Anne Heche was an actor, director, and writer who worked from the 1980s up until her untimely death in 2022. Her first acting role came from the soap opera Another World, in which she played twins Victoria and Marley Hudson, earning her a Daytime Emmy Award. In the 1990s, her career rose to new heights with her roles in movies such as Nicole Holofcener’s Walking and Talking and the action comedy Six Days Seven Nights alongside Harrison Ford.
After that period, Heche turned away from the higher profile roles and toward independent movies and television. She received acclaim for her performances in the HBO comedy series, Hung, as well as the drama Men in Trees. Rarely slowing down, Hesche was prolific in her work with several projects coming out each year. This work ethic meant that there were several movies that she made released after her death. In these recent years, there was a noticeable focus on disaster movies in her filmography, whether that’s because the genre was popular and in demand or because she developed an interest in them cannot be determined.
Heche overcame a number of obstacles in her life and career, from abuse to mental health issues, yet she still produced high-quality, abundant movies and TV shows and this is something to applaud. Here are her last 10 movies, ranked.
10 Armed Response (2017)
Armed Response is a very run-of-the-mill action thriller starring Wesley Snipes as Isaac. He leads a team of six officers investigating the mysterious shut-down of a remote prison inside which, the guards seem to have died.
Heche stars as Riley alongside Dave Annable, Colby Lopez, and Kyle Clements. The movie was written by first-time screenwriter Matt Savelloni and directed by John Stockwell, who works on a lot of similar action-heavy projects. While fans of the genre will find something to enjoy in this offering, its downfall is that the story is formulaic to an overwhelming degree.
9 Frankie Meets Jack (2023)
The Tubi original movie Frankie Meets Jack is a dog-centric romantic comedy. The central pair — Frankie and Jack — is played by Samantha Cope and Joey Lawrence, who also wrote the screenplay alongside Jen Bashian. Jack is a veterinarian who treats Frankie’s dog, which initially bonds the pair who then continue to run into each other coincidentally.
Romantic comedies of this nature are never the most inventive in terms of plot, but that’s not what they’re intended for. What creates an issue here is that the performances from Cope and Lawrence are unfortunately not good enough to hook the audience in spite of the simple story. Interestingly, the pair are married in real life and yet struggle to convey any real chemistry on screen.
8 13 Minutes (2021)
In one of several survival thrillers, 13 Minutes finds Heche, along with other families, attempting to survive the arrival of a tornado. She plays Tammy and the cast is rounded out by actors including Paz Vega, Amy Smart, and Peter Facinelli of the Twilight Saga fame.
One of the movie’s greatest strengths is the balance of plot and character-based drama; it doesn’t leave strong characterization behind in favor of amping up the action. 13 Minutes may be simple, but it has something to say, which isn’t true of many disaster movies which use the physical peril of the characters as a placeholder for interpersonal texture.
7 The Vanished (2020)
Another collaboration between Heche and Facinelli is The Vanished, which he not only stars in, but also wrote and directed. It follows a husband and wife duo, Wendy and Paul, played by Heche and Thomas Jane, whose daughter goes missing on a camping trip. Without much help from the police, Wendy and Paul take the investigation into their own hands.
While it’s far from perfect, with some slower sections weighing the pace down, there is a truly compelling plot at the center of this. To some, the story may come across as overwrought and unlikely, but if you lean into it there’s a lot of fun to be had.
6 What Remains (2022)
What Remains is written and directed by Nathan Scoggins. Its focus is on a pastor whose wife was murdered and now the man who killed her is returning to their small town. Heche is joined here by Kellan Lutz and Cress Williams, and all three put in strong performances. Forgiveness is a prominent theme in What Remains, raising interesting questions about how far it can stretch in extreme circumstances like this.
Though its pace is slow and this can be unenjoyable for some, it also gives the movie a sense of thoughtfulness and purpose. There is a self-confidence in choosing to take your time saying something rather than appeasing those who want everything to be faster and faster.
5 Supercell (2023)
Director Herbert James Winterstern’s feature-length debut Supercell is another tornado-based disaster movie. The cast in this movie is interesting, bringing together Scream’s Skeet Ulrich, Jordan Kristine Seamón from Luca Guadagnino’s We Are Who We Are, and Alec Baldwin, to name a few.
William, the son of a storm chaser who died doing exactly that, decides to set out on an adventure of his own in an effort to understand his lost father. There is a sense of old-school Spielberg in this movie. While it lacks the budget of one, it feels like a charming, crowd-pleasing blockbuster.
4 The Last Word (2017)
The Last Word stars Shirley Maclaine and Amanda Seyfried as Harriet and Anne, respectively. Harriet is a successful businesswoman who pays a local newspaper to ensure her obituary will be exactly as she wishes, and Anne is assigned the task. However, she is stubborn and refuses to just go along with whatever Harriet wants and instead hopes to uncover her real essence.
Maclaine gives a moving performance that is well-matched by Seyfried, though the former is the undeniable star of the show. It’s far from the most original story you’ll ever see and arguably over-sweet, but the performances make it worth your while.
3 The Best of Enemies (2019)
In a stranger than fiction story, The Best of Enemies follows the true story of the connection formed between a civil rights activist and a local Ku Klux Klan leader. Taraji P. Henson plays Ann Atwater, the activist, opposite Sam Rockwell as C.P. Ellis, the Klan member. The cast is then rounded out by Babou Ceesay, Heche, and Wes Bentley.
The Best of Enemies is a movie made of conflicting elements, the tone is upbeat, but the subject is far from it, and the subject itself is a friendship between people who could not be more opposite. It has drawn comparisons to Green Book, which has a similar central friendship between a Black character and a racist white character. So, it’s not a movie free from error, but these conflicting components also make it an interesting watch.
2 You’re Killing Me (2023)
You’re Killing Me feels like a thematic or atmospheric continuation of recent horror installments such as Ready or Not or Ma. Here, McKaley Miller stars as Eden — and coincidentally she was also in Ma — a teenager who attends a party in the hopes she can get a college recommendation letter from the father, a Congressman. Soon, however, Eden finds out that the classmate whose party it is was involved in the disappearance of a local girl, and from there on out, things get rapidly dicier.
The movie is incredibly fun, with a similar tongue-in-cheek feeling about it to the previously mentioned ancestors. It’s swift and easy to enjoy, the kind of project where you can tell the actors are enjoying themselves. This aspect also makes it a great image of Heche in which she is not only putting in an excellent performance but one that she had fun doing.
1 My Friend Dahmer (2017)
My Friend Dahmer explores the teenage life of Jeffrey Dahmer and asks how he might have become the killer we all know now. It is told from the perspective of John Backderf, a real-life childhood friend of Dahmes, and this story is based on his book of the same name. Ross Lynch plays Dahmer, Alex Wolff is his friend John, and Heche stars as Dahmer’s mother Joyce. The movie makes no attempt to come to a concrete conclusion, but it does raise questions about the age-old nature vs nurture debate.
Another important part of the movie is that it avoids exploitation and romanticization, likely because of its source material. In an interview with Parade, Heche says, “This is not about glorifying him or his upbringing in any way. It’s about telling the demise of a child in pain.” She is incredible in the role of the mother, bringing depth and empathy to the table.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
