Sacha Baron Cohen's films – ranked!

15. Grimsby (2016)

This is one for Sacha Baron Cohen, his professional associates, his fans and all of humanity to forget. The idea is that he plays a daft football fan from Grimsby called Nobby – although it’s not set in 1966 – with Liam-Gallagher-type hair and a lairy attitude. He discovers that his long-lost brother Sebastian, played by Mark Strong, is a top assassin for MI6 and is in trouble, so it’s down to gormless, boozy Nobby to save him. The gags really aren’t there, the character feels obvious and Baron Cohen doesn’t look comfortable.

14. Madagascar 2: Escape to Africa (2008)

Baron Cohen’s vocal return as King Julien the Lemur in the Madagascar sequel sounds as tired as everyone else in this very disappointing rehash of the family-movie smash. The idea is that the animals (including Julien) will return to the US, aboard a plane that crashlands in an African nature reserve, where Julien mischievously suggests to Melman the hypochondriac giraffe that he restores the water supply by sacrificing himself to an angry local volcano god.

13. The Jolly Boys’ Last Stand (2000)

A little-known item on the Baron Cohen CV, this film perhaps deserves more attention. Shot on video in the days before this was commonplace, it is perhaps influenced by Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme 95 classic Festen. Baron Cohen plays Vinnie, one of a gang of “Jolly Boys”, hedonistic superlads and pub-crawlers who are disturbed when their leader, Spider (Andy Serkis), wants to settle down and get married – and Vinnie wants to settle down, too. The film is Spider’s wedding video, revealing all sorts of buried emotional trauma.

12: Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (2013)

Baron Cohen had a cheeky cameo in Anchorman 2, playing an arrogant, three-piece-suited and moustachioed BBC news correspondent (a far cry from Jon Sopel) who shows up with his aggressive BBC colleagues just as Ron Burgundy and his gang-members are about rumble with a rival TV news crew. Baron Cohen in effect becomes first among equals in a cavalcade of cameos including Jim Carrey and Marion Cotillard (as the Canadians) and Liam Neeson as the History Channel host.

11. Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted (2012)

Here is that rarest of things: a threequel that turns out to be pretty good, especially after the underpowered second movie. The wacky circus animals visit Europe, pursued by a creepy official animal catcher from Monaco, voiced by Frances McDormand. King Julien (his exotic tones reportedly based on Baron Cohen’s Sri Lankan lawyer) has a big set piece when he romances a circus bear in the middle of Rome.

10. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)

Baron Cohen here plays Pirelli, the hated rival of Johnny Depp’s Sweeney Todd, in this movie version of Stephen Sondheim’s sung-through Victorian horror panto, based on the legend of the demon barber and his gruesome secret. This is the sort of high-camp “period” role Baron Cohen gets offered outside his own comedy projects. He is the fastidious Italian barber, absurdly coiffed and moustachioed, dressed like a Ruritanian army officer in a light opera, who loses to Todd in a shaving contest. He makes a strong visual impression with his cartoonishly vivid face and tall frame, but perhaps not much more than that.

9. The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020)

Opinions divide on Aaron Sorkin’s verbose and self-congratulatory drama about the 1968 trial of the “Chicago seven” – anti-Vietnam protesters who were to be made an example of in Nixon’s America. But Baron Cohen is wittily cast as the counterculture activist and prankster Abbie Hoffman, who found himself staring down the barrel of a long prison sentence. Baron Cohen undoubtedly carries off the part with some aplomb, especially in those famous courtroom exchanges when Hoffman says he is on trial for his thoughts, and later when he has to argue with the more sobersided protester Tom Hayden, played by Eddie Redmayne, about the correct way to protest.

8. Ali G Indahouse (2002)

This is the movie incarnation of the comedy character that made Baron Cohen blow up in the late 90s – that notorious white suburban appropriator of black cool and urban style, Ali G, who on TV punked many a polite celeb with his faux-naive interviews. This was the movie version and, despite being not at all bad, took a conventional scripted approach: the idea is that our innocent hero has been tricked into standing for political office by machiavellian schemers. A regular storyline with fictional characters took some key ingredients out of the Ali G magic formula (Baron Cohen didn’t make that mistake with Borat four years later).

7. Les Misérables (2012)

As in Sweeney Todd, Baron Cohen is wheeled on for a small but eye-catching role in this film version of the hit stage musical based on the Victor Hugo novel; it’s another bravura hair-and-makeup creation. He is the roguish innkeeper M Thénardier, who with his wife, played by Helena Bonham Carter, presides over a horribly sleazy hostelry. With his muttonchop whiskers, tricorn hat and disreputable-looking military uniform, Thénardier mingles with the drunkards, loose women and posh folks slumming it, singing the insidiously catchy tune Master of the House as he does so. Interestingly, Baron Cohen is much less hammy as Thénardier than as Pirelli and has more screen potency.

