Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Columbia Pictures, Disney, Hollywood Pictures, Metropolitan Filmexport, MUBI, New Line Cinema, Paramount Pictures

Demi Moore has entered the chat. With her transcendent performance in Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, Moore steadily built a comeback narrative that led all the way to her first Oscar nomination. Her role as Elizabeth Sparkle, an actress of a certain age pushed aside by the industry until she is desperate enough to split herself in two, is an undeniable convergence of actor, role, and moment.

Moore spent the past two decades working mostly in supporting roles in indie pictures — an intentional step back from the 1990s, when she made history as Hollywood’s highest-paid actress. For much of that decade, her string of Zeitgeist-stirring hits; her marriage to fellow superstar Bruce Willis; and her celebrity persona (including a controversial 1991 Vanity Fair cover, where she appeared naked and pregnant) made her one of the most famous people on the planet. Despite such movies as Ghost, Indecent Proposal, and Disclosure cementing her as one of the few women of the time who could open a film at the box office, Moore was often maligned by critics.

At this year’s Golden Globes, where Moore won the first major acting award of her career, she gave a powerful speech in which she shared a story of a producer who told her she was a “popcorn actress” for whom awards and serious acting were not meant. How wrong he was! Yes, a look back on her filmography reveals her to be one of the greatest “popcorn actresses” of the past half-century, but even more so, a much more interesting actress than she was ever given credit for at the time. Are there missteps? There are many. Are there interminable and forgotten-to-time indie films? You can’t imagine. But more often than not, Moore holds the center of a movie, or drags a howler over the finish line with sheer presence, or simply gives a great performance.

The Substance has landed Moore in the awards conversation for the first time in her four-decade career. In addition to winning the Golden Globe, she took home the Critics Choice and Screen Actors Guild awards for Best Actress and has been shortlisted at BAFTA, the Gothams, Independent Spirit awards and dozens of regional critics prizes. In a few short days, she may win her first Academy Award.

To celebrate her long overdue welcome to Awards Season, we look back at the forty-plus films featuring Demi Moore, a movie star and actress.

Note: We did not include films in which Moore has a glorified cameo, so this list does not include Young Doctors in Love, Love Sonia, or The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. Additionally, the film Wild Oats was excluded, as it premiered on cable, and Bunraku and Happy Tears were left off because they are unavailable for streaming. Also, no television. 

Roland Jaffe’s take on the high-school English literature classic about Hester Prynne (Demi Moore), shunned by her Puritan community for having an affair with a minister (Gary Oldman), lives down to its brutal reputation. The glacial pacing and clunky script work in tandem with deviations from the source text, including an inexplicable bathtub masturbation scene, to make a cinematic crime for the ages. No one gets out unscathed, but Moore is left holding the bag. She looks wildly out of place, as though this will turn into a time-travel movie in which Demi Moore reveals she was a ’90s girlboss sucked back in time via her Palm Pilot. If only …

Half Light is somewhat ahead of its time in that it feels like a straight-to-Netflix movie a decade before that was even a thing. Moore plays an author who heads to the Scottish coast to grieve the accidental drowning of her young son. There, she is haunted by her guilt, her dead child, and (for added cliché) her duplicitous husband and best friend. Moore treats the whole thing with the acting equivalent of a shoulder shrug, as though she knew by the middle of the first day of shooting this was unsalvageable.

Moore’s second big-screen film role comes in a schlock-horror B movie (C movie?) about Dr. Paul Deen (Michael Shoob), who is traversing the postapocalyptic United States while incubating a deadly parasite. In his travels, he runs into Moore’s gentle and kindly Patricia, a lemon farmer. It speaks to the quality of the film that despite so many unanswered questions about the state of the world, the titular parasite, and the roving gangs of often topless killers, the No. 1 question I’m left with is how effective and necessary are lemons in a dystopic future? Is lemonade a favored drink of parasites? Are lemons a form of currency in our new society? Moore has mostly disavowed her first few film roles, and with good reason.

