Michael B Jordan’s four favourite movies
Michael B Jordan is one of the few actors who can be a Marvel villain and remain a hero. His charisma and acting ability earned him early success in TV and has continued to carry him through to movie stardom. He started with the wildly acclaimed HBO drama The Wire, in which he played a teenage drug dealer who tries to walk away from his criminal ties. He went on to play an up-and-coming high school football star in the series Friday Night Lights.
Now in his late thirties, it seems pretty clear that Jordan will always be closely associated with the director Ryan Coogler. The actor has starred in every one of Coogler’s movies, and their expansion as artists and impact on the industry have been closely intertwined. Their collaboration started with Coogler’s feature debut, Fruitvale Station, in 2013 and continued with the Rocky spinoff movie Creed and the first two Black Panther movies.
Most recently, they’ve taken their biggest risk yet with the supernatural period horror movie Sinners, in which Jordan plays a set of twins in the Mississippi Delta in 1932. The film earned rave reviews and, despite being an original story, dominated the box office against all predictions. They even have another project planned, a thriller called Wrong Answer, about a teacher who tampers with his students’ test scores.
During the press tour for Sinners, Jordan was asked by Letterboxd to name his four favourite movies. None of the ones he mentioned were Coogler films, which probably shouldn’t come as a surprise given that he’s been in all of them. His list was a pretty broad one: the 1998 gambling thriller Rounders, the 1995 detective mystery Devil in a Blue Dress, the classic 1995 action-comedy Bad Boys, and the 1988 anime gem Akira.
Jordan didn’t offer much elaboration on his choices (he was on a crowded red carpet, after all), but there are some key similarities between the films. Specifically, they are all either action-oriented or thriller-adjacent. Rounders stars Matt Damon as a law student and poker prodigy who teams up with his shady friend (Edward Norton) to pay off a gambling debt. John Malkovich plays their arch-nemesis, a Russian mobster with a weakness for Oreos. The film was met with tepid reviews but has become increasingly popular over the years.
Devil in a Blue Dress is one of Denzel Washington’s most underrated movies. Based on Walter Mosley’s novel of the same name, it follows a World War II veteran in 1948 Los Angeles who reluctantly accepts a job to look for a missing woman (Jennifer Beals). Despite positive reviews, it made little impact at the box office. It was a throwback hardboiled crime thriller at a time when audiences were flocking to big-budget post-apocalyptic action movies, and unlike Rounders, it has yet to become a cult classic.
Bad Boys hardly needs an introduction. It was a massive hit when it came out and continues to be a ubiquitous presence. Michael Bay’s directorial debut stars Will Smith and Martin Lawrence as detectives trying to bust a drug kingpin. It spawned several identical sequels, including 2024’s Bad Boys: Ride or Die, and will probably continue to spawn sequels until everyone involved is dead and gone.
Jordan’s final pick, Akira, is equally beloved but for very different reasons. Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo and based on his manga series, it’s set in a dystopian 2019 version of Tokyo and follows the leader of a biker gang who tries to stop a psychopath from destroying the city. It might not have been a hit with mainstream audiences, but it is widely considered to be a landmark movie and continues to have a global cult following.
