However, before she becomes a full-fledged Sparrow, she must pass a crucial test: approaching and seducing CIA agent Nate Nash to expose a mole in the Russian ranks with whom he is in contact.
Although he immediately smells a trap, Nash falls in love with the girl amid the shadows of Budapest, hostile and dangerous arena of international espionage, where a risky game of double and triple betrayal will unfold.
Jennifer Lawrence returns under the direction of Francis Lawrence (before you ask, they’re not related), for whom she played the famous Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games saga, which I’ve never been a big fan of, and so I’ll leave off today list.
In this case, the actress teams up with the excellent Joel Edgerton for a spiral of deception that, okay, maybe it’s not very believable, yet turns classic James Bond glamour with a feminine touch, as the Sparrow director who is the stunning Charlotte Rampling.
An excellent psychological thriller, fortunately with more dialogue than shooting and fighting, that was also a great box office success grossing over $150 million worldwide.
Mother! (2017)
Regarding the next movie, I do not remember seeing a story with such an escalation of madness as Jennifer Lawrence’s character experiences.
This absurd fable begins with a couple living in a small, quiet house in the middle of a green plain at the edge of a forest.
He is a famous novelist who has unfortunately lost his inspiration for too long, while his woman tries to stay close to him as together they rebuild the house that a terrible fire devastated long ago.
One night, however, a man comes out of the nearby woods and asks for their hospitality, later joined by his wife and children, who behave wildly, with tension rising until one of the brothers dies during a senseless argument.
About a year later, the man is at the height of happiness as his new book is ready, and his wife is about to give birth to a son, conceived on that very night of death and madness.
Like that night, countless guests invade the house to celebrate the writer’s new work, and once again, madness grows exponentially, leading to total destruction and a subsequent rebirth that no one could have predicted.
Darren Aronofsky takes on the wonderfully complex direction of a simple story, developing a fantasy drama with horror moments by exploring universal themes such as fanaticism and idolatry.
The wild editing keeps the viewer glued to the screen, enhancing a magnificent Jennifer Lawrence who steals the show from the aloof and almost devilish Javier Bardem, along with the majestic uninvited guests Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer, never so wicked as in this movie.
I want to tell you more, but Mother is almost impossible to explain; the only way to know if it’s in your wheelhouse is to experience it yourself.
X-Men – Days of Future Past (2014)
Another movie, another dramatic genre switch as we fly directly into the space-time of X-Men universe, where Jennifer Lawrence replaces the sexy Rebecca Romijn as the shape-shifting mutant Mystique.
This time we start at the end, in a hopeless future where humanity is close to extinction because of the Sentinels, relentless hunter robots designed to exterminate mutants, but eventually began slaughtering anyone they found in their path.
To change the course of events, powerful telepath Charles Xavier and one-time enemy metal lord Magneto work together to send the mind of the ferocious Wolverine back in time to his own 1973 body, trying to prevent the political crisis that led to the Sentinels’ inception.
Indeed, his main goal is to stop Mystique from trying to kill Bolivar Trask, the brilliant scientist who will be the actual inventor of the robots that wipe out almost all of humanity.
However, it will be challenging to keep young Xavier and Magneto together, who hate each other mainly because of the beautiful blue mutant who marked the end of their friendship and union as superheroes on the tragic day of the Bay of Pigs Invasion.
Bryan Singer returns with all his imaginative power to directing the fantastical world of the X-Men, freshening up the formula with a general reboot of the cast while resetting the timeline of past episodes of the saga.
Mystique has never been more central to the plot than in the version played by Jennifer Lawrence, who brings this character to the stage with greater depth and more screen time than all the previous movies combined.
An absolute must-see treat for comic book lovers and those nostalgic for the 1970s, from the atrocious Vietnam War to a Wolverine walking around in a leather jacket and bell-bottom jeans. What’s not to love?
Winter’s Bone (2010)
Finally, let’s conclude with what is the best of the best in Jennifer Lawrence’s career and the movie marking her debut as the absolute leading lady.
We follow the tragic adventure of young Ree Dolly, a young girl from Missouri who carries on the family by taking care of her younger siblings, whose father Jessup ends up in prison for dealing methamphetamine.
Things spiral downward when Ree learns her father is missing, no one knows where, after using their home as collateral to post bail and get out of jail.
So if she doesn’t find him soon, she and her little brothers will lose everything.
Ree embarks on a bold quest to track down her father, despite the violent hostility of relatives in the small community, inextricably tied to crime as their only means of livelihood.
Ambitious director Debra Granik gives this young girl’s bleak and depressing journey an almost mythological dimension, enhancing her dogged search for the truth that becomes a confrontation with the family’s dark and murky roots and its rural community.
An unspoken America that still lives on as if it were the 16th century, a barbaric descendant of the old Mayflower settlers who cannot and will not evolve from the medieval culture of the master man of the house and the woman silent in front of the stove.
Jennifer Lawrence embodies in her young face the odyssey of all those girls having their futures stolen from the day they are born, as in this movie, sacrificial victims of a system giving them no chance for a better life.
In her eyes, we read the determination not to give up on the love of her family, along with the resignation and awareness that she is only buying time to postpone an inevitable future.
