Post by sgev1977 on Jan 11, 2019 14:49:50 GMT
The texts are actually very good but the ranking is all over the place! Of course, they would always put Sherlock in the spot place but it's not his best role AT ALL!!!!
www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/benedict-cumberbatch-tv-movie-roles-ranked-worst-best/?WT.mc_id=tmg_share_tw
Otter-faced thesp Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch CBE is back in the headlines, thanks to his starring role in feverishly debated Channel 4 drama Brexit: The Uncivil War. But where does his performance as Vote Leave puppetmaster Dominic Cummings figure in his career canon?
Find out as we rank Cumberbatch’s 20 top film and TV roles, from worst to best…
20. War Horse (2011)
Moustache bristling with military hauteur, Cumberbatch’s Major Jamie Stewart cuts quite a dash as he leads the cavalry charge against a small German encampment, unaware of the massed machine guns concealed in the woods behind. His horror at the ensuing carnage registers powerfully and director Steven Spielberg’s point about the outmoded, naively Napoleonic British fighting methods is made largely on his face. He’s captured and whisked away to an undetermined fate.
19. To the Ends of the Earth (2005)
Now largely (and unfairly) forgotten, this three-part BBC Two adaptation of William Golding’s nautical novel trilogy clocked up six Bafta nominations. Cumberbatch was protagonist Edmund Talbot, a young aristocrat on a sort of sea-faring Victorian gap year. The role is also notable for the fact that during shooting in South Africa, Cumberbatch fell victim to a scary carjacking. Thankfully he escaped unscathed.
18. Starter for 10 (2006)
A rare delve into out-and-out comedy, the role of Patrick Watts - hyper-uptight captain of Bristol’s University Challenge quiz team - was a great chance for Cumbers to make a fool of himself. Having pompously inducted the ragtag new members, tortured himself with footage of last year’s defeat and then described himself airily as “a sort of floating Renaissance man”, he spends the second half of the film mainly being punched and head-butted. Fair dos.
17. Small Island (2009)
In BBC One’s sumptuous, smartly cast Sunday night adaptation of Andrea Levy’s award-winning novel about the Windrush generation, Cumberbatch fleshed out his character - repressed bank clerk Bernard Bligh, who returns from the war to find two Jamaicans lodging under his roof and wife Queenie (Ruth Wilson) playing away - from a dislikable dullard into something much more moving. It earned him a BAFTA nod for Best Supporting Actor.
16. Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013)
“I have returned to have my vengeance. So shall we begin?” Cumberbatch began carving out a nice line in Hollywood blockbuster villains with his imperiously intelligent, resonant-voiced turn as Khan, the genetically engineered intergalactic terrorist going under the false identity of renegade Starfleet Commander John Harrison and waging his own personal war on the Federation. He’s the best thing in JJ Abrams’ patchy sequel.
15. Brexit: The Uncivil War (2019)
Hogging the screen and stealing all the best lines as Vote Leave campaign director Dominic Cummings in playwright James Graham’s pacy Channel 4 drama, Cumberbatch’s zeal and energy fairly radiated off the screen. The end result divided viewers almost as much as Brexit is dividing the country but Cummings’ wife Mary Wakefield said Cumberbatch’s portrayal of her husband even fooled their own children.
14. 12 Years a Slave (2013)
On film, the first “owner” of slave Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), plantation owner William Prince Ford, is neither the howling sadist to whom he’ll later be entrusted, nor is he quite the “kind, noble, candid Christian man” described in Northup’s 1853 memoir. Cumberbatch and director Steve McQueen introduce Ford at an auction, paralysed by a kind of moral squeamishness, his head lowered, saying little. He’s a man temperamentally inclined to do the right thing but without the backbone to make a meaningful stand.
13. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)
Cumberbatch spent his Hobbit shoot writhing around a motion-capture studio - as he put it, "losing your shit on a carpeted floor in a place that looks like a mundane government building” - and hissing pure rage at a co-star not even present. His vocal work fills the bass register of the movie for about two reels, and has the authority to make of Smaug a cunning nemesis. He’s also a monster of self-regard whose vanity and avarice get the better of him.