“Baldwin and Moore — together again!” … is something no one (not even me, a person who at 15 years old ran to the theater to see The Juror) wanted. Learning that this movie exists is a surprise; to find out it was released as recently as 2017 is bone-chilling. Unfortunately, its existence is the most memorable thing about it, as nothing in this movie sticks. It needs to be five levels more cheesy to reach Autumn in New York levels of camp, so, ultimately, it ends up being the kind of movie you just feel bad for watching.

When is a movie not a movie? When it’s Choices, Moore’s big-screen debut. The quality of this film is so poor that it’s as though you’re watching the entire thing through a viewfinder. It’s so dark (literally, not plotwise — the movie has no plot) that I barely clocked Moore when she popped up more than halfway through the film as the protagonist’s love interest. Despite the movie featuring performances and quality that are one-part porn, one-part after-school special, and one-part home movie, there is something about Moore’s presence that does catch your interest. It’s not exactly a star-is-born moment, but she does shine bright enough to be the only thing in Choices you can see clearly.

Demi Moore herself called this a “dirty old man” comedy; she was not wrong. Blame It on Rio tells the tale of two middle-aged men who head to Rio de Janeiro to chase young girls amid marital woes. Did I mention that Old Man No. 1 (Michael Caine) is chasing Old Man No. 2’s (Joseph Bologna) daughter (Michelle Johnson)? And that said daughter refers to her new lover as “Uncle Matthew”? Or that Johnson had to get court permission to be naked in the film because she was under age? It feels less like a movie and more like something Detective Olivia Benson should be investigating. What saves this from the absolute bottom of the list is that Moore, playing Caine’s daughter, Nikki, is saved from any sexual high jinks with her dad’s BFF by disappearing for much of the movie.

Nothing But Trouble is difficult to watch. Not hard to find, just hard to endure. I’d try to describe the plot, but I am worried someone would send over a wellness check. Nothing could have made this movie work, but when Dan Aykroyd plays both a deformed judge and an overgrown, diaper-clad man-baby, you know Demi Moore will be entirely out of her depth. She has zero chemistry with her co-lead, Chevy Chase (complimentary), and is neither playing it straight enough nor broad enough to break through the noise. Then again, perhaps breaking through a movie that takes place in a dumpster, has a roller coaster called “Mr. Bonestripper,” and includes John Candy playing both a police officer and his own twin sister is not something one should aspire to. Moore would prove to be a fun, lighter screen presence in later films, but this first shot at broad comedy ain’t it.

Songbird takes place in 2024, when the mutated virus, COVID-23, has sent the world into its fourth year of quarantine. Moore plays a wealthy matriarch selling illegal immunity bracelets in this new-world order for reasons too convoluted to explain. She gets involved with, among other people, Archie from Riverdale. I can’t imagine a movie anyone would want to watch less in the ninth month of our own very real, very much still-happening pandemic — or the fifth year, for that matter.

Imagine if someone took your grandpa shouting “You know the problem with this generation? They’re always on their phones!” and made it into a movie. Moore plays Anne, a divorced mom trying to connect with her rebellious daughter, Lola (Miley Cyrus), who is too busy texting to talk to her mother. It’s the kind of movie that already felt dated the moment filming wrapped, so a decade-plus later, it’s as relevant as your dormant Friendster account. Moore tries her best, but this movie isn’t interested in her exasperated single mom, leaving her to chug wine and do a lot of worrying.

Unlike many of her contemporaries — Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock — Moore never went the romantic-comedy route. After watching The Butcher’s Wife, you can understand why she may have stayed away. She stars as Marina, a clairvoyant from Ocracoke, North Carolina, who believes the New York butcher who washes up on her shore is the soul mate she saw in her dreams. She marries him and heads to New York City, where every member of the neighborhood treats the local butcher shop as Central Perk, popping in for lamb chops and love advice that is so folksy it should be served with a jug band underscoring it. Moore plays Marina as a mix of Ariel post-legs in The Little Mermaid, shocked by everything she encounters, and Amy Adams in Junebug if she were struck by lightning. The movie can’t decide on its fable underpinnings, and Moore doesn’t seem to be on stable ground — no matter how egregious her blonde wig or broad her country-fried accent.

