TV & Beyond on 2025-06-18 12:10:00

by | Jun 18, 2025 | TV & Beyond Articles | 0 comments

TV & Beyond on 2025-06-18 12:10:00

high-stress screwball comedy about a stripper who marries an impulsive Russian 21-year-old playboy (Mark Eydelshteyn) and then fights tooth and nail to keep her marriage from being annulled by her husband’s oligarch family, there’s an argument to be made that Madison is, in fact, at least partly responsible for all five of “Anora'”s Oscar wins — especially Best Picture. Not too shabby for an actress who’d never had a high-profile starring role before.

If that sounds bogus, you best believe it: Aside from two starring roles in a couple of little-seen 2017 and 2023 films, Madison had only ever played supporting parts in films and TV shows. But, if none of those parts brought her acclaim comparable to “Anora,” that’s merely an indictment of how little screen time she has typically been afforded; anyone who’s been paying attention has known for years now that Madison is an astounding, attention-commanding talent. Here, we’ve compiled a ranking of all 12 of her film and TV projects — based solely on the quality of the projects themselves rather than her work in them, as she has yet to give a bad performance even in her filmography’s most forgettable entries.

Liza, Liza, Skies Are Grey

Despite her later projects’ tendency to underuse her, Mikey Madison’s very first film role was a starring performance. The role in question was as Liza, the titular character of the 2017 period drama film “Liza, Liza, Skies Are Grey.” The first fiction feature ever directed by veteran American documentary director and producer Terry Sanders, “Liza, Liza” tells the story of the young couple of Liza and Brett (Sean H. Scully), who take a road trip along the Californian coast to get some respite from their stifling, unpromising lives as teenagers in 1966. During their journey, Liza and Brett endeavor to lose their virginity to each other, and are inspired by the societal and cultural shifts of the late ’60s to escape into rebellion and freedom.

Unfortunately, despite the lofty ambitions suggested by that premise, “Liza, Liza, Skies Are Grey” is thoroughly underwhelming as an actual movie. Although the central duo — especially Madison — does their best with their thinly-written characters, there’s just not enough meat in the film to command interest for 85 minutes, let alone spark emotion or reflection. And, as if the dramaturgical listlessness weren’t enough of a problem, the historical era is painted in such broad strokes that any purported insight about midcentury American sexual repression is lost to a persistent lack of credibility.

It Takes Three

Every up-and-coming young American actor has to make a stop or two at John Hughes-esque earnest high school comedy, and Mikey Madison did that with “It Takes Three,” a film in which she lights up the screen despite being the fourth most prominent member of the central love quadrangle. The plot concerns Chris Newton (David Gridley), a stereotypical meathead cool guy who enlists the help of stereotypical awkward geek Cy Berger (Jared Gilman, of Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom”) to doctor his social media accounts, helping him feign a cultured and intellectual personality to try to win over rebellious indie girl Roxy (Aurora Perrineau) — much to the chagrin of Cy’s best friend Kat (Madison), who believes the whole thing to be a shallow exercise in futility and dishonesty.

Incidentally, “a shallow exercise in futility and dishonesty” is also an apt description for “It Takes Three,” a film that boxes its characters so completely into one-dimensional teen movie archetypes that they barely have any room left to be human. Madison fares best, by virtue of playing the character whose personality is least reined in by cliché, but the rest of the cast doesn’t have the same luck; Gridley’s dumb jock, in particular, is so unremarkable as to not even feature in the movie’s poster despite being the ostensible protagonist. This is the kind of movie that has a character read “Cyrano de Bergerac” onscreen to alert you to the fact that you’re watching a “Cyrano” riff — and, as “Cyrano” riffs go, it’s a rough one.

The Addams Family

Candi the barista stepping back and grinning awkwardly at Gomez Addams and Thing in The Addams Family

United Artists Releasing

There have been a few “Addams Family” films, and all but the two beloved Barry Sonnenfeld ’90s entries have been pretty shoddy. The 2019 CGI animated reboot, for one, follows the titular clan’s war against a reality TV show host who wants to drive them out of town — but the plot scarcely matters as more than a throughline for a series of unamusing toddler-friendly gags and a path to a safe and predictable emotional resolution. Add in the rubbery character designs and the flat, cheap-looking CGI, and “The Addams Family” manages to shortchange virtually everything that makes the Addams Family interesting.

