Our Favourite Oscar Isaac Movies

If aliens came down and asked us to show them what a leading man looks like in 2026, I guess you could just point towards Oscar Isaac. He has the face of a 1970s matinee idol and the spectrum of a really talented theatre kid who never left the stage.

He can happily pivot between a tortured folk singer, a space dad, a genocidal tech bro, a crumbling husband, and even a Gothic lunatic – and trust me, he’ll impress you in every single one of them. He is, somehow, both the most online famous person and the most serious actor of his. There's no coherent brand here. And that is exactly Isaac’s beand.

Whether he's setting himself on fire for Guillermo del Toro or just holding a movie together with his eyes (which he does, a lot), Isaac puts the full weight of himself into everything.

Oscar Isaac Movies

Below are the Oscar Isaac performances that make the case.

Frankenstein (2025)

On paper, Isaac playing Victor Frankenstein should be too obvious to work. Victor's supposed to be a walking warning label — ego, ambition, the works — and Isaac arrives with all that matinee-idol warmth that seems to actively contradict the assignment. But that's exactly the trap del Toro set, and Isaac walks into it with a smile. He lets you like Victor, and he lets you root for him. And then he turns the lights on. There's a devastation he keeps sliding in between the grandiose meltdowns (perhaps the flicker of the man Victor could've been if he weren't, you know, Victor) and it wrecks you. This was by far his best performance of the year.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

You know, it’s surprising that many people don’t know about this. Llewyn is a folk singer in 1961 who is very nearly talented enough, very nearly getting there, very nearly fine, and Isaac plays him perfectly for two straight hours. He's funny and mean and sad and absolutely cooked, often in the same frame. He also, by the way, sings like someone who's been doing it for real his entire life.

Ex Machina (2014)

Nathan Bateman is the blueprint! Before Succession, before Mountainhead or whatever. Literally, very morally bankrupt tech founder in every prestige show since 2014 owes him royalties. Isaac plays Alex Garland's shredded, drunken, disco-dancing AI genius like someone who's spent too much time alone and started mistaking himself for god — and it's genuinely one of the strangest, funniest, most unsettling performances of the last decade. He's charming, and then he’s repulsive. Years before ChatGPT, before any of this, Isaac sketched out exactly the kind of guy who would build the thing that unmakes us. And well, here we are.

Dune: Part One (2021)

Duke Leto Atreides is barely in the movie, and yet his eyes and the gray beard left a mark on my heart. He plays Leto with this weary, decent, fully grown-up and when he dies, the rest of the film is essentially a two-hour-and-change meditation on the Leto-shaped hole he left behind.

Scenes From A Marriage (2021)

Remaking Bergman is the kind of decision that ends careers, but Isaac and Jessica deliver some of the best work of their lives here. Isaac plays a man who loves his wife and is also, simultaneously, in the process of dismantling her, and he refuses to pretty it up or make it easier to sit with. He lets small cruelties leak out in the middle of tender moments. It's not a comfortable watch, and it shouldn't be.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

Let's be real: Poe Dameron, as written, is a flight jacket with lines. Poe was literally the coolest person in the galaxy (after Harrison Ford, obviously). The coolness, the little laugh, the genuine tenderness with BB-8 — that's all Oscar. Say whatever you want about the sequels, but Poe actually worked in the movie. All that charisma in a Star Wars movie and then shirtless Adam Driver came and ruined it with his daddy issues later.

Drive (2011)

It was a small role, and yet it landed big. In the movie, Isaac plays the role of an ex-con trying to rebuild a life, doomed from the jump, and he plays it with a lot of haunted, apologetic decency.

The Promise (2016)

Look, The Promise isn't a great film. Terry George's Armenian Genocide epic wants to be Casablanca and mostly ends up somewhere in the vicinity of a long Sunday afternoon. But Isaac — playing a medical student dragged through a love triangle and a historical horror at the same time — does the thing he always does, which is find the actual, specific human being inside the Big Important Role.