In this Ruben Östlund–lite dark comedy, Moore plays an unhinged CEO who takes her team on a retreat that ends in cannibalism. Everything is pitched to an 11, but the film isn’t quite as clever in its satire as it wants, throwing around hot-button issues with abandon in a “look how controversial we are” sort of way. But I’d be lying if, every now and again, I didn’t crack a smile at just how batshit the proceedings were — in many cases thanks to Moore’s demented performance. The movie might occur in a cave, but Moore plays to the rafters as one of the most awful people ever committed to film. She’s enjoying herself; I just wish the audience was too.

In the mid-’90s, during one of his renaissance periods, post–Bullets Over Broadway and Mighty Aphrodite, it was almost a contractual obligation for A-listers to take a small part in one of Woody Allen’s ensembles. It’s hard for Moore to do much with the role since it’s so clear that Allen, the writer, star, and director, has such open disdain for her character, a fictionalized version of his ex-wife in the film. Moore gets a surrealist scene where she lays into Allen’s character, but it lacks the sting his character so clearly deserves.

This aggressively miserable movie about a dysfunctional family coming together for a wedding is written and directed by Sam Levinson, the creator of Euphoria. And, man, it doesn’t let you forget it. From drug-addled teens to deep-seated-yet-generic family trauma to all the histrionics (there’s so much yelling, you guys), it’s the ur-text for the soaring highs and self-indulgent lows of Euphoria High. As the groom’s stepmother, Moore is the second wife of Ellen Barkin’s nightmares. We’re supposed to hate Moore’s uppity interloper, Patty, but twist! The movie underestimates just how much we also hate Barkin’s erratic Lynn. Moore is sharp-tongued and acidic, but there are so many more levels of awful that you wish she would take this awful character to.

A titan of the craft, his acting heir apparent, and an up-and-coming international director. Theoretically, one could understand why an on-the-rise Demi Moore would want to co-star with Robert De Niro and Sean Penn in Neil Jordan’s remake of a 1955 Humphrey Bogart film. (To put this in perspective for today, that would be like Leonardo DiCaprio and Timothée Chalamet starring in a remake of Rain Man directed by Justine Triet, which sounds terrible, but you get the idea.) Moore plays Molly, a tough-as-nails single mother and sometimes sex worker who gets involved with De Niro’s escaped convict, Ned. Moore holds her own against De Niro (although I kind of wish we saw her and Penn together), but ultimately has very little to do except deliver a New Yawk accent so thick she might as well be shaking her fist and screaming, “Why I oughttaaaaa!”

Another year, another mom in the background. Considering how picky Moore became with projects later in her career, this one’s a bit of a head-scratcher. It’s not that Very Good Girls, the story of two best friends (Dakota Fanning and Elizabeth Olsen) who fall in love with the same guy, is particularly bad — at worst, it’s just kind of slight. It’s more that Moore has so little to do as Olsen’s mom you wonder what drew her to the film in the first place. Despite limited screen time, it’s nice to see Moore as this supportive, warm, and safe space for her daughter.

After a string of ensemble, supporting, and indie films, in 2007 Moore returned to co-leading films with fellow movie stars. The prospect of Prom Queen and Prom King of ’90s cinema, Demi Moore and Kevin Costner, headlining a movie together ends in disappointment in this nonsensical thriller. While Moore is expectedly steely as a damaged cop who ends up on serial-killer Costner’s trail, the movie makes the odd decision to sideline her from the main action with minimal interaction with Costner. Instead, she deals mostly with a separate set of escaped murderers and Costner’s protégé, serial-killer-in-training Dane Cook. Yes, Dane Cook. She deserved better.

Moore is quite good in this romantic drama about a woman simultaneously living two lives. She plays the confusion about her situation, the love for the two men in her life, and the peril of what to do in a way that had been absent from her more recent string of roles in this period. The problem, however, is that the performance is trapped in a movie that is — and this is a technical term — a complete and total slog. Trivia alert: The Substance writer-director, Coralie Fargeat served as an assistant director on Passion of the Mind.

