- The Dark Knight (2008)
The Joker is one of the most intelligent street-level villains that Batman and the Justice League have ever faced. Joker has no choice but to rely on his intelligence to remain ahead of his enemies, at all times, and that alone makes him a formidable foe.
2. Fight Club (1999)
An antihero is a character who has good intentions and means well, but who may go about making change in a less than heroic way. Tyler Durden is the main antagonist of the 1999 film fight club and also serving as a hidden antagonist.
3. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Dr. Hannibal Lecter VIII is the titular main antagonist of the Hannibal book series by Thomas Harris and their film adaptations. He is an extremely brilliant but mentally disturbed and cannibalistic serial killer infamous for eating his victims.
4. Memento (2000)
John Edward Gammel, more commonly referred to throughout the movie as Teddy, and situationally John G, is the main antagonist of the 2000 movie Memento. He is an officer of the law that assisted Leonard Shelby in locating and killing the man that assaulted, raped, and potentially murdered his wife.
5. Gone Girl (2014)
Amy Elliot-Dunne is the titular main antagonist of Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl, and its 2014 adaptation of the same name. She is a brilliant, calculating psychopath who contrives an elaborate plan to fake her own death and frame her husband Nick for murdering her, as punishment for Nick’s infidelity.
6. No Country for Old Men (2007)
Anton Chigurh is the main antagonist of the 2005 novel No Country for Old Men by the late Cormac McCarthy and its 2007 film adaptation of the same name. Depicted as a ruthless hitman with an unwavering adherence to his own ethics, he is among the most prominent characters of the unstoppable killing machine genre.
7. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
The character of Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a complex and dynamic female villain. She is the antagonist to Randle McMurphy and uses shame and guilt to intimidate and emasculate the patients of the psychiatric ward.
8. Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Darth Vader is a lead villain in the science fiction franchise Star Wars. He appears primarily in Star Wars (1977, retitled Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope), Star Wars: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Star Wars: Episode VI—Return of the Jedi (1983).
9. Seven
John Doe is the main antagonist of the 1995 thriller film, Se7en. He was portrayed by Kevin Spacey. John Doe is a psychopathic serial killer obsessed with the Seven Deadly Sins of Christianity, and he kills his victims in symbolic murders in an attempt (at least in his own mind) to remind the world about the inevitability to avoid these sins.
10. Joker
Arthur Fleck, later known as the Joker, is the titular main antagonist of the 2019 DC Black psychological thriller-film of the same name and the main protagonist of its upcoming 2024 sequel Joker: Folie à Deux.
Joker follows Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), a struggling stand-up comedian who is driven to murder after being bullied.