12. Wreckers (2011)
In writer-director DR Hood’s little-seen, low-budget British three-hander, Cumberbatch played David, a newly-married teacher trying for a baby with his young wife (Claire Foy). The arrival of his brother (Shaun “Endeavour” Evans), a traumatised Afghan war veteran, brings long-buried antagonisms to the surface. Cumberbatch excelled here at digging beneath the surface of a seemingly balanced guy to find a worryingly unstable personality locked away.
11. Parade’s End (2012)
Fresh from wowing as Sherlock, Cumberbatch led what was dubbed “the highbrow Downton Abbey”: Tom Stoppard’s BBC adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s novel tetralogy set either side of the First World War. He plays unhappily married aristocrat Christopher Tietjens, who falls for a free-spirited Suffragette while trying desperately to remain faithful to his wayward wife (Rebecca Hall), before heading for the trenches. He excelled at portraying the suppressed pain beneath “Chrissy’s” stuffy surface.
10. The Hollow Crown: The Wars Of The Roses (2016)
Cumberbatch is third cousin 16 times removed of Richard III, so it was apt that he should play the monarch in the BBC’s lavish all-star series of Shakespeare’s history plays. Treating the camera as his confidante, he portrays the throne-hungry psycho’s remorseless rise to power with dazzling charisma and was compared to “a medieval Frank Underwood”. The scene where his finger taps calculatingly on a chessboard lingers in the memory. It made a superb finale to the four-year cycle of films.
9. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011)
Sporting a floppy, almost straw-coloured fringe and array of dapper suits, George Smiley’s right-hand man Peter Guillam was the best-dressed member of this cracking ensemble cast and Cumberbatch made him suave but a little unknowable. The character reveal, beautifully and economically handled with a tragic pay-off, was his homosexuality, making this feel in more ways than one like a warm-up for…
8. The Imitation Game (2014)
There’s a performative side to Alan Turing. He’s camping it up mightily in his first scene, sweeping cyanide off the floor with a swishy scarf over his mouth – pointedly the very poison he’d use to take his own life. The script isn't perfect but Oscar-nominated Cumberbatch knows how to wrest it into his own hands and thrive in individual scenes. He’s compellingly chilly, especially when dumping Joan Clarke, and manages to crack open an imaginary window onto Turing’s private torment.
7. The Fifth Estate (2013)
Say what you like about the film, which is generally disparaged as a bit of a botch. But Cumberbatch really did his homework and gives us an almost frighteningly detailed portrait of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange as a paranoid narcissist. His gift for impersonation isn’t really used enough – much less than Michael Sheen’s, say – and this is Exhibit A for how it might complicate and elevate an otherwise humdrum film. His Assange is a control freak freaking out, quivering on the verge of an unholy tantrum at all times.
6. Atonement (2007)
“Jolly nice slacks.” These words are the first clue about Paul Marshall’s interest in 15-year-old Lola (Juno Temple) and it’s the way he delivers them while not actually looking at the slacks in question that really sends a shiver.
In just a handful of razor-sharp scenes, eighth-billed Cumberbatch establishes this chocolate factory tycoon as a prickly creep who can bore your ears off, but only senses too late when he’s doing so. Handing Lola a bar in preference to her two younger brothers, he ends this scene (the film’s best) with chillingly suggestive dental stops, as sharp and clackety as Briony’s typewriter: “You have to bite it.”
5. Doctor Strange (2016)
Cumberbatch injected a welcome shot of cerebral freakiness to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Dr Stephen Strange, the wealthy and arrogant neurosurgeon who is terribly injured in a car crash, then ascends to a higher level of psychokinetic mastery under the tutelage of Tilda Swinton’s Ancient One.
He beefed up in the gym, mastered balletic movements and finger-tutting, and took the mystic-magical gubbins just seriously enough. Witty, thespy and knowingly pompous, he has since sent himself up amusingly in Thor: Ragnarok.
4. Patrick Melrose (2018)
Majestic acting, even while going cold turkey in an eyepatch. Based on Edward St Aubyn’s much-loved semi-autobiographical books, the killer combination of novelist David Nicholls’ note-perfect adaptation and Cumberbatch’s bravura performance made this stunning five-parter one of last year’s superlative dramas.
