It’s a movie in search of ideas, with performances bereft of substance. She and Jim Sturgess, playing the eager suitor trying to rewin her heart, lack the chemistry needed to humanize Upside Down’s gravity-shattering mumbo jumbo.
Not even Dunst could elevate this slapdash slice of man-child drivel.ĭrunk on its attempted visual grandeur, this sci-fi flop wastes Dunst as a personality-free amnesiac. She and Pegg are so mismatched that it’s exasperating to see them wind up together at the end. It’s hard to see what attracted Dunst to the film, especially considering she’s never struggled to find funny material. Like the movie surrounding it, her role is an insult, neither interesting nor humorous. Dunst sleepwalks through this noxious comedy based on Toby Young’s 2001 memoir of the same name, playing a writer who takes a reluctant liking to Pegg’s infantile nitwit.
To borrow Jeff Bridges’s description of the magazine that Simon Pegg’s character once ran, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People is witless. How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (2008) Here’s to many more years of Kirsten Dunst.ģ3.
For the sake of brevity, we didn’t include TV movies ( Fifteen and Pregnant, The Devil’s Arithmetic), animation ( Anastasia), cameos and guest appearances ( ER, Anchorman 2), tiny supporting roles ( The Bonfire of the Vanities, Mother Night), or more obscure titles unavailable on VOD ( Luckytown, Levity). (“She’s my Gena Rowlands, and I mean it,” Campion recently said.) Adding a real-life swoon, the man she marries in Dog is her partner Jesse Plemons, whom Dunst met in 2016.īelow, we rank 33 of Dunst’s performances. Dunst tends to shine brightest when she can inject characters with an optimism bordering on the pathological, but Campion has provided a film that taps into her gentle gravity - proof she still has layers to unpeel. Maybe I don’t play the game enough.”ĭunst’s awards fate could soon change thanks to The Power of the Dog, Jane Campion’s spellbinding psychodrama about a cruel rancher (Benedict Cumberbatch) who terrorizes his tender brother’s new wife (Dunst) in 1920s Montana. I just feel like, What did I do? I am so chill. Maybe they just think I’m the girl from Bring It On. Maybe like twice for a Golden Globe when I was little and one for Fargo. “I’ve never been recognized in my own industry. “I feel like a lot of things I do people like later,” Dunst said in 2019. As she has pointed out in interviews, some of her defining movies, like Drop Dead Gorgeous and Marie Antoinette, were initially met with chilly reception. The fact that her career just makes sense, that she has always played age-appropriate parts and kept her tabloid life to a minimum, has given her one of the sturdiest résumés an actor can hope for.Īnd yet, somehow, the world takes Kirsten Dunst for granted. Has any child star of the last 40 years fared better than Kirsten Dunst? The movies that first won her acclaim ( Interview With the Vampire, Little Women) segued perfectly into the teen vehicles that made Dunst one of the most beloved celebrities of her generation ( The Virgin Suicides, Bring It On), which in turn provided a pathway to the varied modes she has embraced as an adult ( Melancholia, Bachelorette, Fargo). Photo-Illustration: Vulture Photos by Columbia Pictures, Universal Pictures, Magnolia Pictures, Showtime and Warner Bros.