All 31 Films — From Superbad to Bugonia, the Complete Career of a Two-Time Oscar Winner
Born: November 6, 1988, Scottsdale, Arizona | 2 Oscars | 2 BAFTAs | 2 Golden Globes | 31 Films | 2007–2025
Emma Stone is one of the most naturally gifted screen comedians of her generation who quietly became one of its most adventurous dramatic actresses. She arrived fully formed in Superbad in 2007, already in possession of that quality that is impossible to teach and impossible to fake: the sense that whatever she is doing in any given moment is exactly what the scene requires, nothing more, nothing less. She has two Academy Awards, a filmography that spans talking dogs and Yorgos Lanthimos fever dreams, and a capacity for total transformation that gets more astonishing the more closely you pay attention.
What Kind of Actress Is She?
The word that comes up most often about Emma Stone is ‘natural.’ It is true and also misleading. What reads as natural is the result of a specific technical approach, a quality of listening rather than performing, of reacting rather than acting, of trusting the camera to find her rather than pushing toward it. Great screen actors all have this quality. What distinguishes Stone is how early she had it and how consistently she has maintained it across thirty-one films of wildly varying quality.
She has made genuinely bad films. She worked with Woody Allen twice. She was whitewashed into a role she later regretted. She has had her voice used in animated sequels. She has been in sketch anthologies that should not exist. And she has also made The Favourite, La La Land and Poor Things, three extraordinary films in eight years, each one demanding something different and each one delivered completely.
What is clear, across every entry in this list, is that she has never given a performance that didn’t come from a specific and considered place. The films at the bottom are bad. The performances are never bad. That distinction matters enormously, and it is what separates the merely talented from the genuinely great. She is, at 36, still building.
Emma Stone has appeared in 31 films. Two of them won her the Academy Award for Best Actress. Several more should have won her other things. Whatever she does next, people will be watching closely and have been watching, correctly, since 2007.
What follows is every film in her filmography, ranked from bottom to top. This is a ranking of the films as complete works, not just the performances though in almost every case her work rises above the material, and in several cases considerably above it. Voice roles are included.
31. Movie 43 (2013)
★☆☆☆☆ Brief appearance in sketch anthology
One of the worst studio films made this century. A sketch anthology assembled by a dozen directors featuring an almost unbelievable cast all clearly fulfilling contractual obligations. Stone appears briefly. It does not matter. The film is a wasteland. Its very existence is the embarrassment, not her involvement in it.
30. Marmaduke (2010)
★☆☆☆☆ Voice: Mazie the poodle
A talking dog film. Owen Wilson voices the Great Dane. Stone voices a poodle. Rotten Tomatoes: 10%. There is nothing else to say about Marmaduke.
29. The Rocker (2008)
★★☆☆☆ Amelia Stone — bassist, ‘the straight face’
Rainn Wilson as a washed-up drummer who gets a second shot with his nephew’s band. Stone plays the bassist and reportedly learned to actually play bass for the role — which is more commitment than the film deserved. She found the role difficult because the character’s flatness was so contrary to her own personality. Critical and commercial failure.
28. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009)
★★☆☆☆ Brief supporting role
Matthew McConaughey as a commitment-phobic man haunted by the ghosts of his exes. Stone has a small supporting role and is, as usual, more interesting than her screen time allows. The film is a fairly generic romantic comedy of its era. She was already better than this, even then.
27. Paper Man (2009)
★★☆☆☆ Abby
A quiet indie drama about a blocked writer (Jeff Daniels) and his imaginary superhero friend, and the teenage babysitter (Stone) he befriends. Stone is warm and grounded in an underwritten part. The film is too slight and too safe to make its case. Notable mainly as a pre-Easy A credit that shows she was already choosing more interesting material than her peers.
26. The House Bunny (2008)
★★☆☆☆ Natalie — sorority president
Anna Faris as a Playboy Bunny who becomes a sorority house mother. Stone plays the president of the rival sorority and even covers the Waitresses’ ‘I Know What Boys Like.’ The film has genuine comedy in Faris’s performance. TV Guide’s critic noted Stone was well on her way to becoming a star. The film itself is generically bad. She was not.
25. Irrational Man (2015)
★★☆☆☆ Jill — philosophy student
Woody Allen’s late-career thriller about a philosophy professor (Joaquin Phoenix) who commits a murder to give his life meaning. Allen has made this film before and considerably better. Stone plays the student who falls for him and is left holding an underwritten part. Phoenix is more interesting. Neither saves a script that feels like a first draft of Crimes and Misdemeanors.
24. Magic in the Moonlight (2014)
★★☆☆☆ Sophie — spiritual medium
A period romantic comedy set in 1920s France, with Colin Firth as a sceptic who falls for Stone’s spiritualist. The age gap between Firth and Stone was noted by critics; the chemistry isn’t entirely convincing. Stone does what she can with a charm-dependent role. The film is inconsequential Allen — pleasant in the way warm air is pleasant, and equally forgettable.