The movie’s only winning creative aspect is the voice cast, which includes such shrewd choices as Oscar Isaac as Gomez, Charlize Theron as Morticia, Allison Janney as their ruthless nemesis Margaux Needler, and Nick Kroll as Uncle Fester. Mikey Madison makes a very small but typically strong contribution as Candi, a barista who works in Margaux’s ambitious planned community Assimilation, and is terrified of Gomez when he walks into her café.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Mikey Madison as Sadie talking and smiling maniacally in the backseat of a car in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Sony Pictures Releasing

Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 historical fiction dramedy “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” tells of two prominent Hollywood players in the late ’60s, floundering Western TV star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double and personal assistant Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), as they saunter through a rapidly changing film industry. We also see a little bit of a highly aestheticized version of the life of Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), who happens to live next door to Dalton with her husband Roman Polanski (Rafał Zawierucha).

Despite huge box office success and two Oscar wins (including an utterly inexplicable one for Pitt), “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” is in all likelihood the laziest, dullest, least interesting film of Tarantino’s career — an aimless trudge through falsified history that never bothers to actually find anything compelling in Dalton or Booth’s lives and stock fading-macho woes. To boot, the movie advances some strikingly regressive ideas about race, gender, and masculinity, going so far as to reframe the Charles Manson family from reactionary white supremacists to a woke proto-feminist matriarchy.

This rewriting of the Manson cult’s actual nature becomes especially troubling in the movie’s climax, which features Mikey Madison in a role we won’t spoil, but which epitomizes Tarantino’s self-serving appropriation of charged real-life history for his own alarming ideological ends. Madison shrieks, bleeds, and gets set on fire like a champ, but her scene ranks among the most revoltingly misogynistic in all of contemporary cinema.

Nostalgia

Mikey Madison as Kathleen sitting and staring with a pensive expression in Nostalgia

Bleecker Street Media

Written by Alex Ross Perry and directed by Mark Pellington, “Nostalgia” is a 2018 film that brings together several interconnected narratives revolving around the unifying theme of loss and grief. The various tales are brought to life by a starry team including Jon Hamm, Nick Offerman, Amber Tamblyn, Catherine Keener, Ellen Burstyn, Bruce Dern, Patton Oswalt, and James LeGros.

Mikey Madison, in one of her first film roles, has just a few minutes of screentime as Kathleen, a friend of Tallie (Annalise Basso), the daughter of Keener and LeGros’ characters. It’s impossible to get into the nature of Kathleen’s role in the plot without spoilers, but suffice to say that Madison makes the most of her one big scene, accessing reserves of heavy emotion that are stunning to see coming from an actress who was then under 19 years old.

As for the movie as a whole, it sporadically rises to that same level of accomplishment; in between heavy-handed and sentimental ploys for tears, “Nostalgia” does manage to get in some searing and moving insights about the nature of attachment and the challenges of moving on, and the whole cast is in top form from start to finish. But the treatment of a central theme as fraught as the mourning process in itself requires a defter, more delicate touch than Pellington and Perry are really able to display in this particular work.

Imposters

Mikey Madison as young Maddie Jonson smiling whilel wearing a waitress uniform and nametag on Imposters

Bravo

Mikey Madison appears in two episodes of the 2017-2018 Bravo dark comedy series “Imposters.” Created by Adam Brooks and Paul Adelstein, the show tells the story of Maddie Jonson (Inbar Lavi), a professional con woman working for a shadowy organization that employs various con artists in operations around the United States. With the help of her associates Max (Brian Benben) and Sally (Katherine LaNasa), Maddie routinely manipulates targets into falling in love with and marrying her, only to steal their most precious belongings once she’s lured them into a false sense of security. But she wants out of the con life, initiating a series of dangerous circumstances as she faces off against her mysterious boss, known only as The Doctor (Ray Proscia).

