Role Call: Christian Bale

The Machinist (2004)

THE ROLE Bale notoriously dropped 63 pounds to play Trevor Reznick, an insomniac factory worker who begins to question his own sanity.

WHAT EW SAID Lisa Schwarzbaum: ''There's not a minute we watch Bale, stumbling hollow-eyed through a green-gray world of alienation and paranoia... that we dare forget the millions who have died — in famines, in sickness, in concentration camps — desperate for the nourishment Bale so arbitrarily declined to play a make-believe character in a movie. Such boniness is obscene.''