Demi Moore starred with her then-fiancé, Emilio Estevez, in his directorial debut, which is essentially Muppet Babies Bonnie and Clyde. Estevez stars as John Wisdom, a college grad who can’t get a job after a run-in with the law. He decides to Robin Hood his way out of it by becoming a bank robber, exploding mortgage paperwork along the way. Moore is just capital-T, capital-G The Girlfriend, dragged along for the ride. At times, she’s the voice of reason; at other times, she’s the accomplice. But, unfortunately, she’s never anything more than a sliver of a character. It’s a testament to Moore’s overall star power that she makes any impression at all.

For an actress who once had that old ’90s dog-whistle reputation of “being difficult,” Moore sure does have many co-stars with whom she’s starred in several films: Alec Baldwin, Glenn Headley, Rob Lowe, Michael Caine, even Estevez. Here, she joins her former Disclosure and A Few Good Men co-stars (and real-life father and son) Donald and Kiefer Sutherland in this little-seen but solid western. Moore gives one of her quietest performances as repentant cowboy Kiefer’s former lover, Mary Alice. She lets a lot of the silence and unspoken moments fill the space between them, leaving you wishing the movie spent more time on their relationship and less on the story of a former young gun brought back to the gunslinging life he was trying to escape.

A clever concept: The Joneses are a family of roving influencers who move to neighborhoods to covertly sell products to its suburban denizens. Moore plays Kate, the head of the household and sales team. Both in performance and as scripted, Kate only goes halfway there. We’re told she’s very charming, very manipulative, and very career focused, but we don’t really see it. Moore sells the satire when she’s shilling her products quite well, but at home with her sales team/fake family, you want to see her a bit more tightly wound, a bit more Monica Geller.

Rough Night suffered in comparison to summer 2017’s other girls’ weekend comedy, Girl’s Trip, but it is still a pretty fun movie thanks in large part to the performances of a game cast embracing the zany Looney Tunes tone. Moore and Ty Burrell play horny neighbors interested in seducing Zoë Kravitz. Moore lets Burrell do the heavy comedic lifting, but she’s a welcome addition, getting laughs due to her sheer presence as she and Burrell do an extended version of Will Ferrell and Rachel Dratch’s “Love-ahs” sketch from Saturday Night Live.

Two things Demi Moore doesn’t get enough credit for: being silly and being a great villain. She gets to flex both those muscles in the big-screen adaptation of those TV-obsessed, boob-obsessed teens Beavis and Butt-Head. Interestingly, this was only the second time she and her then-husband, Bruce Willis, ever co-starred in a film together.

Moore’s first above-the-title solo starring role is a doozy: She plays Abby, who happens to be pregnant with the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. His birth will be a total bummer and cause the apocalypse. The movie squanders a fun if familiar premise with layers and layers of Catholic lore and enough secondary Bible characters to fill a Dan Brown novel. Moore’s grounding presence is the only thing that keeps the movie from flying into the hereafter.

Moore’s scene-stealing performance in Amanda Kramer’s 2022 film checks two boxes she had only danced around before: art-house favorite and queer icon. As much as she had been engaging with independent cinema for the past 20 years, Please Baby Please is decidedly an art-house film helmed by an auteur, filled with Surrealism, split realities, dream sequences, and Andrea Riseborough. Even more so than that, for an actress as famous as Demi Moore, she only had Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle to cultivate a legion of Twitter gays who would lift up even her most benign work. This pivot would round off with her role as a Swan who can use the f-slur in Feud: Capote vs. the Swans and her Oscar buzz for The Substance. But Please Baby Please should not be forgotten in that pantheon of queer delights.

Now and Then is where the Venn diagram of millennial crushes for many guys, gals, and gays overlaps. Four grown childhood friends (Moore, Rosie O’Donnell, Rita Wilson, and Melanie Griffith) gather for the impending birth of Wilson’s first child. They reminisce about the one golden summer that changed everything. The adults are relegated to bookend scenes, leaving most of the action to their younger selves (Christina Ricci, Thora Birch, Ashley Aston Moore, and Gaby Hoffman), who examine life, death, divorce, boys, their own changing bodies, and friendship dynamics. It’s a sweet little film, remembered fondly for, among other things, being the second time Ricci and Devon Sawa would lock lips in the same calendar year. (They really were the Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan of a micro-generation.) The four adult leads create a quick, easy rapport, even if the film is sometimes edited to suggest they were never in the same room. Moore gets bonus points for (mostly) selling some cringeworthy narration like “as we grow older, it becomes difficult to just believe.”

