Top 15 Emma Stone Movies, Ranked

There’s a version of Emma Stone’s career where she takes the safe path after Easy A blows up: romantic comedies, franchise work, maybe a prestige drama every few years. Instead, she spent the next decade and a half working with Yorgos Lanthimos, playing Billie Jean King, and winning two Academy Awards for roles that had no business being as strange and alive as they turned out to be. At TV Hulk, we ranked these performances by how much they stuck with us — the moments where she made you forget you were watching a performance at all, and the characters who felt too specific and real to have been invented. From her earliest scene-stealing appearances to the roles that changed what people expected from her, here are her 15 best.

15. Gangster Squad (2013)

Grace Faraday is doing more interesting work than the movie around her ever quite manages to support. Stone plays her as a genuine Old Hollywood femme fatale, all knowing glances and careful silences, and there’s a version of this film where Grace gets to be as dangerous and complicated as Stone is clearly playing her. The moment she and Josh Brolin share across a crowded room early in the film, that flicker of recognition and mutual calculation hints at a noir that never fully materializes. She brings real glamour and timing to a movie that mostly wants her to look beautiful in period costumes, and it’s telling that her best beat is a quiet exhale after a lie lands — Stone lets Grace know exactly what she’s gotten away with even when the script has already moved on.

14. Superbad (2007)

Jules is barely on screen, but Stone makes every second count. She plays the high school party host with a breezy self-possession that feels completely effortless next to Jonah Hill’s sweaty desperation, and the contrast is half the joke. Watch the way she delivers her lines to Seth: there’s no performance anxiety in it, just a girl who finds him mildly ridiculous and is too good-natured to say so directly. It’s a small role in a movie that wasn’t really about her, but Emma’s natural comedic instincts are fully visible even here. Looking back now, knowing what came next, Jules in Superbad reads like a very early preview of an actor who was always going to figure it out.

13. Kinds of Kindness (2024)

Three characters, three completely different emotional registers, one film. Stone plays Rita, Liz, and Emily across Yorgos Lanthimos’s anthology structure, and the way she shifts her whole physical bearing between segments is genuinely striking. As Rita, she’s coiled and obedient; as Liz, she’s unraveling in ways that feel genuinely unsettling; as Emily, she carries a fervent, almost religious certainty that reads as both comic and deeply strange. The scene where Liz confronts her husband with flat, affectless fury is the section’s emotional peak, and Stone plays it without a single moment of conventional movie-acting — no swelling emotion, no release valve, just a woman staring at someone she’s decided to stop pretending for. Deliberately uncomfortable, and completely gripping.

12. The Croods Franchise (2013–2020)

Eep works as well as she does because Stone doesn’t play her as a generic animated teenager. The voice has a specific restless energy to it, a forward-leaning impatience that makes Eep feel like she’s always about to bolt toward the horizon whether anyone’s ready or not. In the original Croods, the argument scenes between Eep and her father land because Stone pitches her delivery somewhere between genuine frustration and barely suppressed love, and that emotional texture is what separates a memorable animated performance from a functional one. She’s not doing a “funny voice”; she’s building a character from the inside out, and that restless energy never lets up — you can hear it most clearly when Eep first spots Guy and Stone lets a beat of wonder slip through before the excitement takes over completely.

11. Battle of the Sexes (2017)

What Stone does with Billie Jean King goes well beyond the tennis sequences. She captures the specific weight of someone living a public life while privately figuring out who she actually is, and the scenes where King processes her feelings for hairdresser Marilyn Barnett (Andrea Riseborough) are played with a quiet, searching quality that never tips into melodrama. There’s a moment where King sits alone after a match, not triumphant, just still, and Stone holds it without reaching for an obvious emotional note. Her physical commitment to King’s playing style is just as precise — the way she plants her feet and sets her jaw before a serve tells you everything about who this woman is before she even speaks.

10. Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011)

Hannah Weaver could have been a plot device, the girl who finally cracks the player’s armor, but Stone plays her with enough wit and self-awareness that she becomes the most interesting person in the room. The bar scene is the one everyone remembers: Hannah sees right through Jacob’s (Ryan Gosling) practiced routine, calls it out with a raised eyebrow and a grin, and then goes home with him anyway because she wants to, not because she was charmed into it. That distinction matters, and Stone makes it land. The chemistry between her and Gosling felt almost unfairly natural, and watching it now, knowing La La Land was five years away, the bar scene plays like a proof of concept for everything that came after.

9. Zombieland Franchise (2009–2019)

Wichita is the person who has already thought three steps ahead of everyone else in the room, and Stone plays that quality without ever making the character feel cold. In the original Zombieland, the con she and Little Rock run on Columbus and Tallahassee, complete with fake tears and a perfectly timed reversal, establishes Wichita as someone who’s been surviving on her wits long before the apocalypse started. Stone delivers the whole sequence with a dry, almost bored efficiency that lands as sharply funny. Zombieland: Double Tap gives Wichita more room to show the cost of always being the smartest and most guarded person around, and Stone handles that shift without losing the character’s essential toughness. The tell is in how she softens toward Columbus — not through big declarations, but through a barely-there drop in her usual defensive sharpness.

8. The Help (2011)

Skeeter Phelan is the engine of the whole story, the character whose decision to listen and write sets everything in motion, and Stone plays her with an earnest drive that keeps the film grounded when it risks tipping into sentiment. The scene where Skeeter sits across from Aibileen (Viola Davis) for their first real interview, nervous and determined in equal measure, is a good example of how Stone works in ensemble: she’s not competing for the scene, she’s serving it. Her co-stars dominated awards conversation that year, and rightly so, but Emma’s performance is the connective tissue that lends the film’s emotional stakes their credibility — and you feel her absence in every scene she’s not in.