Troubled toff Patrick Melrose battled drug addiction and his demons, rooted in childhood abuse by his monstrous father (Hugo Weaving) and the negligence of his selfish mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Cumberbatch’s nuanced portrayal - since nominated for both an Emmy and Golden Globe - was both darkly comic and deeply heart-wrenching.
3. Hawking (2004)
This feature-length BBC Two drama charted Stephen Hawking‘s early years as a PhD student at Cambridge University, when he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease while beginning his game-changing work on the beginning of time and nature of the universe. Cumberbatch studied the debilitating condition and worked with a movement coach to portray the different stages of Hawking’s physical decline, and conveyed the theoretical physicist’s twinkling intelligence with astonishing accuracy.
His poignant performance has been unjustly overshadowed by his friend Eddie Redmayne’s Oscar-winning turn in The Theory of Everything a decade later, but many consider Cumberbatch’s the superior portrayal.
2. Amazing Grace (2006)
His breakthrough role and still the best use of his gifts on film, Cumberbatch is a clear standout in Michael Apted’s rather porridgey abolition drama. As everyone around him, including Ioan Gruffudd’s Wilberforce, ploughs their most earnest acting furrows to get slavery scotched as we all know it must be, Cumberbatch’s William Pitt The Younger holds back, sizing up the Commons mob askance, biding his time.
He’s “exceptionally promising”, said the Telegraph at the time, because he gives the 24-year-old Prime Minister “the cagey intelligence of a man who knows sincerity alone won’t win him battles”. He got the shell-game of politics down to a tee here, and the acting game, too.
1. Sherlock (2010-2017)
The performance that made him a household name, launched a thousand memes and remains arguably his career-best. Boldly reinventing Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective as a contemporary crime-buster was a risk but paid off handsomely, thanks in no small part to Cumberbatch’s consummate portrayal.
His Holmes was a high-functioning sociopath and intellectual superhero, with that flowing Belstaff coat as his cape. Supremely arrogant yet jittery and neurotic, so fully did he inhabit the role that it’s now hard to imagine anyone but Cumberbatch making those ingenious deductions or delivering those grandstanding speeches.
The increasingly intricate plotting might have split opinion towards the end but the show was a huge hit for the BBC, pulling in blockbuster ratings and selling worldwide, while winning armfuls of BAFTAs and Emmys. A return is still planned but, with Cumberbatch and co in such hot demand, might be a long time coming.
Find out as we rank Cumberbatch’s 20 top film and TV roles, from worst to best…
20. War Horse (2011)
Moustache bristling with military hauteur, Cumberbatch’s Major Jamie Stewart cuts quite a dash as he leads the cavalry charge against a small German encampment, unaware of the massed machine guns concealed in the woods behind. His horror at the ensuing carnage registers powerfully and director Steven Spielberg’s point about the outmoded, naively Napoleonic British fighting methods is made largely on his face. He’s captured and whisked away to an undetermined fate.
19. To the Ends of the Earth (2005)
Now largely (and unfairly) forgotten, this three-part BBC Two adaptation of William Golding’s nautical novel trilogy clocked up six Bafta nominations. Cumberbatch was protagonist Edmund Talbot, a young aristocrat on a sort of sea-faring Victorian gap year. The role is also notable for the fact that during shooting in South Africa, Cumberbatch fell victim to a scary carjacking. Thankfully he escaped unscathed.
18. Starter for 10 (2006)
A rare delve into out-and-out comedy, the role of Patrick Watts - hyper-uptight captain of Bristol’s University Challenge quiz team - was a great chance for Cumbers to make a fool of himself. Having pompously inducted the ragtag new members, tortured himself with footage of last year’s defeat and then described himself airily as “a sort of floating Renaissance man”, he spends the second half of the film mainly being punched and head-butted. Fair dos.
17. Small Island (2009)
In BBC One’s sumptuous, smartly cast Sunday night adaptation of Andrea Levy’s award-winning novel about the Windrush generation, Cumberbatch fleshed out his character - repressed bank clerk Bernard Bligh, who returns from the war to find two Jamaicans lodging under his roof and wife Queenie (Ruth Wilson) playing away - from a dislikable dullard into something much more moving. It earned him a BAFTA nod for Best Supporting Actor.
16. Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013)
“I have returned to have my vengeance. So shall we begin?” Cumberbatch began carving out a nice line in Hollywood blockbuster villains with his imperiously intelligent, resonant-voiced turn as Khan, the genetically engineered intergalactic terrorist going under the false identity of renegade Starfleet Commander John Harrison and waging his own personal war on the Federation. He’s the best thing in JJ Abrams’ patchy sequel.
15. Brexit: The Uncivil War (2019)
Hogging the screen and stealing all the best lines as Vote Leave campaign director Dominic Cummings in playwright James Graham’s pacy Channel 4 drama, Cumberbatch’s zeal and energy fairly radiated off the screen. The end result divided viewers almost as much as Brexit is dividing the country but Cummings’ wife Mary Wakefield said Cumberbatch’s portrayal of her husband even fooled their own children.
14. 12 Years a Slave (2013)
On film, the first “owner” of slave Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), plantation owner William Prince Ford, is neither the howling sadist to whom he’ll later be entrusted, nor is he quite the “kind, noble, candid Christian man” described in Northup’s 1853 memoir. Cumberbatch and director Steve McQueen introduce Ford at an auction, paralysed by a kind of moral squeamishness, his head lowered, saying little. He’s a man temperamentally inclined to do the right thing but without the backbone to make a meaningful stand.
13. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)
Cumberbatch spent his Hobbit shoot writhing around a motion-capture studio - as he put it, "losing your shit on a carpeted floor in a place that looks like a mundane government building” - and hissing pure rage at a co-star not even present. His vocal work fills the bass register of the movie for about two reels, and has the authority to make of Smaug a cunning nemesis. He’s also a monster of self-regard whose vanity and avarice get the better of him.
12. Wreckers (2011)
In writer-director DR Hood’s little-seen, low-budget British three-hander, Cumberbatch played David, a newly-married teacher trying for a baby with his young wife (Claire Foy). The arrival of his brother (Shaun “Endeavour” Evans), a traumatised Afghan war veteran, brings long-buried antagonisms to the surface. Cumberbatch excelled here at digging beneath the surface of a seemingly balanced guy to find a worryingly unstable personality locked away.
11. Parade’s End (2012)
Fresh from wowing as Sherlock, Cumberbatch led what was dubbed “the highbrow Downton Abbey”: Tom Stoppard’s BBC adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s novel tetralogy set either side of the First World War. He plays unhappily married aristocrat Christopher Tietjens, who falls for a free-spirited Suffragette while trying desperately to remain faithful to his wayward wife (Rebecca Hall), before heading for the trenches. He excelled at portraying the suppressed pain beneath “Chrissy’s” stuffy surface.
10. The Hollow Crown: The Wars Of The Roses (2016)
Cumberbatch is third cousin 16 times removed of Richard III, so it was apt that he should play the monarch in the BBC’s lavish all-star series of Shakespeare’s history plays. Treating the camera as his confidante, he portrays the throne-hungry psycho’s remorseless rise to power with dazzling charisma and was compared to “a medieval Frank Underwood”. The scene where his finger taps calculatingly on a chessboard lingers in the memory. It made a superb finale to the four-year cycle of films.
9. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011)
Sporting a floppy, almost straw-coloured fringe and array of dapper suits, George Smiley’s right-hand man Peter Guillam was the best-dressed member of this cracking ensemble cast and Cumberbatch made him suave but a little unknowable. The character reveal, beautifully and economically handled with a tragic pay-off, was his homosexuality, making this feel in more ways than one like a warm-up for…
8. The Imitation Game (2014)
There’s a performative side to Alan Turing. He’s camping it up mightily in his first scene, sweeping cyanide off the floor with a swishy scarf over his mouth – pointedly the very poison he’d use to take his own life. The script isn't perfect but Oscar-nominated Cumberbatch knows how to wrest it into his own hands and thrive in individual scenes. He’s compellingly chilly, especially when dumping Joan Clarke, and manages to crack open an imaginary window onto Turing’s private torment.
7. The Fifth Estate (2013)
Say what you like about the film, which is generally disparaged as a bit of a botch. But Cumberbatch really did his homework and gives us an almost frighteningly detailed portrait of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange as a paranoid narcissist. His gift for impersonation isn’t really used enough – much less than Michael Sheen’s, say – and this is Exhibit A for how it might complicate and elevate an otherwise humdrum film. His Assange is a control freak freaking out, quivering on the verge of an unholy tantrum at all times.