23. Aloha (2015)
★★☆☆☆ Allison Ng — air force pilot
Cameron Crowe’s critically demolished romantic comedy, filmed in Hawaii, with Bradley Cooper, Rachel McAdams and a staggering waste of talent at every level. Stone’s casting as a character of Asian-Hawaiian-Swedish descent drew legitimate whitewashing criticism, which Crowe later apologised for. Stone herself later expressed regret about taking the role. The film is a mess. She is not, but it makes no difference.
22. Zombieland: Double Tap (2019)
★★☆☆☆ Wichita
A decade-later sequel that nobody strictly needed. The chemistry between Stone, Eisenberg, Harrelson and Breslin remains intact and they all clearly enjoyed making it. But the film doesn’t have a good reason to exist beyond the cast’s appeal, and it leans on that appeal too heavily. A pleasant way to spend ninety minutes. Not more.
21. Gangster Squad (2013)
★★☆☆☆ Grace Faraday — gangster’s moll
A stylised 1940s crime film — Ryan Gosling, Josh Brolin, Sean Penn as a cartoonish Mickey Cohen. Stone plays Grace, the love interest who comes between the gangster and the cop. The role is thin but she fills it with intelligence and presence. The film is all style and shallow content, but it looks handsome and moves quickly. She and Gosling’s chemistry is already visible here, two years before La La Land.
20. The Croods (2013)
★★☆☆☆ Voice: Eep — cave girl daughter
Dreamworks’ animated prehistoric adventure. Stone voices Eep, the daughter who longs to explore beyond the cave. It is a well-crafted family film with real warmth, and Stone brings an energy and specificity to the voice work that elevates what could have been a generic part. More interesting than it sounds. Less discussed than it should be.
19. The Croods: A New Age (2020)
★★☆☆☆ Voice: Eep — returning
A capable sequel that expands the world from the first film. Stone’s vocal performance is as alive as before. The film itself is slightly more formulaic — the second-film problem of having to both recap and extend simultaneously. A warm, enjoyable sequel that justifies its existence without quite equalling its predecessor.
18. Kinds of Kindness (2024)
★★☆☆☆ Three separate characters across three stories
Stone’s third Lanthimos collaboration is the most formally demanding: an anthology of three darkly comic fables in which she plays different characters with different relationships to control and submission. There is no throughline character to build — each version of her has to feel complete on its own terms. The film divided audiences. Stone was the consistent element that held it together. One critic called her miscast; most disagreed.
17. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)
★★★☆☆ Gwen Stacy
The film that killed the franchise. Overstuffed and trying to launch five things at once. But Stone’s Gwen Stacy is its emotional core, and her death sequence — which she reportedly helped choreograph — is the most affecting moment in either Spider-Man film. She makes you care about a character the franchise had largely been using as a plot device.
16. The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)
★★★☆☆ Gwen Stacy
Better than its sequel and better than it gets credit for. Stone’s Gwen Stacy is one of the most fully realised characters in the superhero genre — a scientist and an intellectual equal to Peter Parker, not a love interest with a personality attached. She and Andrew Garfield had genuine offscreen chemistry (they dated during filming) and it shows in every scene. The film is imperfect. She is not.
15. Friends With Benefits (2011)
★★★☆☆ Small supporting role
Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis lead this romantic comedy about friends who try to keep sex uncomplicated. Stone has a small but scene-stealing early appearance. She is, as usual, funnier than the film requires and more interesting than her screen time allows. Not her film, but a useful marker in a year she was on screen constantly.
14. Cruella (2021)
★★★☆☆ Cruella de Vil / Estella Miller
Stone versus Emma Thompson in a Disney origin story about the infamous fur-obsessed villain. The film is overlong, tonally confused about whether it is a dark character study or a crowd-pleaser, and its punk-London aesthetic is applied rather than earned. But Stone commits completely, matching Thompson scene for scene in a physically and vocally inventive performance. She is significantly better than the film around her. That happens a lot.
13. Eddington (2025)
★★★☆☆ Supporter of the sheriff
Ari Aster’s pandemic-era contemporary Western starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal and Austin Butler. Stone appears in a supporting role and critics noted that she and Pascal were game and ready but their characters weren’t given an awful lot to actually do, functioning more as images than fully fledged people. A supporting performance in an ambitious film — worth seeing for Aster’s vision, not primarily for Stone.
12. Zombieland (2009)
★★★★☆ Wichita — survivalist con artist
Her breakthrough into broad popular recognition. Playing Wichita, a survivor who survives by deceiving everyone she meets, she is funny and sharp and never lets the character tip into broad comedy. The ensemble — Eisenberg, Harrelson, Breslin — is one of the most charming in horror-comedy history, and Stone holds her own in company that should, on paper, have dominated her. She does not allow it.
11. Battle of the Sexes (2017)
★★★★☆ Billie Jean King
Stone as Billie Jean King in the period of the famous 1973 tennis match against Bobby Riggs. She gained weight for the role, learned to play tennis convincingly, and found a quality of quiet determination inside King that anchors the film. Steve Carell’s Riggs is more entertaining in a showy sense. Stone’s King is more true. A performance of enormous restraint in a film that keeps trying to go bigger around her.