7. The Amazing Spider-Man Franchise (2012–2014)

Gwen Stacy is the best love interest the Spider-Man films have produced across any iteration, and that comes down to Stone making her a full person rather than a motivation. In The Amazing Spider-Man, the scene where Gwen figures out Peter’s secret and doesn’t flinch, she just recalibrates and moves forward, tells you everything about who this character is. She’s not waiting to be rescued; she’s a participant. The second film asks more of her, and Stone delivers, particularly in the final act where Gwen’s last moments are played with a grace that made the ending hit harder than most superhero deaths manage to. The real-life connection between Emma and Andrew Garfield made their scenes feel lived-in in a way that’s hard to manufacture in blockbuster filmmaking.

6. Cruella (2021)

Stone commits to Estella’s transformation into Cruella with a theatrical boldness that the film’s punk-rock aesthetic absolutely requires. She plays the early scenes as a scrappy, ambitious young designer with a chip on her shoulder, and the shift into full Cruella mode, the white streak, the calculated cruelty, the designer warfare, feels earned rather than cosmetic. The scene where Cruella crashes the Baroness’s party in a garbage truck that erupts into a couture reveal is peak Stone: she’s having the time of her life, and it shows. This is a performance that lives or dies on pure commitment, and Emma never wavers for a single second. Anchoring a Disney franchise on charisma alone is harder than it looks, and she makes it look easy.

5. The Favourite (2018)

Abigail Masham arrives at court looking like a victim and leaves looking like a victor, and the genius of Stone’s performance is how completely she hides the transition. She plays Abigail’s early scenes with a wide-eyed, slightly desperate quality that reads as genuine vulnerability, and then you start noticing the small calculations behind the eyes. The scene where Abigail poisons Sarah’s (Rachel Weisz) horse, executed with such cheerful efficiency, is the moment the mask fully slips, and Stone plays it with a lightness that makes it even more chilling. She earned her third Oscar nomination for this supporting role, working opposite two of the best actors of their generation, and she holds her own completely. Watching Abigail quietly dismantle everyone around her while maintaining perfect innocence is the film’s central pleasure.

4. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)

Sam Thomson is furious, and Stone doesn’t soften it. As Riggan’s (Michael Keaton) daughter fresh out of rehab, Sam has no patience for her father’s artistic crisis. The rooftop confrontation scene, where she unloads a trembling, full-throated monologue about his irrelevance and self-absorption, is the most electrically alive Stone had been on screen up to that point. She’s going toe-to-toe with Keaton and Edward Norton in a film full of theatrical bravado, and she doesn’t blink. The Oscar nomination she received for the role was her first, and it announced something: this was an actor who could hold the center of a scene against anyone. Sam’s anger feels specific and earned, not just written, because Stone finds the grief underneath it.

3. Easy A (2010)

Olive Penderghast is sharp, self-aware, and talking directly to the camera, and Stone draws you in until she seems to be talking specifically to you. Carrying nearly every scene of a teen comedy on pure personality is a tall order, and she does it with comedic timing and warmth that made Easy A feel like a classic almost immediately. The fake sex scene with Brandon (Dan Byrd), where Olive performs for the listening crowd with theatrical commitment and then catches her own eye in the mirror with a flicker of something more complicated, is a perfect small moment in a film full of them. Stone was 21, and what makes Olive so magnetic is how her self-deprecating intelligence keeps undercutting the bravado — she’s always the first one in on the joke about herself, and that honesty is what makes you root for her so hard.

2. Poor Things (2023)

Bella Baxter has the body of an adult woman and the mind of a newborn, and Stone plays that combination without a moment of coyness or apology. The physical performance alone is extraordinary: Bella’s early lurching walk, the way she processes sensation with total unfiltered immediacy, the gradual shift in posture and gaze as her mind develops. The dinner table scene in Lisbon, where Bella encounters poverty for the first time and responds with pure, uncomplicated horror that the adults around her have long since learned to suppress, is Stone at her most unguarded. She won her second Academy Award for the role, and it’s the more daring of her two wins. Yorgos Lanthimos’s surrealist world requires complete surrender, and Emma gives it everything. Bella is unlike any character she’d played before, and the performance is unlike anything else in her filmography.

1. La La Land (2016)

Mia Dolan is an aspiring actress whose hope is wearing thin but refusing to quit, and Stone plays that specific emotional state with a transparency that makes the character impossible to look away from. The “Audition (The Fools Who Dream)” sequence, a solo monologue-song in a single extended take, became one of the most discussed acting moments of the decade for good reason: it’s raw, specific, and completely unguarded. Stone swept the major awards that year, taking home the Oscar, Golden Globe, and BAFTA, and the sweep made sense because the performance earns it at every level. Mia has to sing, dance, cry, and sell a love story that ends without a happy ending, and Emma does all of it while making it feel effortless. The film’s final sequence works as well as it does because of what she’s built across the previous two hours. You feel the whole weight of it.

Emma Stone has won two Oscars for two completely different kinds of performances, but the more interesting pattern is that her best work keeps happening at the edges of what’s expected: a scheming social climber in a period black comedy, a woman experiencing the world for the first time in a surrealist fairy tale, a teenager weaponizing her reputation in a scrappy indie. She keeps finding the roles where the floor drops out, and she keeps landing on her feet.