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The best Michelle Monaghan movies and TV shows include a strong mix of blockbusters, critically acclaimed indies, and even some broad comedies along the way. After going to college to study journalism, she decided to leave for New York to try her hand at acting. After getting her start in television, she got smaller roles in Perfume and Unfaithful and finally earned her break in 2002 when she picked up a recurring role in the legal drama series Boston Legal. That led to Monaghan getting bigger roles in movies.
Monaghan got to play the love interest in movies like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, a co-starring role in Gone Baby Gone, and then her first big rom-com role in Made of Home with Patrick Dempsey. From there, she started getting significantly meatier opportunities, including Duncan Jones' sci-fi action thriller Source Code, the HBO anthology series True Detective, and the Adam Sandler comedy Pixels. In 2025, Monaghan joined the cast of The White Lotus season 3.
10 Made Of Honor (2008)
Hannah
Made of Honor
Release Date April 30, 2008
Runtime 101 minutes
Director Paul Weiland
Michelle Monaghan got her first chance to star in a major rom-com when she signed on to Made of Honor. The film was meant to be Patrick Dempsey's chance to parlay his fame as McDreamy in Grey's Anatomy into a movie career as a leading man. However, things didn't work out as well as he had hoped since the movie was mostly a critical disappointment, although it was a minor box office success, making $106.4 million on a $40 million budget.
Dempsey is Tom, a wealthy womanizer, and Monaghan is Hannah, a formerly geeky college student who is now engaged to marry Colin, a wealthy Scottish Duke (Kevin McKidd, another Grey's Anatomy star, who plays Owen). However, Tom, who has been Hannah's best friend since college, now realizes he might love her. However, even with the lackluster reviews, critics still praised Monaghan and Dempsey's performance and chemistry in the movie.
9 Pixels (2015)
Violet Van Patten
Released in 2015, critics mostly hated the science fiction comedy Pixels, but it was still a big success and remains one of Adam Sandler's best theatrical comedy releases over the last few decades. The film presents an alien attack on Earth from a race who believes that video feeds of classic arcade games is a declaration of war by Earth. The aliens then create the classic video game characters (Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Q-Bert, etc...) and attack the Earth, leading to the U.S. President bringing in former arcade champions to lead the defense.
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Pixels Cast, Character & Cameo Guide
The Pixels movie contains an all-star main cast, several recognizable supporting cast members, and a host of memorable cameos from the world of media.
Michelle Monaghan stars in the movie as Lieutenant Colonel Violet van Patten, a unique weapons developer and specialist for the military. She is also the romantic interest for Adam Sandler's former Donkey Kong master turned tech repairman, Sam Brenner. Monaghan turns from an antagonist to Sam to an ally and an important part of the team. Pixels earned $244.9 million worldwide but only $78.7 million in North America.
8 Saint Judy (2018)
Judy Wood
saint judy
Release Date March 1, 2019
Runtime 106 minutes
Director Sean Hanish
In 2019, Michelle Monaghan took on the lead role in a biographical drama about Judy Wood, an immigration attorney who changed the law on granting asylum in the United States to save women's lives. In real life, Wood's actions have helped to save tens of thousands of women's lives around the world. In this film, Wood represented a teacher from Afghanistan who faced deportation and helped save her life by blocking the attempts to send her back to her possible death.
The movie was initially released at the 2018 L.A. Film Festival before being released theatrically in 2019. Critics gave the movie mixed reviews, with a 73% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. However, the audience score was a lot higher, at 85%. It also received several festival awards, including at the L.A. Film Festival, London Raindance Film Festival, and Mill Valley Film Festival. Monaghan also received a Best Performance nomination at the London Raindance Film Festival.
7 Source Code (2011)
Christina Warren
Source Code was Duncan Jones' follow-up to his critically acclaimed sci-fi movie Moon. This film awarded Jones a much larger budget. It saw Jake Gyllenhaal star as U.S. Army pilot Captain Colter Stevens, a man who woke up on a computer train going to Chicago and then dying when the train exploded. He then wakes up on the train again and realizes he is part of a sci-fi plan where he continues reliving the moment repeatedly until he can figure out who the terrorist was and how they blew up the train.
Michelle Monaghan stars as Christina Warren, Stevens's girlfriend who was on the train with him and helps him find the terrorist and stop any future attacks. However, the movie is full of twists and turns and allows both Gyllenhaal and Monaghan to replay scenes in different ways, a nice acting exercise in which both stars excelled. The film was a box office success, and critics praised Source Code with a 92% fresh rating.
6 MaXXXine (2024)
Detective Williams
In 2024, Ti West directed the third film in his X film series, MaXXXine. In the movie, Mia Goth returns to reprise her role as Maxine Minx from X (she also plays Pearl in X and Pearl). The third installment follows the events of X and has Maxine now in California trying to become a mainstream actress after she spent most of her time acting in porn movies. However, when she was there, she had to deal with a serial killer and also the twist that her father is a televangelist who preaches hate.