10. The Interview (2014)
★★★★☆ Brief cameo
The Seth Rogen / James Franco comedy that became notorious for the Sony hack and North Korean threats more than anything on screen. Stone has a cameo. It registered only slightly. The film itself is inconsistent — funnier in places than its reputation suggests, less funny overall than it needed to be.
9. Easy A (2010)
★★★★☆ Olive Penderghast — the girl with the reputation
The film that made her a star and still the most purely pleasurable thing in her filmography. Stone plays Olive, a high school girl whose lie about losing her virginity runs away with her life in ways she cannot stop. It is a film about reputation and gossip and how women are punished for what men are celebrated for, and Stone plays it with a comedic intelligence that recalls the great Hollywood screwball heroines — Katharine Hepburn’s timing, Carole Lombard’s warmth. She is funny in ways that look simple and are not. Easy A is the film that proved she could carry a movie. She carried it so completely that it is almost impossible to imagine anyone else in the role.
8. The Help (2011)
★★★★☆ Skeeter Phelan — aspiring journalist
Stone as the aspiring journalist who decides to document the stories of Black maids in 1960s Mississippi. The film’s politics have grown more complicated in the years since — its approach to race, its centering of a white protagonist — and the critical conversation around it has shifted. But Stone grounds it. She plays Skeeter as driven by conscience rather than virtue, and her scenes with Viola Davis have real weight. Davis is the film’s moral and artistic centre. Stone is the right person to follow into that centre.
7. Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011)
★★★★★ Hannah — law student
The film that introduced the Gosling-Stone chemistry to the world, two years before La La Land made it famous. She plays Hannah, a law student who has a one-night stand with Gosling’s serial bachelor and derails his whole philosophy. Her scenes have a specificity and warmth that the rest of the film — for all its pleasures — doesn’t quite match. She appeared in this film for about thirty minutes and stole it entirely.
6. Superbad (2007)
★★★★★ Jules — the cool girl
Her film debut. A small role as Jules, the girl Jonah Hill’s character spends the film pursuing, but it announced something immediately and completely. She was 18. She had never been in a film. And she was already doing the thing that would define the next eighteen years of her career: making every moment feel observed rather than performed. The film is Rogen and Goldberg’s masterpiece. She arrived in it as a complete person.
5. The Favourite (2018)
★★★★★ Abigail Masham — scheming social climber
Yorgos Lanthimos’s first collaboration with Stone, and the one that changed the trajectory of her career. She plays Abigail, a fallen aristocrat who arrives at Queen Anne’s court as a servant and methodically dismantles Olivia Colman and Rachel Weisz’s world to claim power for herself. Stone is the film’s engine — she is present in almost every scene, watching, calculating, performing innocence while plotting ruin. The performance is controlled in ways that are only visible on a second viewing. Her Oscar nomination for Supporting Actress was deserved. Many thought she should have won.
4. Bugonia (2025)
★★★★★ Michelle Fuller
Stone’s fourth Lanthimos collaboration — a dark comedy in which she plays a woman kidnapped by tech bros who believe she is a shape-shifting alien controlling a corporation. It earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress and a Best Picture nomination as producer, making her the first woman nominated as both actress and producer in two different films. The film itself is divisive — stranger than Kinds of Kindness and more overtly comic — but Stone’s commitment is never in doubt.
3. Birdman (2014)
★★★★★ Sam — recovering addict daughter
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s one-take-illusion masterpiece gave Stone the role of Sam, the recovering addict daughter of Michael Keaton’s washed-up superhero actor. She has one speech — delivered in a single take in an alleyway — that is among the most raw and specific monologues in her filmography. The Academy gave her a Supporting Actress nomination. It was fully deserved. The film is brilliant. She matches it.
2. La La Land (2016)
★★★★★ Mia Dolan — aspiring actress
Damien Chazelle’s love letter to old Hollywood and to Los Angeles gave Stone the role of Mia, an aspiring actress surviving on rejection and coffee shop shifts. She sings, she dances, she plays a woman trying to believe in herself in a city designed to break that belief. Her first Oscar was one of the clearest and most deserved in recent Academy history — not just for the musicality but for what she does in the film’s final minutes, watching a life that didn’t happen unspool before her, holding grief and gratitude in the same expression simultaneously. That is one of the hardest things to do on screen. She makes it look like breathing.
1. Poor Things (2023)
★★★★★ Bella Baxter — brought back to life, discovering the world
The summit. Bella Baxter — a woman brought back to life in an adult body with a baby’s brain, discovering the world, language, desire and herself as her consciousness develops — is the most original character Stone has played and the most complete performance of her career. She charts Bella’s evolution through specific physical and vocal choices that are entirely thought through and wholly committed: the lurching walk of early Bella gives way to something more fluid; the speech patterns change; the eyes change; the quality of her attention to the world around her changes. It is the kind of performance where you could pause any frame and read the character’s exact stage of development from the posture alone. Yorgos Lanthimos gave her complete freedom to build something unprecedented. She used every bit of it. Her second Oscar was not a career achievement prize — it was the right award for the right performance at the right moment. The finest work of her career so far, and one of the finest performances of this decade.