Best Aaron Sorkin Movies, Ranked: All 10 by Critic Score — From Malice to The Social Network

FilmRated score 53 (Rotten Tomatoes 54%, Metacritic 52). The only Sorkin film that most critics did not recommend is also the least typical. Malice is a twist-driven thriller set in a Massachusetts college town, where a dean (Bill Pullman) and his wife (Nicole Kidman) rent a room to a brilliant, arrogant surgeon played by Alec Baldwin. Harold Becker directed, and Sorkin shares the screenplay credit with Scott Frank, from a story by Sorkin and Jonas McCord.

The plot turns over so many times that the reviews of the day split on whether it was clever or simply implausible, and the scores reflect that split almost exactly down the middle. What has lasted is one scene. Baldwin's surgeon, questioned in a deposition about whether he has a God complex, answers with a speech that ends on the line "I am God." It is two minutes of pure Sorkin in a film that otherwise rarely sounds like him, and it is the reason Malice still gets quoted. Watch it if you like early-1990s thrillers; skip it if you are here for the dialogue.

FilmRated score 64 (Rotten Tomatoes 68%, Metacritic 60). Sorkin's third film as director compresses several real crises in the lives of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz into one production week of I Love Lucy: a newspaper accusation that Ball had been a Communist, tabloid reports of Arnaz's infidelity, and a pregnancy the network did not want on air. Nicole Kidman plays Ball and Javier Bardem plays Arnaz, with J.K. Simmons and Nina Arianda as their co-stars William Frawley and Vivian Vance.

The acting was the part nearly everyone agreed on. Kidman, Bardem and Simmons were all nominated for Academy Awards, which makes this the only film on the list with three acting nominations. The complaints were about everything around them: the timeline that folds events from different years into five days, and a film about a great comedy that is seldom funny itself. Amazon released it in theaters on December 10, 2021, and on Prime Video eleven days later. It is the lowest-scoring of the three films Sorkin directed before The Social Reckoning.

FilmRated score 74 (Rotten Tomatoes 85%, Metacritic 62). This is the widest gap between the two aggregators on the list, 23 points, and it explains the low placing of the most famous film here. Most critics liked it; fewer loved it. Rob Reiner's courtroom drama, adapted by Sorkin from his own 1989 Broadway play, stars Tom Cruise as Lt. Daniel Kaffee, a Navy lawyer who has never tried a case, defending two Marines accused of killing a fellow Marine at Guantanamo Bay. Demi Moore and Kevin Pollak work the case with him, and Jack Nicholson plays the base commander, Col. Nathan Jessup.

Audiences were less divided. The film grossed $243.2 million worldwide on a budget of under $40 million and was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor for Nicholson. Its final cross-examination, and Jessup's "You can't handle the truth!", is among the most quoted scenes in American film. On Rotten Tomatoes the audience score is 89%, four points above the critics. If the ranking were by popularity rather than reviews, this would be near the top.

FilmRated score 75 (Rotten Tomatoes 82%, Metacritic 67). The last film Mike Nichols directed tells the true story of a hard-partying Texas congressman, played by Tom Hanks, who in the 1980s steered hundreds of millions of dollars in covert funding to Afghan fighters resisting the Soviet invasion. Julia Roberts plays the Houston socialite who pushes him into it and Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Gust Avrakotos, the CIA officer who makes it work. Sorkin adapted George Crile's 2003 book.

Hoffman is the reason to watch. His first scene, a shouting match with a superior that ends with a broken office window, earned him an Academy Award nomination, and the film is at its best whenever he and Hanks share a room. At 100 minutes it is also the shortest film on this list, and several critics felt that brevity cost it: the consequences of arming Afghanistan are left to a closing title card. It grossed $119.5 million against a $75 million budget.

FilmRated score 77 (Rotten Tomatoes 82%, Metacritic 71). Sorkin's first film as director is built around Jessica Chastain, who plays Molly Bloom, a former competitive skier who ran high-stakes poker games for actors, athletes and financiers in Los Angeles and New York before the FBI arrested her. Idris Elba plays her defense lawyer and Kevin Costner her father. Sorkin adapted Bloom's 2014 memoir, and the screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award.

It runs 141 minutes, the longest film here, and much of that is voice-over: Chastain narrates poker hands, legal exposure and her own history at a speed that leaves little room to breathe. Critics who liked it called that exhilarating, and those who did not found it exhausting. The film is also worth a look this week for a supporting player. Jeremy Strong, who plays Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Reckoning, appears here as the man who gives Bloom her start. STX released it in limited theaters on December 25, 2017, and it grossed $59.3 million on a $30 million budget.

FilmRated score 79 (Rotten Tomatoes 90%, Metacritic 68). Sorkin and Rob Reiner's second film together is a romantic comedy set in the White House. Michael Douglas plays Andrew Shepherd, a widowed president heading into a re-election year, and Annette Bening plays Sydney Ellen Wade, an environmental lobbyist he asks to a state dinner. Martin Sheen plays the chief of staff and Michael J. Fox a young domestic policy adviser.

