Adams began her career as a dancer in dinner theater, which she pursued from 1994 to 1998, and made her film debut with a supporting part in the dark comedy Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999).

She won two consecutive Golden Globe Awards for Best Actress for playing a seductive con artist in the crime film American Hustle (2013) and painter Margaret Keane in the biopic Big Eyes (2014).

Further acclaim came for playing a linguist in the science fiction film Arrival (2016), a self-harming reporter in the HBO miniseries Sharp Objects (2018), and Lynne Cheney in the satire Vice (2018).

[18] Soon after, while she was off work nursing a pulled muscle, she attended the locally held auditions for the Hollywood film Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999), a satire on beauty pageants starring Kirsten Dunst, Ellen Barkin, and Kirstie Alley.

Club wrote that Adams plays her "alpha-bitch role with vicious glee largely missing from Sarah Michelle Gellar's sterile take on the character".

[4][28] Her career prospects seemingly improved a year later when she received a lucrative offer to star as a regular in the CBS television drama Dr. Vegas, but she was dropped after a few episodes.

[30] Disillusioned by her firing from Dr. Vegas, Adams, aged 30, considered quitting acting altogether after completing work on the independent comedy-drama Junebug, which had a production budget of under $1 million.

[15] Tim Robey of The Daily Telegraph labeled the film a "small, quiet miracle" and wrote that Adams had given "one of the most delicately funny and heartbreaking performances it's ever been my pleasure to review".

[5][35][36] Later in 2005, Adams had supporting parts in two critically panned films—the romantic comedy The Wedding Date, starring Debra Messing and Dermot Mulroney, and the ensemble coming-of-age film Standing Still.

She was among 250 actresses who auditioned for the high-profile role; the studio had favored the casting of a bigger star, but the director Kevin Lima insisted on Adams due to her commitment to the part and her ability to be nonjudgmental about Giselle's personality.

[45] The critic Roger Ebert commended Adams for being "fresh and winning" in a role that "absolutely depends on effortless lovability", and Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe credited her for "demonstrat[ing] a real performer's ingenuity for comic timing and physical eloquence".

[48] Enchanted was a commercial success, grossing over $340 million worldwide, and Adams was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Comedy or Musical.

[51] Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter credited Adams for being "sweetly savvy" in her part, while Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian was disappointed to see her talent wasted in a role he considered to be of minimal importance.

[52][53] The 2008 Sundance Film Festival saw the release of Sunshine Cleaning, a comedy-drama about two sisters (played by Adams and Emily Blunt) who start a crime scene clean-up business.

[54][55] Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle found Adams to be "magical", adding that she "gives us a portrait of raging want beneath a veneer of surface diffidence".

Shanley initially approached Natalie Portman for the part, but offered Adams the role after finding her innocent, yet intelligent, personality similar to that of Ingrid Bergman.

[91] Comparing her character to Lady Macbeth, the critic Justin Chang wrote that Adams's "pertness has rarely seemed so malevolent", and Donald Clarke of The Irish Times commended her for playing the part with "discrete menace".

[99] After losing out on the role of Lois Lane in two previous films about Superman, Adams secured the part in Zack Snyder's 2013 reboot, Man of Steel, starring Henry Cavill as the titular superhero.

[100] She played Lane with a mixture of toughness and vulnerability, but Peter Bradshaw found the character "sketchily conceived" and criticized the actress' lack of chemistry with Cavill.

[102] Adams next featured in Her, a drama from writer-director Spike Jonze about a lonely man (Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with an artificial intelligence (voiced by Scarlett Johansson); she played his close friend.

[103] Further success came to Adams when she reteamed with David O. Russell in the black comedy crime film American Hustle, co-starring Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, and Jennifer Lawrence.

[103][104] She collaborated closely with Bale to build their characters and made off-screen suggestions to Russell, including for a scene in which she is aggressively kissed on the lips by her lover's wife (played by Lawrence).

[103][104] The work proved grueling for Adams, who later confirmed reports that Russell had been hard on her and made her cry frequently; she said she feared bringing such a negative experience home to her daughter.

[8] American Hustle was critically acclaimed;[105] Manohla Dargis of The New York Times believed Adams "goes deeper here than she's ever been allowed to", adding that she had successfully "turn[ed] an unpredictable character into a thrillingly wild one".

[120] Stephanie Zacharek of Time magazine found the film visually arresting yet thematically weak, but credited Adams and Gyllenhaal for making their characters' pain seem genuine.

Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan noted her "finely calibrated performance" and asserted that the film was "a showcase for her ability to quietly and effectively meld intelligence, empathy and reserve".

[138] Daniel D'Addario of Variety found her to be "operating at the peak of her abilities" and added that with "her voice dropped an octave, slowed to a drawl, and sharpened with distrust, [she] is simply superb".

[140][141] Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair drew comparisons to Adams's role in The Master; he commended "her usual rigor" but criticized the "lazy rubber-stamp of a man's idea of a woman adjacent to power".

Jake Coyle of The Washington Times considers Adams an actress who does not transform herself for her roles, but who inhabits "a character with warmth and smarts while, to varying degrees, remaining herself".

[205] According to the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes and the box-office site Box Office Mojo, Adams's most critically acclaimed and commercially successful films are Catch Me If You Can (2002), Junebug (2005), Enchanted (2007), Doubt (2008), Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009), Julie & Julia (2009), The Fighter (2010), The Muppets (2011), The Master (2012), Man of Steel (2013), Her (2013), American Hustle (2013), Big Eyes (2014), Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), Arrival (2016), Nocturnal Animals (2016), and Justice League (2017).