6. Hugo (2011)

A rare moment for Baron Cohen to be cast as the out-and-out baddie – perhaps in the same iconic way that Robert Helpmann played the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. He plays the scary railway stationmaster who is on the trail of the young hero, Hugo. Baron Cohen has a moustache and a kepi hat, which makes him look the very epitome of French official pomposity (and perhaps there’s a hint of a role he may yet take: Inspector Clouseau) although it’s an interestingly British-type accent. His character also has a hint of pain or vulnerability: a leg brace from a first world war injury. This becomes a very Spielbergian detail that unexpectedly complicates the way we see his character.

5. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)

If it is noticeable that Baron Cohen tends to get cast in French (or Italian or generally exotic European) character-cameo roles then this could be the movie that started it all. Talladega Nights is a Will Ferrell comedy in the manner of Anchorman and Blades of Glory, about a boorish race-car driver played by Ferrell who, in time-honoured style, falls on hard times and then makes a comeback. Baron Cohen steals the scene as the gay French driver who enrages the all-American crowd by displaying Perrier sponsorship logos, smoking absurdly thin French cigarettes and reading Camus at the wheel of his car. His baiting of American redneck sensibilities is an interesting forerunner of Borat’s provocations.

4. Madagascar (2005)

Madagascar is the family animation about the wacky animals tamely bred in New York City zoo who find themselves transported to Africa and left to fend for themselves. There’s plenty of voice-work talent on display, including Chris Rock and Ben Stiller, but the scene is absolutely stolen by Baron Cohen’s King Julien, a local lemur with the drollery of Nathan Lane’s Timon in The Lion King, and sounding like a dancehall version of Peter Sellers in The Millionairess. Baron Cohen’s character had an authentic global music hit, filling the dancefloors at children’s parties the world over with his new, family-friendly version of I Like to Move It.

3. Brüno (2009)

Here is another of Baron Cohen’s great prankster creations: a cousin to Borat undoubtedly, but with some indelicate rhetoric all of his own. He is Brüno, the gay Austrian TV fashion journalist who after being fired from his programme Funkyzeit Mit Brüno for a backstage incident at the Milan fashion shows, decides to head off to LA – base camp for his all-out assault on the Everest of celebrityhood. Baron Cohen’s faux-strian is flamboyant, blond, emotionally generous yet vulnerable and still only 19 years old. (He could be one of the two demonic boys in Funny Games, by that other great Austrian hero, Michael Haneke.) The hoaxes are often gasp-inducing and his confrontations with some of the most reactionary and homophobic figures in American politics are uproarious.

2. The Dictator (2012)

Baron Cohen’s scripted comedy satire The Dictator is a fish-out-of-water romp in which he plays General Aladeen, tyrannical ruler of the oil-rich north African rogue state Wadiya, who is intensely irritated by the west’s infatuation with the Arab spring. Profoundly anti-American, he hardly ever appears in public without his cheerful catchphrase-greeting: “Death to the west!” and is secretly keeping Osama bin Laden as a houseguest in a spare room. (There is however some evidence that he was in fact installed in power by the CIA many decades ago.) A diplomatic and political quirk of fate means that Aladeen has to visit New York to speak at the UN, and a calamity leads to him becoming all adrift, penniless and alone, dependent on the charity of a feminist vegetarian-cafe manager, played by Anna Faris. Again, this is the kind of straight-ahead comedy vehicle that perhaps doesn’t show Baron Cohen’s genius to its fullest extent, but it’s a very entertaining spectacle of bad taste.

1. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)

This is Baron Cohen’s masterpiece, a very rare example of a TV comedy character coming to glorious life on the big screen, using the live-ammo pranks and tricks that would normally work only on television – usually depending on the audience anticipation built up week by week. The usual “scripted” approach to Ali G hadn’t quite worked for the cinema, so Baron Cohen took the plunge with his maladroit Kazakh TV interviewer and went all out for real tricks in a very roughly scripted story, demonstrating his quick-wittedness, his very real method dedication to staying in character, and his amazing bravery. His Borat character was lethally offensive and excruciatingly embarrassing – and also hilariously nihilistic, in that it often skewered not just reactionary attitudes but Americans trying to be polite. (This was the crux of Christopher Hitchens’ frosty disdain for Borat at the time and he didn’t grasp, or concede, that the point of the film was to be funny and anarchic and outrageous, rather than politically righteous.)

Borat’s gross-out impertinence and lack of taste was at its most subversive when the film was centring on the reality of antisemitism, which came as a culture shock to the film’s liberal-left audience and campus fanbase, who were unused to seeing antisemitism in any costume other than that of Nazi Germany and certainly not in a contemporary setting, however broadly comic. Could – can – Borat do it a second time? Nowadays, celebrity interviewees are more savvy, so it may be that his victims will be more from the public. The sheer situationist craziness of Borat made it a unique comedy.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is out now. Borat 2 is out on 23 October