This Jon Cryer–Demi Moore coming-of-age story is forgotten; perhaps it shouldn’t be. Cryer plays an amateur teen photographer who falls in love with Moore’s rock-band front woman, Laura, when he takes her photo. While this movie isn’t fully baked, it has its ’80s-teen-comedy charms: a young Tim Robbins as a school bully, Louis DiMucchi from Grease 2, Norm from Cheers, and an impossibly young Jennifer Tilly as a terminally horny nerd with the hots for Cryer. Most important, it has Demi Moore in her first co-lead role. While she is mostly here as an object of want for Cryer’s Charles, it is the first glimpse into the tough yet tender, smart, and sexy onscreen persona that would make Moore a superstar in the coming years.

I know I’m going to sound like the world’s oldest millennial, but we really didn’t know how good we had it. We used to have these airport-paperback-courtroom thrillers adapted by Oscar-winning screenwriters and starring the biggest movie star in the world just rolling in and out of movie theaters. And we didn’t appreciate it. Moore is great as a single mom chosen for jury duty in the trial of a mob boss. Alec Baldwin’s psycho hit man also chooses her to intimidate into getting the jury to acquit. Their cat-and-mouse is effective until the film’s climax, where things kind of fall apart (it takes place, for some reason, in a cave in Guatemala). Through it all — even through a young Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s long-hair phase — Moore remains a protagonist who we’re rooting for and believe in.

Demi Moore and John Cusack are giving actors on the verge of movie stardom in One Crazy Summer, a cable-TV staple in the late ’80s and early ’90s. It’s a shaggy, fun movie chock-full of comedic talents doing lots of improv. Unfortunately, in a film like this, “the girl” is never going to get much of a chance to be front and center — she’s not even invited onto the boat during the climactic regatta race! Yet Moore brings an undeniable coolness factor to the proceedings, with her hair full of braids and earth-girl vibes. She also nails a great scene where she protects her man and bests the town bully.

Moore received a then-unprecedented $12.5 million to star in Striptease, the most glaring example of how much her acting career and celebrity were intertwined. Striptease was savaged by critics and rejected by audiences for reasons that are kind of baffling nearly 30 years later (although, by all accounts, it became profitable on home video and overseas). Forget what you heard and the misogyny-soaked reviews — Striptease isn’t some unwatchable disaster.  Sure, it’s not as funny as the Carl Hiaasen novel on which it’s based, nor is it as progressive as it wants to be, but it captures the spirit of its world and delivers strong performances from Ving Rhames, Burt Reynolds, and Moore as a down-on-her-luck FBI secretary turned stripper trying to win custody of her daughter. There are moments in Moore’s performance, particularly when she’s dancing, where you feel every inch of her movie-star powers. The truth is, despite all the titillation and ink spilled about Striptease, its biggest crime is being aggressively … fine.

The logline of Disclosure — what if a woman sexually harassed a man — is treated with the same level of credulity as author Michael Crichton’s sci-fi novels turned blockbusters, Jurassic Park and Congo. That’s appropriate, as the film paints Moore’s SHE-EO as a velociraptor in a miniskirt. The sexual politics may have aged as poorly as the VR technology at the center of the movie’s convoluted corporate intrigue, but Moore’s performance as Meredith has only grown with time. She relishes in her first opportunity to play a villain devouring scenery, terrorizing Michael Douglas, and ripping into a monologue about the state of women’s sexuality in the ’90s that is as juicy as it is ridiculous. Does Meredith have any depth of character other than Boss Bitch? Of course not; she’s literally introduced to us legs first. But Moore gets to spit out lines like “I am a sexually aggressive woman. I like it. Tom knew it, and you can’t handle it” with such venom you can’t help but hoot and holler.

