Every Oliver Stone Movie Ranked Worst To Best
His long-running filmography laid out in order of quality.
Directors often have a tricky proposition when entering the Hollywood system. They can either go their own way and pursue their own ideas at risk of financial failure, or they can take the studio approved route. American director Oliver Stone has straddled the line between the two.
While Stone may have written Scarface and contributed heavily to 1978's Midnight Express, this list will focus purely on his directorial efforts. Oliver Stone has made many varied films throughout his extensive career and some fare better than others.
His releases are often based in politics and real world events, adapting them for the screen. Some productions are some of the best in their genre, while others stand out as misguided experiments that didn't sit well with critics or audiences. Be that as it may, he's been in the business far longer than most and that kind of longevity has created many different experiences for the man.
As of 2020, Stone has directed a total of twenty flicks; now it's time to rank all them by quality. It's a longer list than usual so get settled in...
20. The Hand
At the bottom of the director's barrel, it's The Hand, released in 1981 to a critical lashing. As the second release of Oliver's directing career, it represents an experiment that really didn't pay off.
The film stars Michael Caine and Andrea Marcovicci with the former playing a comic book illustrator who loses his hand in an accident. As the artist struggles to adjust, his lost hand makes an unexpected appearance and forms a sadistic mind of its own. It's the most widely panned of the director's filmography, sitting at 11% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Stone has never had an affinity for the horror genre and this film is proof positive of that; it attempts to squeeze a serious tone out a simplistic fright formula that belongs squarely in the days of campy B-movies. At the very least, it was incredibly cheap to produce, coming in at a budget of 6.5 million Canadian dollars.
Even with this reduced cost however, The Hand struggled to gain ground. In a decade loaded with brilliant horror flicks, it only managed to scrape back 2.4 million US dollars at the box office. As a result of both the film's poor critical and commercial reception, Oliver Stone has never returned to the genre since.