# What are the best Tilda Swinton films of all time?

> Perhaps the most daring and shape-shifting actor in contemporary cinema — she has played ancient sorcerers, grieving mothers, corporate villains, and vampires with the same eerie otherworldly precision. Which Tilda Swinton film is your favorite?

*By YPB Team · Published April 11, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-are-the-best-tilda-swinton-films-of-all-time*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Orlando (1992)**
   Swinton plays the immortal Orlando — a nobleman who wakes up one day as a woman — in Sally Potter's dreamy, feminist adaptation of Virginia Woolf's novel.
2. **Michael Clayton (2007)**
   Swinton won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress as Karen Crowder, a corporate lawyer whose polished exterior conceals increasingly desperate choices.
3. **We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)**
   Swinton gives a shattering performance as Eva, a mother haunted by guilt and grief after her son commits a school massacre.
4. **The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005)**
   Swinton brings imperious, icy menace to the White Witch Jadis, the tyrannical ruler who has kept Narnia frozen in eternal winter.
5. **Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)**
   Swinton plays Eve, an ancient vampire whose relationship with her melancholy musician husband spans centuries, in Jim Jarmusch's languid, beautiful meditation on eternity.
6. **I Am Love (2009)**
   Swinton plays Emma Recchi, a Russian-born Italian matriarch who discovers passion and herself through a forbidden affair in Luca Guadagnino's sumptuous drama.
7. **Doctor Strange (2016)**
   Swinton plays the Ancient One — a Celtic mystic and sorcerer supreme — with serene power and enigmatic grace in Marvel's superhero origin story.
8. **Snowpiercer (2013)**
   Swinton is grotesquely funny and frightening as Minister Mason, the bureaucratic enforcer maintaining the rigid class system aboard the last train on a frozen Earth.
9. **Burn After Reading (2008)**
   Swinton plays Katie Cox, the icy, adulterous wife of John Malkovich's paranoid ex-CIA analyst, in the Coen Brothers' darkly absurd Washington comedy.
10. **The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)**
   Swinton plays the impossibly ancient Madame D., whose death sets off the entire intricate plot of Wes Anderson's beloved caper.
11. **Suspiria (2018)**
   Swinton plays not one but three roles — a dance mistress, an ancient witch, and a grieving psychiatrist — in Luca Guadagnino's hallucinatory horror remake.
12. **Memoria (2021)**
   Swinton plays a Scottish woman in Colombia tormented by a mysterious booming sound that only she can hear in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's hypnotic arthouse film.
13. **Okja (2017)**
   Swinton plays the eccentric, bombastic CEO of a corporation that has engineered a super-pig — a creature a young Korean girl will stop at nothing to protect.

Tags: movies, actors, tilda swinton