The Tomatometer here is the third highest on the list, but the Metascore of 68 shows that the reviews were warm rather than ecstatic. Its place in Sorkin's career is larger than its score. The walking-and-talking staffers, the idealized Democratic president and the climactic press-room speech are all a first draft of The West Wing, which premiered four years later with Sheen promoted from chief of staff to president. Sorkin has said that material he cut from this script fed into the series. The film grossed $108 million and earned Marc Shaiman an Academy Award nomination for its score.

FilmRated score 83 (Rotten Tomatoes 89%, Metacritic 76). The highest-ranked film Sorkin directed is a script he first wrote in 2007, when Steven Spielberg was going to direct it. It dramatizes the 1969 federal trial of the activists charged with conspiracy and inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Eddie Redmayne plays Tom Hayden, Sacha Baron Cohen plays Abbie Hoffman, Mark Rylance plays defense lawyer William Kunstler and Frank Langella plays Judge Julius Hoffman, with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Bobby Seale.

It was made for theaters and ended up on Netflix. Paramount sold the film during the pandemic, and it began streaming on October 16, 2020, after a short theatrical run. It was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for Baron Cohen, and won none. A courtroom gives Sorkin the structure his directing sometimes lacks: every scene has a judge, a clock and an argument to win. This is the film that The Social Reckoning's early viewers have been comparing it with, usually to the new film's disadvantage.

FilmRated score 84 (Rotten Tomatoes 85%, Metacritic 82). The most formally daring script on the list has only three scenes. Each takes place backstage in the minutes before a product launch: the Macintosh in 1984, the NeXT computer in 1988 and the iMac in 1998. In each one the same people corner Jobs with the same unfinished arguments. Michael Fassbender plays Jobs, Kate Winslet plays marketing chief Joanna Hoffman, Seth Rogen plays Steve Wozniak and Jeff Daniels plays Apple CEO John Sculley. Danny Boyle directed, and shot the three acts on 16mm film, 35mm film and digital video.

Critics admired it and audiences stayed away. Fassbender and Winslet were both nominated for Academy Awards, and Sorkin and Winslet won Golden Globes, but the film grossed $34.4 million worldwide against a $30 million budget. The audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is 73%, twelve points below the critics, the reverse of the pattern on A Few Good Men. It is not a biography in the usual sense and does not pretend the conversations happened as shown. If you want the facts of Jobs's life, read Walter Isaacson's book, which the film is loosely based on. If you want two hours of actors at full speed, this is the one.

FilmRated score 91 (Rotten Tomatoes 94%, Metacritic 87). A film about baseball statistics has no right to be this watchable. Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics, who in 2002 rebuilt a team he could not afford by trusting numbers over scouts. Jonah Hill plays the young economist who shows him how, and Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the manager who does not want to hear it. Bennett Miller directed. Sorkin shares the screenplay credit with Steven Zaillian, from a story by Stan Chervin and Michael Lewis's 2003 book.

The shared credit matters when judging it as a Sorkin film. Zaillian wrote the earlier draft and Sorkin rewrote it, and the result is quieter than anything else here: long silences, a father and daughter in a guitar shop, a general manager who cannot bear to watch his own team play. It was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Pitt, Best Supporting Actor for Hill and Best Adapted Screenplay, and won none. It grossed $110.2 million on a $50 million budget.

FilmRated score 96 (Rotten Tomatoes 96%, Metacritic 95). First place is not close. The Social Network has the highest Tomatometer and the highest Metascore of any Sorkin film, and the five-point lead over Moneyball is the largest gap between any two neighbors in the top half of this list. David Fincher directed. Jesse Eisenberg plays Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Garfield plays co-founder Eduardo Saverin and Justin Timberlake plays Napster co-founder Sean Parker, in a story told through two lawsuits over who created Facebook and who was pushed out of it.

Sorkin adapted Ben Mezrich's book The Accidental Billionaires, and the script won him the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. The film won two more, for Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's score and for editing, from eight nominations, and lost Best Picture to The King's Speech. It grossed $225 million worldwide on a $40 million budget. The opening scene, a breakup conducted at twice the speed of normal conversation, is as good an introduction to Sorkin's writing as exists. It is also the standard The Social Reckoning will be measured against.

Put the ten scores side by side and one pattern stands out. The top three films were all directed by someone else: Fincher, Miller and Boyle. The three films Sorkin directed himself score 83, 77 and 64, an average of 75. The seven he wrote for other directors average 79, and that figure includes Malice. The gap is small, and three films are a thin sample. Still, it matches what critics have said in individual reviews for years: his scripts tend to be at their best when a strong visual director pushes against them.

That is the context for October 9. The Social Reckoning is the fourth film Sorkin has directed, and the first where he follows a film that another director made from his script. Early reactions, which we covered separately, praise the cast and fault the filmmaking, which is the pattern this ranking would predict. Once reviews are published we will add its score here and see where it lands. To beat Sorkin's own best work as a director it needs to clear 83. To match the film it follows, it would need 96.

Which should you watch first? If you have seen none of them, start with The Social Network, then Moneyball. If you want the pure courtroom version of Sorkin, watch A Few Good Men and The Trial of the Chicago 7 back to back; they were made 28 years apart and share a structure. If you loved The West Wing, The American President is where it began. And if you only have time for one scene, the deposition speech in Malice is on YouTube.