Emily Blunt

In The Fall Guy (2024), Emily Blunt’s Jody Moreno puts Ryan Gosling through repeated takes while the crew listens to what amounts to a private argument. She is trying to stay angry with him and keeps forgetting. We were moved by those lapses, because Gosling notices each one and neither actor needs to point it out. David Leitch gives them room to make that exchange matter, even when the mystery plot is doing its best to distract us.

The move from My Summer of Love (2004) to her Hollywood breakthrough in The Devil Wears Prada (2006) established her without settling what kind of actor she would be. A leading role in The Young Victoria (2009) came before the action work of Looper (2012) and Edge of Tomorrow (2014). In the latter, Doug Liman gives her Rita a useful task: keep Tom Cruise’s repeated failures from becoming one long comic routine. She does it with direct speech and credible physical effort, holding our attention without trying to win his laughs.

We would not trade away that action work for more comedies. In The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026), Emily Charlton’s clipped delivery supplies much of the pleasure in an amiable film with too little at stake. Steven Spielberg gets more from her in Disclosure Day (2026). Her weather forecaster Margaret Fairchild treats strange new abilities as an embarrassment before recognising the danger, and her disbelief helps the exposition along.

Christopher Nolan leaves Kitty drinking and glaring for too much of Oppenheimer (2023), a fine film with a thin part for Blunt. In Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine (2025), Dawn Staples’s kitchen rows are louder than the fights, and twice he lets her anger run past the point where we believe it. We would welcome larger parts, but she needs directors who will rein her in when necessary. For an evening built around Blunt, start with Edge of Tomorrow.