One of the better films from Moore’s most recent period as a supporting player in indie films, Margin Call places its audiences in the tense 24 hours that snowballed into the 2008 financial crisis, as a group of executives scramble to contain the impending disaster. Moore is the only woman in the testosterone-fueled boardroom, a fact that is never lost on her or the audience. She is calculating in the best possible ways, allowing her hotheaded colleagues (including Paul Bettany, Kevin Spacey, and Jeremy Irons) to fill the space with their big swinging dicks, while she’s strategizing on how to survive this day and the next.

Remembered fondly (?) as the darkest film of the Disney renaissance period, Moore voices Esmeralda, the kindly Roma woman who helps the tormented Quasimodo and, oddly for a children’s movie, stirs the loins of evil Judge Frollo in the song “Hellfire.” Along with 1997’s Meg (voiced by Susan Egan) in Hercules, Esmeralda was a welcome reprieve from the Disney princesses who were prone to giving up everything, from their freedom to their voice, for a handsome prince. Questions about how the Roma people were depicted in 1996 aside, Esmeralda embodies everything that a Demi Moore “type” would expect on screen: smarter than all the men, sweet-natured, seductive, playful, mischievous. She nails it.

Moore reunites with her Blame It on Rio co-star Michael Caine for this fun diamond-heist caper, one of the more pleasant surprises buried in her long filmography. Caine plays Mr. Hobbs, a janitor who enlists Laura Quinn (Moore), a frustrated manager at the London Diamond Company in 1960, to rob the joint. Hobbs has an untold vendetta against the fat cats who run the company, and Quinn, the firm’s only female manager, is consistently getting passed up for promotions that go to inferior men. Twists, turns, and backstabs ensue, but all along, Caine and Moore’s sparkling dynamic elevates the proceedings. Caine is perfectly squirrelly, while Moore portrays world-weariness, frustration, and anger at being constantly overlooked perfectly. So perfectly, in fact, we won’t mention the old-age makeup that made me gasp in the opening and closing scenes.

Moore reteamed with Emilio Estevez for this unwieldy, occasionally cloying, but well-acted (it earned a SAG Best Cast nomination) Altman-esque film about the hours leading up to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Moore is playing it full tilt as alcoholic chanteuse Virginia. She seeds the ground for her performance in The Substance as yet another fading star realizing that her time in the spotlight is ending. While Bobby is pretty heavy-handed in its message and delivery, any child of the ’90s would consider its standout scene to be the one between Moore’s Virginia and Sharon Stone’s beautician, Miriam. Seeing these two icons — both mistreated by the industry for being talented and beautiful and powerful at the height of their stardom — connect and spar is positively electric. It’s worth the price of admission.

The second time Demi Moore and her then-husband, Bruce Willis, starred (physically) onscreen together was in this mean-spirited but pretty good thriller. Moore stars as Cynthia, a hairdresser along with her best friend, Joyce (Glenne Headley), in Bayonne, New Jersey. If New York City is the fifth lady in Sex and the City, Bayonne is the third meatball in Mortal Thoughts. The big hair and thick accents would take you out of the dour world of the movie if decades of Snookies and Sopranos, Gorgas and Guidicis didn’t retroactively ground these characters in some form of reality. Maybe that’s why it plays better now than when it was a box-office disappointment in 1991. The film is told in flashback as Cynthia is being interrogated for the murder of Joyce’s abusive husband, Jimmy (played by Willis). In the present, the question of Cynthia’s innocence and reliability as a narrator is conveyed through Moore’s cagey, wide-eyed performance. In flashback, Moore realizes that perhaps her best friend is not someone who can be trusted and might be pretty dangerous. Moore is most effective when she realizes she may be getting left behind in whatever pact these two women have made. The game is changing, and Moore pivots in real time from “Wait? What’s happening?” to “Oh no! This is what’s happening!” Director Alan Rudolph admitted that they made up the ending on the fly, and the movie does have that glued-together spirit about it, but more than not, it sticks the landing thanks to the two central performances.