It’s the ideal setup for a wild, rambunctious, morbidly entertaining fusion of comedy and suspense, and that’s very much what “Imposters” is. Although its story lands in a somewhat unsatisfying place due to a premature cancellation after just two seasons, it still makes for perfectly addictive binge viewing. Mikey Madison has only two guest starring spots as the younger version of Maddie, during the Season 1 finale and the fifth episode of Season 2, but the combination of sly wit, charisma, and vulnerability that she displays in those two episodes’ flashbacks is enough to make her an integral part of Maddie’s characterization.

All Souls

Mikey Madison as River wearing skull makeup on half her face in All Souls

Lionsgate Home Entertainment

Prior to “Anora,” Mikey Madison had exactly two leading roles in movies, and one had happened just the year before, in 2023, in the Emmanuelle Picket-directed crime caper “All Souls.” Picket’s feature directorial debut, “All Souls” follows one nerve-racking Halloween night in the life of River, a young single mother who gets blackmailed into working as an informant and infiltrating the inner circle of volcanic drug kingpin Silas (G-Eazy) — who is also the father of her daughter Jade (Mia Love Disnard).

While it doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel, the film is at least pretty successful in mining that scenario for tension and enthrallment. With a sense of immediacy and urgency that is almost Safdie brothers-esque (or even Sean Baker-esque, come to think of it, given the nature of Baker’s own Madison-starring feature), “All Souls” is able to engender deep investment in River’s situation, imparting significant emotional impact to the twists and turns of her tenuous struggle to keep herself and her daughter safe. To that end, of course, Picket and writer Anthony Ragnone II are helped in no small part by the efforts of Madison herself. Much like in “Anora,” she is able to create a whole, living and breathing person out of River even as she navigates multiple layers of performance and deceit, thus making the stakes of River’s story all the higher.

Monster

Mikey Madison as Alexandra Floyd sitting in class and tilting her head to the right in Monster

Netflix

In 1999, American author Walter Dean Meyers released “Monster,” an innovative young adult novel that mixes screenplay and epistolary formats to tell the story of Steve Harmon, a 16-year-old honor student awaiting trial for murder after being involved in a drugstore robbery gone awry. Nearly 20 years later, in 2018, a film adaptation premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, with a screenplay by Radha Blank, Cole Wiley, and Janece Shaffer, and direction by music video veteran Anthony Mandler. Despite good reviews and a positively star-studded cast, however, it wasn’t until 2021 — following the breakout of its star Kelvin Harrison Jr. — that “Monster” finally landed commercial distribution, premiering on Netflix in May of that year.

It’s truly a shame that it took so long for the world to get to see “Monster,” because it is one of the strongest courtroom dramas American cinema has seen in a long time, teeming with the very same formal originality and political sharpness that animated its source material’s philosophical investigation into the nature of truth and subjectivity. Harrison shines in a role tailor-made to showcase his command of psychological nuance, but the whole ensemble is given room to do top-notch work. Indeed, with Jennifer Hudson, Jennifer Ehle, Jeffrey Wright, Tim Blake Nelson, John David Washington, Jharrel Jerome, and even a surprisingly excellent A$AP Rocky in tow, it’s almost possible to miss Mikey Madison turning in a delightful cameo as Alexandra Floyd, a highly cynical student in Steve’s film class.

Lady in the Lake

Mikey Madison as Judith Weinstein laughing while talking to Natalie Portman as Maddie Schwartz on Lady in the Lake

Apple TV+

As part of Apple TV+’s ongoing effort to establish itself as a boutique of artful, quality-controlled television amid the streaming wars, 2024 saw the release of “Lady in the Lake,” a period crime miniseries created, partly scripted, and entirely directed by Alma Har’el of “Honey Boy” fame. Based on the eponymous novel by Laura Lippman, “Lady in the Lake” centers on Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman, in her first-ever TV acting work), a ’60s Jewish housewife from the Baltimore suburbs who begins to work as an investigative journalist. She endeavors to solve the mystery of the murder of 11-year-old Tessie Durst (Bianca Belle), and her pursuit leads her to cross paths with Black progressive activist Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram).

