Every DiCaprio
Movie Ranked

Three hours of pure, unhinged chaos. The Quaalude crawl. The chest-thumping lunch. The yacht sinking. DiCaprio turned Jordan Belfort into a Shakespearean monster you cannot stop watching. The single greatest comedic-dramatic performance of the 21st century.

An undercover cop unraveling inside the Boston mob. Every scene crackles with paranoia. Leo brought a coiled, desperate energy that made you feel the walls closing in. Best Picture winner. Scorsese's tightest thriller. DiCaprio is its beating, terrified heart.

Nolan built a labyrinth of dreams, but DiCaprio made you care about the man lost inside it. The scenes with Mal are devastating. He turned a $160M blockbuster about extracting secrets from people's subconscious into a deeply personal story about grief and guilt.

The one that finally won him the Oscar. Subzero temperatures. Eating raw bison liver. Crawling through snow for months. Leo communicated more with grunts and stares than most actors do with pages of dialogue. The internet celebrated his win like a national holiday.

His first villain. He smashed a real glass and kept acting while bleeding. Calvin Candie is charming, terrifying, and deeply evil all at once. The dinner scene is a masterclass in controlled menace. Tarantino gave him the role and Leo set the table on fire.

96% on Rotten Tomatoes. Pure charm. Pure con artistry. DiCaprio played a teenager who impersonated a pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer, and made you root for the criminal the entire time. The chemistry with Tom Hanks is flawless. Spielberg's most underrated film.

He was 19 years old. Oscar-nominated as a teenager. His portrayal of a mentally disabled boy was so authentic that people genuinely thought he was disabled in real life. The water tower scene is cinema. Nobody knew this kid. Everybody remembered him after.

The biggest movie ever made at the time. $2.2 billion worldwide. Leo was 22 and became the most famous person on Earth overnight. Jack Dawson is pure romantic idealism. 'I'm the king of the world' entered the permanent lexicon of human civilization. He wasn't even nominated for Best Actor. The Academy has a lot to answer for.

A fading TV star terrified of irrelevance. The scene where Rick forgets his lines and berates himself in the trailer is one of the most human moments in Tarantino's filmography. The chemistry with Brad Pitt is effortless. Also the only Leo movie where his marriage survives. Miracles happen.

A psychological thriller that rewards rewatching. Leo's slow unraveling as a federal marshal investigating a disappearance on an island asylum is masterful. The twist recontextualizes every scene. Critics were split. Audiences loved it. Time has been kind to this one.

Scorsese's seventh collaboration with DiCaprio. A three-and-a-half-hour epic about the Osage murders. Leo played against type as the weak, morally bankrupt husband slowly poisoning his wife. 93% on RT and 10 Oscar noms. Proof he is still evolving at 49.

Leo as Howard Hughes — aviation pioneer, filmmaker, and obsessive-compulsive billionaire. He captured the brilliance and the madness in equal measure. The sequences showing Hughes' mental deterioration are among the best work of both Scorsese and DiCaprio. 11 Oscar nominations. Won five.

Leo with a South African accent, running through Sierra Leone's civil war. The accent was surprisingly convincing. The performance earned him a Best Actor nomination. Released the same month as The Departed. Two Oscar-caliber performances in one holiday season. Show-off.

The first Scorsese-DiCaprio collaboration. Leo held his own against Daniel Day-Lewis in full scenery-devouring mode — no small feat. The film is messy and overlong but the partnership it launched changed cinema for the next two decades.

Critics hated it. Audiences loved it. $353M worldwide. Leo was born to play Gatsby — the hopeless romantic building an empire out of pure longing. The 'old sport' delivery alone justifies the film's existence. Luhrmann's excess overwhelmed the story, but DiCaprio's performance is genuinely great.

Neon-soaked Shakespeare with guns and Hawaiian shirts. Luhrmann made iambic pentameter feel dangerous. Leo made an entire generation care about a 400-year-old love story. The fish tank scene. The balcony scene. He was 21 and already a movie star.

Leo and Kate Winslet reunited 11 years after Titanic — this time as a married couple whose suburban life is quietly destroying them. It is somehow even more depressing than the Titanic. Brutal, brilliant, and criminally underseen. The arguments feel too real.

A climate change satire disguised as a comet movie. Leo played a nervous astronomer trying to warn the world. Critics were divided. The internet memed it to death. Leo was clearly passionate about the message even when the script was hitting you over the head with it.

A raw, brutal portrait of teenage addiction. Leo went from Gilbert Grape to a heroin addict begging his mother for money through a locked door. The film is rough around the edges but DiCaprio's commitment is total. A cult classic that showed his range early.

A CIA thriller where Leo plays a field operative opposite Russell Crowe's desk-bound handler. Ridley Scott directed. It should have been better. Competent but forgettable — the rare DiCaprio film where he's doing the work but the material doesn't rise to meet him.

19% on Rotten Tomatoes. Leo on a secret Thai beach that turns into a Lord of the Flies nightmare. His first film after Titanic, chosen specifically to shed the heartthrob image. The film is a mess but it made $144M because Leo was the biggest star on Earth. Boyle and DiCaprio both survived this.

Leo in old-age prosthetics playing the FBI director as a closeted, paranoid control freak. Eastwood directed with his usual efficiency. The makeup was distracting. The performance underneath it was committed. Not a bad film — just not a necessary one.

Leo plays twin brothers — the evil king and the good prince. Jeremy Irons, John Malkovich, and Gerard Depardieu are the Three Musketeers. It made $183M on the strength of Leo's post-Titanic fame. 34% on RT. A guilty pleasure that nobody defends but everybody watched.

$300,000 at the box office. Leo played the French poet Arthur Rimbaud in a biographical drama about his destructive relationship with Paul Verlaine. A bold choice for a rising star. Almost nobody saw it. The few who did remember Leo's fearlessness more than the film itself.

Leo's first major film role, opposite Robert De Niro as an abusive stepfather. He was 18. De Niro was De Niro. And the kid held his own. The audition tape for this film is legendary — he walked in and demanded the part with the confidence of a veteran. The beginning of everything.