After Ghost, a celebrity marriage to Bruce Willis, and a controversial Vanity Fair cover, Moore had reached a new echelon of fame. Unfortunately, her career hit a bit of a speed bump with a hat trick of disappointing-to-disastrous films in 1991. As they say, the rent was due, and she had no choice but to slay. Moore is once again the only female player in a testosterone soup, this time comprised of Tom Cruise, Kevin Bacon, Kiefer Sutherland, Jack Nicholson, and Kevin Pollak. Her Lieutenant Joanne Galloway is the beating heart of the film, ensuring that justice for the two marines accused of murder doesn’t get lost among the pissing contest between Cruise’s cocky lawyer, Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee, and Nicholson’s megalomaniacal Colonel Nathan Jessup. Much was said at the time about the decision to cast two of the most beautiful people on the planet (Moore and Cruise) and not give them a romantic subplot, but I think the film and Moore are better for creating a professional, platonic dynamic based on begrudging respect. Moore really sells the arc from her disappointment in Kaffee’s lackadaisical approach to the case at the film’s start to nearly fangirling over his prowess as a lawyer by the end.

A movie so embedded in the culture that a bad joke about it at the Oscars 25 years later led to Chris Rock getting smacked in the face by Will Smith. After the one-two punch of The Scarlet Letter and Striptease, critics and audiences seemed to be determined not to let Moore succeed even in a crowd-pleaser like Ridley Scott’s G.I. Jane. And it’s a shame. Maybe it has to be a click or two more serious to have gotten any real respect (Moore does scream “Suck my dick!” to Viggo Mortensen at one point), but it should’ve been an easy hit at the box office. In what would be her last starring role in a big-budget studio film for quite some time, Moore is at her steely best as Jordan O’Neil, the first female to go through Navy SEAL training. She navigates the machismo and gender bias of her fellow recruits while effectively sparring with Mrs. Robinson herself, Anne Bancroft, as a senator using O’Neil as a political pawn. This should have been Moore’s first real brush with awards attention.

Moore has never had much of a chance to be one of the girls. Oftentimes, she’s the only significant female presence in a male-dominated story: A Few Good Men, G.I. Jane, One Crazy Summer, Indecent Proposal, Disclosure, No Small Affair, Margin Call — the list goes on. When she has female co-stars, she often acts as the antagonist, like in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle or, in some ways, The Substance. Hell, even in Ghost, a third of her scenes opposite Whoopi Goldberg are physically channeling Patrick Swayze. With her filmography light on romantic comedies, Moore never got a Judy Greer or Joan Cusack to play off of, so it’s refreshing to see her in films like St. Elmo’s Fire, Now and Then, and About Last Night, because she’s great at working with female energy, too. This watered-down adaptation of the David Mamet play is about two Chicago singles (Moore and Rob Lowe) who fall in love, move in, wreck each other’s lives, and fall back in love. They are each flanked by a best friend: Lowe is saddled with a nearly unbearable James Belushi, while Moore gets prickly Elizabeth Perkins as her former roommate. Moore and Perkins’s onscreen dynamic is easily the best thing about the movie. They have bits, shorthand, girl talk, and fights that make their relationship seem more lived-in and more compelling than anything happening with the boys (or with Moore and Lowe, for that matter).

Moore had been away from big studio movies for over five years when she popped up as Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle’s Big Bad, fallen angel Madison Lee (perfect name). Moore brings genuine gravitas and danger to her very silly role in this very silly sequel to a very silly hit. Seeing her spar against this new generation of leading ladies (Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, and Lucy Liu) has meta-context for days. If Charlie’s Angels had been adapted for the big screen in, say, 1993, there’s no way Demi Moore wouldn’t have been cast as the Jaclyn Smith type. Furthermore, Moore knows exactly what movie she’s in and gives us the kind of camp excellence it requires. CA:FT never fulfills the promise of its premise more than when Madison Lee is revealed to be a villain, sheds a single tear, picks up her hilariously oversize golden gun, and utters the line: “I was never good. I was great.” The movie, as a whole, may not live up to this moment, but this moment lives on forever.

