Ian McKellen is one of the most brilliant actors of our time. He has a way of selling his characters’ emotions and hooking in the audience whenever he delivers a monologue. It was a stroke of genius when Peter Jackson decided to cast McKellen as Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, because whenever there was some high-fantasy vocabulary to unload on the audience, which was initially tantamount to gibberish in the eyes of passive moviegoers, Jackson could just give it to McKellen and he’d deliver it in such a way that gripped the viewer and sold the stakes. The actor has done some fantastic work over the years, so here are Ian McKellen’s 10 Best Movies (According To Rotten Tomatoes).
Mr. Holmes (89%)
Just when you thought there couldn’t possibly be a fresh take on Sherlock Holmes — with Robert Downey, Jr., Benedict Cumberbatch, and Jonny Lee Miller all simultaneously having a crack at it —director Bill Condon came along with his vision of an aging Sherlock Holmes. Incredibly, Ian McKellen plays Holmes at two different ages on parallel timelines — old age, in which his career is starting to wind down as he solves his final cases, and really old age, in which his memory is slipping and he needs a 24-hour caregiver. Through varying his body language, the sharpness of his wit, and the speed of his line delivery, McKellen sells both ages convincingly, in a way that few actors who have taken on such a challenge have managed.
X-Men: Days of Future Past (90%)
While the X-Men franchise’s prequel movie X-Men: First Class was praised by critics for shaking up the formula and being technically well-made, fans undeniably missed the old cast. So, the producers selected the perfect comic book run to mix the prequel’s cast with the main trilogy’s and place the narrative’s focus on their most popular character: Wolverine.
In X-Men: Days of Future Past, a dystopian future sees Sentinels taking over the world and enslaving mutants, so the surviving X-Men send Wolverine back in time into his own body to prevent the Sentinels from ever being invented and mass-produced.
Scandal (91%)
This political drama caused a huge controversy when it was released in the late ‘80s. On its posters, it even proudly labeled itself as the most controversial film of the year. It chronicles the Profumo affair, which rocked Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government back in 1961. The sexual affair in question was between John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War working under Macmillan, and Christine Keeler, a 19-year-old aspiring model. Naturally, the public was outraged, and the government’s spin doctors struggled to contain the situation. Ian McKellen played Profumo himself among an ensemble cast that included such fellow greats as John Hurt and Bridget Fonda.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (91%)
A lot was riding on Peter Jackson’s gargantuan movie adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. It’s the norm for studios to take a stab at starting a franchise by releasing a big-budget movie based on an intellectual property that ends with a sequel setup and seeing if the audience bites. However, usually in those cases, if the movie bombs, the studio just won’t bother making a sequel. Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies were all shot back-to-back, so The Fellowship of the Ring couldn’t afford to bomb, because the producers had already sunk a ton of money into making the second and third movies. And it was a tough sell, too — high fantasy based on a dense book with complicated themes. But of course, an audience did catch on, Fellowship did connect, and the trilogy went on to become a tremendous success.
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (93%)
Very few final movies in trilogies manage to live up to expectations and satisfy fans with the conclusion of the overarching storyline that they’ve been following for three movies. Even fewer manage to break the record for most Academy Award wins in history. And that’s what makes The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King such a monumental accomplishment. The movie is often derided or even mocked for its many endings, but each character’s story needed a few endings to feel truly complete. As cathartic as the destruction of the One Ring in Mount Doom was, it wasn’t the end of Frodo’s emotional journey yet.
Richard III (94%)
This curious adaptation of the William Shakespeare play bumps up England’s civil war by around 450 years in order to set the story in the 1930s. Ian McKellen not only starred in Richard III; he also wrote its screenplay along with director Richard Loncraine. McKellen is rarely that involved behind the scenes of his projects, so this was quite a passion project for the renowned thespian. The actor was close to the material, as the film was drawn from a similarly themed staging of the play for the Royal National Theater that McKellen had starred in for director Richard Eyre.
Gods and Monsters (95%)
This partially fictionalized account of the final days of Frankenstein director James Whale is a powerful tribute to its subject. Whale not only revolutionized horror cinema; he was also one of the first openly gay filmmakers to land a high-profile Hollywood gig. The movie isn’t overly concerned with being factually accurate, but it is spiritually faithful to Whale and it draws heavily on the psychological effects of his experiences in World War I. Gods and Monsters avoids the pitfalls of most biopics by remaining true to its subject and imparting an important message about Whale’s place in society and in history.
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (95%)
It’s unsurprising that The Lord of the Rings’ middle chapter is ranked as its finest installment, because that’s often the case with the second movies in trilogies: The Dark Knight, The Empire Strikes Back, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, etc. The case could be made that this is because the second movie has no obligation to set anything up or wind anything down.
It’s the all-action escalation of the stakes that takes the viewers into the big finale. The Two Towers exemplifies this with its breathtakingly cinematic Battle of Helm’s Deep sequence, which embellishes a part of the book for one of the most finely crafted battle scenes ever filmed.
TIE: And the Band Played On (100%)
This powerful HBO docudrama charts the discovery and outbreak of HIV. It was adapted from the book of the same name, which documents the history of the virus from the government framing it as an illness specifically targeting gay men to actor Rock Hudson increasing the public’s awareness of it by announcing that he’d been diagnosed with AIDS. Author Randy Shilts has said that while he believes any journalist worth their salt could’ve written the book, he felt personally compelled to write it because he was a gay man, and as such, he and many people he cared about were scrutinized and vilified during the epidemic.
TIE: The Dresser (100%)
This is not Ian McKellen’s most renowned film. At the time, he was getting the most recognition for his return as Gandalf in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy. But according to Rotten Tomatoes, it is his best. It premiered on BBC Two in 2015 and didn’t get as much attention as a theatrical release would receive, but it did star McKellen alongside fellow A-list talent Anthony Hopkins. The Dresser is a made-for-TV film adaptation of the 1980 play of the same name by Ronald Harwood. It was directed by Richard Eyre, who most famously helmed the psychological thriller Notes on a Scandal.
