Last year, Jennifer Lopez returned to prominence after receiving critical acclaim for her role as stripper and criminal mastermind Ramona Vega in Hustlers. Lopez is perhaps best known for her music career, with hits like “Jenny from the Block” and the more recent “On the Floor,” but she’s been acting since she appeared as a cast member on In Living Color starting in 1991.
Lopez’s acting career has had soaring highs and crushing lows. She’s been nominated for Golden Raspberries and Golden Globes, Grammys and Billboard Music Awards. And through it all, she’s remained a consummate professional. Here are her five best and five worst performances, ranked according to IMDb.
WORST: Maid in Manhattan (5.2/10)
This 2002 romantic comedy saw Jennifer Lopez starring opposite Ralph Fiennes as a maid who falls in love with an über rich Prince Charming. The film grossed $163 million on a $55 million budget, making for a net profit of over $100 million, and still runs nearly daily on cable.
It received mixed reviews from critics, with an average rating on Rotten Tomatoes of 5.2/10. Still, Time magazine put Maid in Manhattan on its list of top 10 worst chick flicks of all time, with some critics accusing it of being too similar to Cinderella, and relying too much on its underlying fairytale framework.
BEST: Home (6.6/10)
Lopez tried her hand at voice acting in this animated sci-fi comedy film from DreamWorks, playing Lucy Tucci, the mother of one of the main characters. Home stars Jim Parsons (The Big Bang Theory) and Rihanna (Ocean’s 8) in an intergalactic adventure based on the children’s book The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex.
The film was a modest box office success for DreamWorks, earning back $386 million on a $135 million budget. In 2016, it was spun off into a television series on Netflix, in which Lopez’s role was taken over by Whiskey Cavalier’s Ana Ortiz.
WORST: The Back-up Plan (5.1/10)
Lopez doesn’t have a great track record with rom coms. Though she appears in a lot of them, none have been particularly well-received - not even fan favorite The Wedding Planner, in which she stars opposite Matthew McConaughey. In The Back-up Plan, her love interest is Alex O’Loughlin, most famous for playing Steve McGarrett on CBS’ Hawaii Five-0.
The Back-up Plan is about a woman who meets the love of her life shortly after becoming pregnant with a sperm donor. It made $77.5 million on a $35 million budget, and was directed by Alan Poul, executive producer of HBO’s Six Feet Under.
BEST: Selena (6.7/10)
Jennifer Lopez starred as the late Selena Quintanilla-Pérez in this 1997 biopic. Many consider it her breakout role, and she was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Actress - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for her performance. The film was written and directed by Gregory Nava, who also directed Lopez’s other films My Family (1995) and Bordertown (2006).
Selena made a modest return of $60 million on a $20 million budget, but received overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics, and has gone down in recent film history as one of Lopez’s finest movies. Perhaps because it’s far from her usual rom-com fare.
WORST: Anaconda (4.8/10)
Released in the same year as Selena, the horror film Anaconda pitted Lopez against an enormous homicidal snake. But she isn’t working alone. She’s part of an all-star cast that includes Ice Cube, Owen Wilson, and Jon Voigt, as members of a documentary film crew that find themselves taken hostage by a snake hunter tracking a legendary anaconda.
The movie, though a critical failure, did reasonably well at the box office, making $136 million on a $45 million budget, and spawned a franchise. One theatrical sequel, Anacondas: Hunt for the Blood Orchid, was released in 2004, but the film also had three television sequels, and one crossover with the Lake Placid series of horror films.
BEST: U Turn (6.8/10)
1997 was a big year for Lopez. Along with Selena and Anaconda, this small crime thriller starring Lopez and Sean Penn also hit theaters. Oddly enough, Jon Voigt also appeared in this film, along with Billy Bob Thornton, Joaquin Phoenix, Claire Danes, and Nick Nolte.
Lopez plays the daughter of Nick Nolte’s character, who also happens to be his wife. She enlists the help of Penn’s character, Bobby Cooper, to kill her father/husband and steal $200,000. Of course, as all murder plots do, this one goes horribly wrong - just as the film went wrong at the box office, making back only $6.6 million of its $19 million budget.
WORST: The Boy Next Door (4.7/10)
This erotic thriller saw Lopez joined on the silver screen by 9-1-1’s Ryan Guzman, under the direction of xXx and The Fast and the Furious helmsman Rob Cohen. The script, reportedly based on the screenwriter’s own life experiences, saw a much younger man becoming increasingly obsessed with his neighbor.
The Boy Next Door was produced by Jason Blum of Blumhouse, and though the film returned $53 million on a $4 million budget, critical consensus was mostly negative, citing the movie’s “cheap” thrills and lack of narrative substance. Nevertheless, Lopez won an MTV Movie Award for Best Scared-As-S**t Performance, so overall, the film was a win for her.
BEST: An Unfinished Life (7/10)
Lopez stars opposite Robert Redford and Morgan Freeman in this spiritual drama based on the Mark Spragg novel of the same name. The film centers around alcoholism, a bear, and Homeland’s Damian Lewis as Lopez’s character’s abusive ex-boyfriend. It received mixed reviews from critics, holding only a 53% on Rotten Tomatoes, but apparently IMDb’s users are much more into it.
An Unfinished Life made $18 million on a $30 million budget, but director Lasse Hallström, best known for directing almost all of ABBA’s music videos, went on to helm such hits as A Dog’s Purpose (2017), Dear John (2010), and The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2018).
WORST: Gigli (2.5/10)
Oh, Gigli. This film isn’t just bad, it’s one of the worst box office bombs of all time, grossing only $7 million on a $75 million budget. It seems to have ended the career of Martin Brest, who’s best known for directing the action comedy mega-hit Beverly Hills Cop (1984) - since Gigli’s release in 2003 he has not worked on a single film. It made many worst films of the decade lists, and deserved to be there.
Gigli very nearly swept the 24th Golden Raspberry Awards, winning six Razzies, including Worst Picture, and a special award, Worst “Comedy” of Our First 25 Years. Though Lopez and co-star Ben Affleck were romantically involved at the time, it seems even their chemistry couldn’t save this train wreck.
BEST: Out of Sight (7/10)
Out of Sight was adapted for the screen by Scott Frank from Elmore Leonard’s novel of the same name. Frank, who had previously adapted Leonard’s novel Get Shorty, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for his work - an honor which he would again be nominated for nearly 20 years later for his work on Logan (2017).
Lopez plays U.S. Marshal Karen Sisco, in what is perhaps her best on-screen performance. The film sees her become romantically entangled with career criminal Jack Foley, played by Soderbergh regular George Clooney. Lopez’s character even received her own spinoff series, 2003’s Karen Sisco, though the role was taken over by Carla Gugino for television.