(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 18 January 2026 14:30, UK
When compared to the many young actors who have shown an active interest in classic cinema, some have assumed that Millie Bobby Brown has little of it in the art form, because, while she may have been acting from a very young age, she has become an uninteresting performer boasting a bland filmography that’s earned her the tag of a ‘Netflix star’.
In fairness to her, there’s only so much she could have done to save a film like The Electric State, which was so terrible that not even a young Meryl Streep and Daniel Day-Lewis could have raised it to palatable. However, when her other most memorable film roles are in Damsel, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and Enola Holmes, it’s pretty clear that taking quality parts isn’t a priority.
The question that Brown now faces is whether she’s interested in ‘serious’ acting now that Stranger Things has concluded. While shooting an expensive, intensive television series requires an intense degree of commitment that may have prevented her from accepting other parts, she now has the freedom to use her star power for the force of good.
There’s no way to tell how much say she had in her roles as a child star, but she should now theoretically have the independence to choose the types of films she wants to make, so only time will tell if she utilises this freedom to change some opinions about her tastes.
On the subject of taste, even if she may not share the same bench of film knowledge as some of her contemporaries, such as Jenna Ortega or Finn Wolfhard, the list of favourites Brown provided to Letterboxd aren’t bad at all.
She started off by naming Up, which is one of the greatest and most mature Pixar films of all time, such that while there are many in the industry with an unfortunate bias against animation as a medium, Up became only the second animated film in history to receive an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Picture’.
Brown has been criticised for her long-term relationship with Netflix, a streaming service that seemingly wants to bring the death of movie theatres, but she cited Marriage Story, a Netflix film with a limited theatre run to qualify for the Academy Awards, as one of her favourites. Even if a vast majority of audiences watched the film at home, it is still the type of emotional character drama for adults that the industry rarely makes anymore, but you can always turn to Noah Baumbach for.
The one pick of hers that may raise some eyebrows is Star Wars: Episode III- Revenge of the Sith, which concluded George Lucas’ Star Wars prequel trilogy. The trilogy was met with savage reviews upon debut, but has since been defended in retrospect by many of the audiences that grew up watching it, including Brown. In that, Revenge of the Sith is certainly the most well-regarded of the three because of the emotional transformation of Hayden Christensen’s Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader, and for the incredible performance turned in by Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Rounding off the circuit, the most obscure film Brown listed was Gia, a 1998 HBO film that starred Angelina Jolie. Even though television films aren’t always treated with the respect that they deserve, this one had the same quality as any HBO production, allowing Jolie to show that she had real acting chops and was not just a tabloid celebrity, so one hopes Brown will be able to find a film role that will restore her reputation in the same way.
Millie Bobby Brown’s four favourite movies:Up (Pete Docter, 2009)Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach, 2019)Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (George Lucas, 2005)Gia (Michael Cristofer, 1998)
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