Moore became undeniable in this Brat Pack hit. Flanked by her contemporaries, many of whom were bigger stars than she was at the time, she leaps off the screen as Jules, the wild child of the friend group. Jules has a penchant for “bopping” her boss, setting up her (seemingly, possibly closeted) friends, doing mountains of cocaine, and, generally, making the worst life decisions a person possibly could. She is reminiscent of every friend you’ve ever had in your 20s who was a complete disaster, but through some combination of charisma and good fortune, you kept rooting for. Moore, who was going through her own problems with substance abuse and got clean thanks to director Joel Schumacher, plays Jules perfectly: She’s the kind of friend you want at 9 p.m., you love at 11 p.m., and you’re having the time of your life with at 1 a.m., but by 3 a.m., things are getting dark. The movie was a big hit in 1985, but overall sentiment on it has changed in the last 40 years. Turns out this gang of privileged, white Georgetown students is kind of insufferable! Doesn’t matter; Demi Moore’s star was sent into orbit.

Much like Glenn Close before her and Diane Lane after her, Demi Moore collaborated, sometimes quite tensely, with director Adrian Lyne to reach career heights. As a film, Indecent Proposal is not as good as either Fatal Attraction or Unfaithful. It kind of falls apart in the last half and gets swallowed up in the Zeitgeist conversation about its central question: Would you let your partner sleep with someone else for $1 million? The concept doesn’t seem like enough to hold a movie in 2025, with ethical non-monogamy, throuples, and open relationships coming up in typical brunch conversation, but in 1993, it was all anyone could talk about. With all the controversy abated, you really see how much Demi Moore is doing here. She’s just so damn good at melodrama! There’s such an interesting undercurrent to her performance — she’s almost rolling her eyes at how dumb these men who are fighting over her can be. This one wants to buy her; the other one thinks he already owns her. Meanwhile, she holds all the power and she wears it well. Shallow as the film can be, it’s a great vehicle for Moore to do everything she does best.

The movie that would make Demi Moore a superstar. As a kid growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, at the height of VHS culture and 24-hour cable-movie channels, I have seen Ghost in its entirety or in part, conservatively, 2,583 times. And it hits every time. Give me that timeless love story between Sam Wheat (Patrick Swayze) and Molly Jensen (Demi Moore), torn apart by a murder yet united in eternity via the Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody” and pottery sex! Give me Whoopi Goldberg in one of the rare, perfect Oscar wins as reluctant clairvoyant Oda Mae Brown! Give me the supernatural thriller with a dastardly, ab-shredded Tony Goldwyn murdering his bestie, Sam, for … money? Who cares! Give it all to me! Over the years, much has rightly been made of Moore’s ability to cry onscreen. Yet, her performance shouldn’t be watered down (sorry) to just her preternatural ability to access tears. She plays every note of loss and grief that Molly feels after violently losing her life partner at a moment’s notice. Moore nails the irrationality of grief, whether she’s saving a pack of Rolaids that Sam once touched or slapping Goldwyn’s Carl when he suggests she needs to move on with her life. Anyone who has lost a loved one and sought closure from a tarot-card reader, psychic, or medium can recognize the hope, reluctance, and anger Molly brings to her initial interactions with Oda Mae. All of that has gotten lost in the iconic haircut and the love scenes and the undeniable cheesiness of the movie, but Demi Moore is giving a tremendous performance here. And, yes, she’s one helluva cryer.

You could argue it’s recency bias, but you could also argue that it’s the only time Demi Moore has had a role this great to dig into. I’m no mathematician, but the equation seems to go as follows: Actor + Role x ineffable Movie Star Quality = Best Actress front-runner. It’s the perfect moment of an actor meeting a role and taking it to a place where only she can. You can feel how hungry Moore has been for an opportunity like this, so once she rips into it, she doesn’t let go. Coralie Fargeat’s singular vision and screenplay set Moore up to channel over four decades of acting and life experience into her performance as Elizabeth Sparkle, the starlet turned fitness queen willing to do anything to hold onto her youth — and relevance — when the awful men who run her industry are ready to replace her. On the power of Moore’s performance and comeback narrative, The Substance went from Cannes to a midnight-madness screening at the Toronto International Film Festival and all the way to being a five-time Oscar nominee, including Best Picture. For a body-horror-comedy! About aging women in Hollywood! Distributed by Mubi! There are simply no comps for this movie.