What unfolds is a taut, twisty, incredibly tense thriller that doubles as a meditation on crime, truth, journalism, and the complex historical relations between the United States’ Black and Jewish communities. Portman and Ingram are both fantastic as ever, but the show also offers an opportunity to see Mikey Madison in action in the role of Judith Weinstein, a local Jewish woman who teams up with Maddie to search for Tessie while she’s still being considered missing. The two women bond over the misogyny and antisemitism they both face, and end up becoming friends — a dynamic that allows Portman and Madison to display a surprising amount of chemistry.

Scream

Mikey Madison as Amber Freeman sitting on a couch and hugging her knees in Scream

Paramount Pictures

The 2022 soft reboot of “Scream” is yet another example of a Mikey Madison movie where actually wading into detail about the nature of her role would inevitably constitute spoilers. Simply put, she is the definition of a scene-stealer, utterly stopping the show with her boisterous and energetic performance in just a handful of sequences — and that the movie itself is among the best and most memorable not just in the “Scream” franchise but in all 2020s studio horror.

As ever, the plot concerns a killing spree perpetrated and dealt with by a litany of highly genre-savvy characters. The kicker, here, is that the movie communicates even more directly than usual with the 1996 original, and acts as a sort of state of the union on the changes in horror cinema over the intervening two and a half decades, complete with Jordan Peele influence and spirited satire of “elevated horror” and its very vocal fans. For all the sophistication and playfulness of its meta elements, however, the 2022 “Scream” remains first and foremost a rollicking good time, full of shocking kills, immediately iconic one-liners, and deliriously entertaining twists, all bound together by a genuine emotional core that understands everything that was funny, scary, and affecting about the original “Scream.”

Better Things

The project that revealed Mikey Madison to the world was the enormously underrated FX dramedy “Better Things.” Created by Pamela Adlon and Louis C.K. (who was fired from the show after confirming the sexual misconduct allegations against him in 2017), “Better Things” follows Samantha “Sam” Fox (Adlon), a working-class actress in Los Angeles struggling to raise three children on her own. Those children are peppy youngest daughter Duke (Olivia Edward), defiant middle child Frankie (Hannah Alligood), and troubled eldest Max, played by Madison.

“Better Things” ran for five seasons between 2016 and 2022, and proved to be the rare example of a show that started out great and then kept getting better with each season, as Adlon’s work as writer and director (she helmed every episode from Season 2 onwards) grew in confidence, poise, and profundity. Each of the show’s core protagonists — Sam and her kids plus Sam’s British mother Phyllis “Phil” Darby (Celia Imrie) — gets the chance to develop immensely as humans over the course of 52 masterfully-written episodes; as a result, Max may well be the single most layered, complex, and fully lived-in role of Mikey Madison’s career so far. The difficult, tempestuous, yet deeply loving and caring relationship Max has with her mother is one of the show’s most enduring emotional centers, and it’s utterly thrilling to watch Madison come into her own as an actor in real time with Adlon’s masterful direction guiding her.

Anora

Mikey Madison as Ani Mikheeva standing by a guardhouse and looking to her left in Anora

Neon

The top pick for this list really couldn’t have been anything else but “Anora.” The highly acclaimed 2024 film, which made history as the first American title in 13 years to win the Palme d’Or and then swept the 2025 Oscars on top of that, is the epitome of writer-director Sean Baker’s singular knack for breathing raucous, messy life into portrayals of people on the margins of American society. And, in this particular case, this means that “Anora” is also an incredible showcase for the screen presence and acting chops of Mikey Madison, who for once gets a whole, richly-written, virtuosically-directed film built entirely around her. The resounding success of “Anora” is a testament not just to Baker’s effervescent talent but to what a force of nature Madison is among her generation’s peers.

Even the fiery online controversy that erupted in the wake of the Best Actress Oscar upset, with many deeming then 25-year-old Madison’s triumph over the likes of 62-year-old Demi Moore and 59-year-old Fernanda Torres a result of ageism (never mind that seven actresses over 45 and zero actresses aged 25 or younger had won the Best Actress Oscar in the preceding decade), spoke to the brilliance of Madison’s performance. Her work as Ani is so natural, authentic, and fine-grained that it feels less like watching an actor at work than a young woman just being herself — which, as any video interview with Madison can attest, couldn’t be further from the truth. She is just that darn good, as is “Anora.”

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