Top five Tony Gilroy movies

While Tony Gilroy will forever be associated with the Bourne series, it's far from the only thing he's done in his career to date. Here are five other projects to which he's lent his name.

Michael Clayton (2007)

Gilroy received an Oscar nomination for Best Director for this 2007 flick, which counted A-listers such as George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton amongst its stellar cast.

Playing the role of a ‘fixer’ at a high-end law firm, Clayton (Clooney) struggles to come to terms with the stresses of doing the dirty work of the firm’s law-breaking clientele as well as battling a fairly serious gambling problem while he’s at it.

Incredibly clever throughout, it regularly featured on best film lists in 2007 and picked up a host of awards, with Swinton in particular widely acclaimed for her portrayal of Clayton’s colleague Karen Crowder.

Duplicity (2009)

For a man that does serious films pretty well, Gilroy is also capable of turning his hand to comedy, as he did with this 2009 romantic comedy starring Julia Roberts and Clive Owen – and don’t worry, there’s none of the smutty carry on that those two got up in Closer in this one.

Roberts and Owen play spies with a romantic history who use their spy smarts to pull off an elaborate and extremely complicated con job on their respective bosses.

Like all of Gilroy’s movies, Duplicity makes the viewer think and there’s all sorts of deception and counter-deception at play, but Roberts and Owen, with help from Gilroy regular Tom Wilkinson and the excellent Paul Giamatti, pull it off quite well and there’s more than a few laughs along the way.

State of Play (2009)

Serious moviegoers used to stay well clear of any movie involving Ben Affleck but the 2009 film State of Play was arguably the origin of his recent renaissance. With Kevin McDonald directing operations, Gilroy helped pen the script to this tense thriller, which was based on a BBC series of the same name.

Affleck is joined by Russell Crowe, Helen Mirren and the lovely Rachel McAdams for this movie, in which an investigative reporter delves deep into a mysterious death which has been passed off as a suicide. Although he’s never returned to his Gladiator era state of fitness, Crowe looks particularly gruff in State of Play, but don’t be fooled into thinking that the lack of care shown for his own appearance is consistent with journalists everywhere. We’re not all like that. Honest.

Dolores Claiborne (1995)

Having cut his teeth in the script-writing business with 1992’s The Cutting Edge, Gilroy subsequently penned the script to this Stephen King adaptation in 1995.

As you’d expect from King, this isn’t exactly a pleasant affair and stars the truly-terrifying Kathy Bates as an iron-willed country woman attempting to defend herself from accusations that she was centrally involved in the death of an elderly woman for whom she was providing care and that of the woman’s husband two decades previous.

It’s grisly and not for the faint-hearted but compelling stuff all the same.

Armageddon (1998)

Feel free to scoff if you must, but there were a few redeeming moments in the largely ridiculous 1998 movie, for which Gilroy wrote the script.

Drilling a hole to prevent a comet bound for Earth may not be the most scientifically plausible of actions, but the special effects were pretty good, Steve Buscemi was pretty funny and Liv Tyler looked pretty damn hot throughout.

Gilroy has been associated with better movies, mind.