Top 10 Tom Holland Movies, Ranked

Tom Holland has been doing something quietly extraordinary for over a decade: making audiences forget they’re watching an actor. Whether he’s a terrified teenager in a flooded Thai hotel or a small-town kid with a loaded gun and nowhere left to run, there’s a quality to his work that feels less like performance and more like presence. Here at TV Hulk, we ranked these films by how fully Holland disappears into each role — how convincing, how emotionally alive, and how much each performance sticks with you after the credits roll. From early breakout work to franchise-defining turns, every entry on this list earned its spot.

10. The Current War (2017)

Samuel Insull doesn’t walk into rooms so much as dart into them, and that restless, opportunistic energy is exactly what Holland brings to the role. As Edison’s fast-talking personal secretary, he’s perpetually in motion — scribbling notes, anticipating his boss’s next move, quietly absorbing everything happening around him. The film is crowded with heavyweights (Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Shannon, Nicholas Hoult), and Holland holds his own without ever overreaching. There’s a particular sharpness to the way he plays Insull’s ambition as something almost involuntary, like a reflex rather than a scheme. It’s a supporting role in terms of screen time, but he makes you wish the camera followed Samuel a little more closely at every turn.

9. Spies in Disguise (2019)

Walter Beckett is a pacifist gadget genius who would genuinely rather turn a spy into a pigeon than let anyone get hurt, and Holland’s voice work leans fully into that cheerful, unshakeable idealism. His delivery has a bouncy, slightly breathless quality that fits Walter’s mile-a-minute brain perfectly. When Walter launches into an excited explanation of why glitter is actually a brilliant defensive weapon, Holland sells every word with total conviction. The comedic timing against Will Smith’s world-weary super-spy Lance Sterling clicks into place almost immediately, and their back-and-forth gives the film a livelier rhythm than most animated buddy comedies manage. Walter’s earnestness could easily tip into annoying, but Holland keeps it warm and funny throughout.

8. Pilgrimage (2017)

Brother Diarmuid has no dialogue to speak of, and that’s the challenge Holland accepted here. Playing a young novice monk on a perilous journey through a brutal medieval landscape, he communicates fear, creeping moral doubt, and eventual crisis entirely through his eyes and the tension in his body. There’s a scene where Diarmuid witnesses violence he cannot stop and cannot process, and Holland’s stillness in that moment is more affecting than any line reading could have been. Most fans have never seen this one, which makes it the hidden gem on this list: a performance so far removed from Peter Parker that it almost functions as a proof of concept, Holland quietly demonstrating that he was always more than a franchise player.

7. In the Heart of the Sea (2015)

Thomas Nickerson is the last man alive who remembers what really happened to the Essex, and Holland plays the young version of that survivor with a physical rawness that’s hard to shake. His scenes in the open ocean, exhausted, terrified, watching the crew make increasingly desperate decisions, carry a genuine sense of endurance rather than performance. There’s a moment where young Thomas has to choose between his own survival and something like his conscience, and Holland plays the conflict without telegraphing the outcome, which is harder than it sounds for a young actor. It’s an underrated piece of work in a film that deserved more attention, and it helped put him on Hollywood’s radar in the years between The Impossible and his MCU debut.

6. The Lost City of Z (2016)

Jack Fawcett appears relatively late in this slow-burning prestige adventure, but when he does, Holland brings a quiet emotional weight that reframes everything before it. Jack is a young man raised in the shadow of his obsessive explorer father (Charlie Hunnam), and Holland plays that complicated mix of admiration and resentment without letting either feeling fully win. His best scene comes in the final act, when Jack makes a choice that mirrors his father’s and Holland conveys the full cost with almost no dialogue. In a film built on measured, restrained performances, his work fits seamlessly, and holding his own against Hunnam and Sienna Miller in their shared scenes says a lot about where his instincts already were at that stage of his career.

5. Cherry (2021)

Cherry goes through more in two and a half hours than most protagonists experience across a trilogy: army enlistment, PTSD, opioid addiction, increasingly desperate bank robberies. Holland is present for every ugly turn. What makes the performance land is the vulnerability he brings to the early scenes, that wide-open quality of someone who hasn’t learned to protect himself, which makes the later deterioration feel earned rather than dramatic. His physical transformation across the film’s chapters is striking, but the more impressive work comes in quieter moments: Cherry sitting in a car after a robbery, completely hollow, Holland holding the camera’s gaze with nothing left to perform. Critics were divided on the Russo Brothers’ approach, but the performance itself remains the most ambitious thing Holland has put on screen outside the MCU.

4. Onward (2020)

Ian Lightfoot is anxious in the specific way that actually hurts to watch, not comically nervous, but deeply convinced he’s going to disappoint everyone who matters to him. Holland’s voice work captures that self-doubt with aching specificity: the slight catch before Ian tries a spell he’s not sure he can pull off, the way his voice lifts when something works, the quiet devastation when Ian realizes what the journey has really been about. His chemistry with Chris Pratt gives Onward its emotional engine, and together they build a sibling dynamic that feels lived-in despite being entirely voice work. Ian’s arc is a big reason this one hits as hard as it does.

3. The Devil All the Time (2020)

Arvin Russell is introduced as a boy watching his father pray over a makeshift cross in the Ohio woods, and by the time he’s grown into Holland’s version of the character, that image of desperate, inherited faith has curdled into something much darker. Holland strips away every trace of Peter Parker’s warmth here. Arvin is quiet, watchful, and capable of real violence when pushed far enough, and the film’s confrontation scenes have a coiled tension that builds slowly before releasing fast. There’s a moment where Arvin faces down a corrupt preacher (Robert Pattinson, doing extraordinary work) and Holland plays it with a cold clarity that’s deeply unsettling from someone audiences associated entirely with a friendly neighborhood superhero. This is the performance that made it impossible to argue Holland was just a franchise actor.

2. The Impossible (2012)

Lucas Bennett is twelve years old when the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami hits, and he spends most of The Impossible doing things no twelve-year-old should have to do: keeping his injured mother moving through floodwater, making decisions that could save or cost lives, holding himself together when everything is falling apart. The performance has a physical and emotional honesty that most adult actors would struggle to match. There’s a scene in a makeshift hospital where Lucas breaks down after holding it together for so long, and it’s the kind of moment that makes you forget you’re watching a film. Holland shares the screen with Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor and never gets swallowed by either of them, which, for a live-action feature debut, is still remarkable to think about.

1. Spider-Man Franchise (2016–2021)

Peter Parker had been played by talented actors before Tom Holland, but something clicked differently this time. Holland’s version actually feels like a high schooler, not a brooding twenty-something in a backpack, but a kid who gets nervous talking to his crush, looks up to Tony Stark the way a teenager would a mentor, and cracks jokes during fights because he’s scared and that’s what he does when he’s scared. That authenticity runs through every MCU appearance, from his breathless introduction in Civil War through the gut-punch of No Way Home, where Holland carries the emotional finale with grief that feels completely real. The scene where Peter asks Strange to make everyone forget him lands as hard as anything in the MCU’s entire run, and it works because Holland spent five films making you care about this specific kid. This is the role that defines his generation’s relationship with the character.

Holland built one of the more interesting filmographies in his age group over the course of a decade. The Spider-Man films are the center of gravity, but the work around them, the Southern gothic intensity of The Devil All the Time and the raw debut in The Impossible, tells the fuller story of an actor who has never coasted on the franchise alone.