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MaXXXine Cast & Character Guide
The MaXXXine cast includes the familiar star of the X trilogy, Mia Goth, alongside iconic supporting actors like Kevin Bacon and Halsey.
One of the new stars of the third movie in the series is Michelle Monaghan, who plays Detective Williams in MaXXXine. She is one of the LAPD detectives investigating the serial killer case alongside Bobby Cannavale's Detective Torres. These two are minor supporting characters in the film, but they are integral in helping save Maxine in the end. Critics gave the film average reviews, but it was the lesser of the three films in the trilogy.
5 Patriots Day (2016)
Carol Saunders
Patriots Day
3/10
Release Date December 21, 2016
Director Peter Berg
Writers Eric Johnson, Matt Cook, Peter Berg, Paul Tamasy
Directed by Peter Berg, Patriots Day is an action thriller starring Mark Wahlberg as Boston Police Department Sergeant Tommy Saunders, one of the officers on duty during the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013. The film is based on the non-fiction book Boston Strong: A City's Triumph Over Tragedy by Casey Sherman and David Wedge, although the story is a somewhat fictional tale that uses the real events of the bombing as a backdrop and focuses on the manhunt for the terrorists who set off the bombs.
Michelle Monaghan stars in the film as Tommy's wife, Carol Saunders, a registered nurse. Critics praised Patriots Day, with an 81% fresh rating, and it was called a nice tribute to the heroes who were on hand during this real-life American tragedy. Berg was also praised for the moments in the film where he used real footage from the actual terrorist bombing in Boston.
4 Gone Baby Gone (2007)
Angie Gennaro
Ben Affleck directed a neo-noir crime thriller based on the novel Gone Baby Gone by Dennis Lehane. In this film, a pair of private investigators are hired to return a four-year-old girl to her mother. However, when they learned that the parents are known drug addicts, and the mother is a mule for a drug lord, they have to figure out what they will do when they learn the girl's abductor is a decorated police officer in Captain Jack Doyle, and the young girl is safer with him than her own mother.
The film shows how difficult a decision like this is, and both Michelle Monaghan and Casey Affleck deliver great performances as Patrick and Angie, the PIs, who are also in a relationship with each other. Critics praised the film, with a 94% Rotten Tomatoes score, and Amy Ryan received an Oscar nomination for her role as Helene, the little girl's mother.
3 Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)
Julia Meade
The biggest movie franchise that Michelle Monaghan appeared in was the Mission: Impossible series. She was also part of the best movie in that entire franchise, Mission: Impossible - Fallout. Monaghan plays Julia Meade, making her first appearance in the third movie and her final in Fallout. Julia was a nurse who became a doctor, and she ended up marrying Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise). However, the two split up for her safety, and she married Erik (Wes Bentley).
|
2006 |
Mission: Impossible III |
|
2011 |
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol |
|
2018 |
Mission: Impossible - Fallout |
Julia's return in Fallout was where her marriage to Erik was revealed and where the couple met Ethan Hunt during their time working in Kashmir to help out during the smallpox epidemic. While she was a main actor in Mission: Impossible III, she only had a smaller supporting role in Fallout, she still ended up helping out with the danger to the area. This was a nice sendoff for the character in the highlight of the entire franchise to date.
2 Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)
Harmony Faith Lane
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Release Date November 18, 2005
Runtime 103 minutes
Director Shane Black
Writers Brett Halliday, Shane Black
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang had two very important moments in movie history. First, it was screenwriter Shane Black's (Lethal Weapon) first directorial effort. Second, it was the film that really brought Robert Downey Jr. back to the public eye after his very publicized addiction problems led to a prison sentence. A decade later, the two teamed up again in the MCU release Iron Man 3. In this specific film, Downey plays Harry, a petty criminal running from the police after a botched robbery who accidentally gets cast in a movie at a confused casting call.
He is paired with a real private investigator, Gay Perry (Val Kilmer), to follow him and learn more about his role when he ends up involved in a real case that involves a murder. Michelle Monaghan stars as Harmony Lane, an actress who believes that Harry is a real private eye, and she asks him to help find her missing sister, who ends up being the murdered person in the case Gay Perry is working on. The film has an 86% fresh score and has become a cult classic.
1 True Detective (2014)
Maggie Hart
In 2014, Michelle Monaghan returned to television and starred in one of the best critically acclaimed shows of the last decade — the first season of the anthology crime drama series True Detective. This season starred Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey as two police detectives are pulled into a case that is tied to a murder they investigated and thought they had solved 17 years earlier. Monaghan stars as Maggie, the ex-wife of Harrelson's Marty Hart.
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The season takes place over three different time frames — the original investigation in 1995, a period in 2002 when the detectives have a falling out, and then in 2012, when the new case is opened. This means Harrelson, McConaughey, and Monaghan have a chance to play the same characters 17 years apart. The series won five Primetime Emmy Awards for the first season, while Michelle Monaghan earned a Golden Globe nomination for her performance.
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