6. Atonement (2007)
“Jolly nice slacks.” These words are the first clue about Paul Marshall’s interest in 15-year-old Lola (Juno Temple) and it’s the way he delivers them while not actually looking at the slacks in question that really sends a shiver.
In just a handful of razor-sharp scenes, eighth-billed Cumberbatch establishes this chocolate factory tycoon as a prickly creep who can bore your ears off, but only senses too late when he’s doing so. Handing Lola a bar in preference to her two younger brothers, he ends this scene (the film’s best) with chillingly suggestive dental stops, as sharp and clackety as Briony’s typewriter: “You have to bite it.”
5. Doctor Strange (2016)
Cumberbatch injected a welcome shot of cerebral freakiness to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Dr Stephen Strange, the wealthy and arrogant neurosurgeon who is terribly injured in a car crash, then ascends to a higher level of psychokinetic mastery under the tutelage of Tilda Swinton’s Ancient One.
He beefed up in the gym, mastered balletic movements and finger-tutting, and took the mystic-magical gubbins just seriously enough. Witty, thespy and knowingly pompous, he has since sent himself up amusingly in Thor: Ragnarok.
4. Patrick Melrose (2018)
Majestic acting, even while going cold turkey in an eyepatch. Based on Edward St Aubyn’s much-loved semi-autobiographical books, the killer combination of novelist David Nicholls’ note-perfect adaptation and Cumberbatch’s bravura performance made this stunning five-parter one of last year’s superlative dramas.
Troubled toff Patrick Melrose battled drug addiction and his demons, rooted in childhood abuse by his monstrous father (Hugo Weaving) and the negligence of his selfish mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Cumberbatch’s nuanced portrayal - since nominated for both an Emmy and Golden Globe - was both darkly comic and deeply heart-wrenching.
3. Hawking (2004)
This feature-length BBC Two drama charted Stephen Hawking‘s early years as a PhD student at Cambridge University, when he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease while beginning his game-changing work on the beginning of time and nature of the universe. Cumberbatch studied the debilitating condition and worked with a movement coach to portray the different stages of Hawking’s physical decline, and conveyed the theoretical physicist’s twinkling intelligence with astonishing accuracy.
His poignant performance has been unjustly overshadowed by his friend Eddie Redmayne’s Oscar-winning turn in The Theory of Everything a decade later, but many consider Cumberbatch’s the superior portrayal.
2. Amazing Grace (2006)
His breakthrough role and still the best use of his gifts on film, Cumberbatch is a clear standout in Michael Apted’s rather porridgey abolition drama. As everyone around him, including Ioan Gruffudd’s Wilberforce, ploughs their most earnest acting furrows to get slavery scotched as we all know it must be, Cumberbatch’s William Pitt The Younger holds back, sizing up the Commons mob askance, biding his time.
He’s “exceptionally promising”, said the Telegraph at the time, because he gives the 24-year-old Prime Minister “the cagey intelligence of a man who knows sincerity alone won’t win him battles”. He got the shell-game of politics down to a tee here, and the acting game, too.
1. Sherlock (2010-2017)
The performance that made him a household name, launched a thousand memes and remains arguably his career-best. Boldly reinventing Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective as a contemporary crime-buster was a risk but paid off handsomely, thanks in no small part to Cumberbatch’s consummate portrayal.
His Holmes was a high-functioning sociopath and intellectual superhero, with that flowing Belstaff coat as his cape. Supremely arrogant yet jittery and neurotic, so fully did he inhabit the role that it’s now hard to imagine anyone but Cumberbatch making those ingenious deductions or delivering those grandstanding speeches.
The increasingly intricate plotting might have split opinion towards the end but the show was a huge hit for the BBC, pulling in blockbuster ratings and selling worldwide, while winning armfuls of BAFTAs and Emmys. A return is still planned but, with Cumberbatch and co in such hot demand, might be a long time coming.
www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/benedict-cumberbatch-tv-movie-roles-ranked-worst-best/?WT.mc_id=tmg_share_tw
