Every Nora Ephron Movie Ranked

Nora Ephron had a way with words. Not in a trite, empty compliment sense. She could mold them, manipulate them, and swirl them around in the soup of her mind until she produced just the right combination of sweetness and bite. She understood how language worked, on the page and in person, and how the little phrases we incorporate into our vernacular can mean much more than they seem. She played with interactions until they were outrageously funny in shocking, spontaneous, and sometimes absurd ways. 

Luckily for all of us, she brought this gift of hers to the silver screen as a writer and eventually branched out into directing. Sadly, Ephron passed away in 2012, but we still have the films she left us to remember her amazing talent and — by extension — her. There are only 15 in total, but we've ranked them from worst to best based on ratings from IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes (averaged together), with box office receipts breaking any ties. So let's get to them!

Based on the novel by Nora Ephron's sister Delia, "Hanging Up," is the tale of three sisters played by Lisa Kudrow, Meg Ryan, and Diane Keaton (who also directed) facing the illness and impending death of their father (Walter Matthau in his final role), despite never having been close to him. It's semi-autobiographical in the same way Ephron's novel "Heartburn" was as well as her sister Amy's novel "Cool Shades" is. Being so close to the material, it makes sense that Ephron wouldn't want to direct it herself, though the official story is that she committed to "You've Got Mail," which was filmed at the same time but, due to the wiles of Hollywood, was released 14 months earlier. 

Sadly, be it from that lack of personal connection or Keaton's relatively inexperienced hand at the direction (or something else entirely), the film lacked the heart required to offset its bitterness. "Hanging Up" also has a score of 3.1 out of 10, averaging from its 4.8 on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes scores of 12 and 34%, but its overall box office loss of just over $9 million settles it into our number 14 spot.

In the Girl Power world of the late '80s, "Cookie" is here to show that chicks can be mobsters too. It's actually not a bad concept for a mob comedy, because it upends the very boys-only structure of most gangster stories by exploring the nature of a Mafia family within and around a traditional family. There are father-daughter conflicts and obstacles to traverse in addition to criminal enterprises, but the film itself does not live up to the concept. As Roger Ebert said in his review, "The last act of the movie is all plot and event, which betrays how thinly the main characters have been written ... the whole movie is hazy." 

Seeing as character development through dialogue was always one of Nora Ephron's strengths as a screenwriter, this review is especially disappointing, but the highlight performances by Brenda Vaccaro (as the mob wife) and Dianne Wiest (as the mob mistress) indicate that perhaps it's just that Ephron's strengths lie with writing characters at certain stages in life and love. The eponymous Cookie (Emily Lloyd) also feels — and looks — somewhat derivative of director Susan Seidelman's earlier hit "Desperately Seeking Susan." Like a lot of things from that era, some of this film hasn't aged well, adding to the sense of discomfort. It's ill-fitting overall, and that's reflected in its score of 3.5 out of 10, averaged from its IMDb rating of 5.4 and Rotten Tomatoes scores of 13% and 38%. "Cookie" lands in the number 12 slot.

The idea of a heavenly being coming to Earth is not a new one, and "Michael" was one of three movies to come out in 1996 that featured just that. (The other two were "The Preacher's Wife" with Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston and "An Unlikely Angel" starring Dolly Parton.) While these types of stories usually involve the angel having a mission to heal or mend something for a particular human, Nora Ephron's "Michael," adapted and rewritten from the original screenplay by Jim Quinlan and Pete Dexter, features an imperfect angel interested in worldly pleasures from food to women and everything in between. 

Even though Ephron and her sister Delia rewrote this script themselves and Nora directed, there's once again a certain disconnect between her direction and the story, which the New York Times referred to in their release-week review as "wafer-thin," writing that, "The movie is so busy applying cute touches to everything and everybody that it forgets to devote enough attention to the souls Michael has come down to save." John Travolta is at his most charming, but at best the film comes off as merely innocuous. Taking its IMDb rating and its Rotten Tomatoes scores into account, "Michael" winds up with a 4.6 out of 10 and occupies slot number 10.

In 1980 Nora Ephron and Carl Bernstein (he of the Watergate exposé) ended their four-year marriage after she, while pregnant with their second child, caught him cheating on her with a mutual friend. It's an honest-to-god nightmare situation that some women will cross themselves and spit three times to avoid, even if they've just heard about it secondhand. Three years later, Ephron published her novel "Heartburn," a roman à clef of the experience, and three years after that it came out as a film starring Meryl Streep and directed by the incomparable Mike Nichols, both of whom Ephron had worked with in her first big Hollywood movie "Silkwood" a couple of years earlier. By adapting her own novel into the screenplay for this one, Nora Ephron got the better of her ex by miles. (She also told anyone who would listen who Deep Throat was.) 

"Heartburn" is just as sharp, as bitter, as devastating, as infuriating, and as funny as one would expect Ephron's exploration of such a painful event would be, but what makes it so authentically felt also can make it very unsettling, so it's no surprise that it's IMDb rating and Rotten Tomatoes scores bring this middle-of-the chart entry (we're in the eighth place) with the extremely middle-of-the-road score of 5.1 out of 10.

Stretching the definition of a Nora Ephron movie for our sixth place entry is "Strike!," a film she neither wrote nor directed but executive produced and which nevertheless still bears a lot of her hallmark characteristics. The film (known as "Strike!" on IMDb and to stream on Starz, and "All I Wanna Do" on its own title card as well as on Rotten Tomatoes) features a group of private school girls in the '60s who rebel against the status quo and eventually lead a brief protest when the Board of Trustees attempts to merge them with a boys' academy. 

These themes of not just feminine empowerment but specifically the draining effect a man's presence can have on that power, and the struggle women face to achieve or even maintain influence when compared to men in a world that so boldly favors them. These themes are key to Ephron, prevalent in every other one of the films on this list in one way or another. "Strike!" is also bursting with talent, from actresses who are legendary (Lynn Redgrave) to ones in the middle of their "It Girl" moments (Kirsten Dunst), to ones about to hit theirs (Rachael Leigh Cook), to ones that had been and/or would become beloved character actresses (Gaby Hoffmann, Heather Matarazzo, and Merritt Wever). It feels almost gratuitous that Vincent Kartheiser is also a standout as Snake. If only filmmakers could've found a better title and settled on it.

"Julie & Julia" was Nora Ephron's last feature film. She adapted the screenplay from the memoir of the same name by Julie Powell and, brilliantly, interspersed it with scenes she adapted from Julia Child's autobiography, "My Life in France," then directed it herself. What this culminates in onscreen is Ephron's vibrant love letter to food. 

Over time, viewers have seen a noticeable disconnect regarding the Julie (Amy Adams) sections in favor of the Julia (Meryl Streep) ones, which is probably fair. After all, Julie is the character struggling with personal growth in the film's present, and personal development is always messy. In contrast, Julia is the character whose story is already known to rise well above any setbacks to iconic success and legendary status as a beloved American figure. The balance is inherently tipped. Of course, embracing imperfection is also a favorite theme of Ephron's, so perhaps in this case disproportionate characters are to be expected. "Julie & Julia" earned over $129 million at the box office, and, with its IMDb rating and Rotten Tomatoes scores averaging a 7.3 out of 10, lands in our number four spot.

As the late Roger Ebert noted in his 1983 review, "Silkwood" "is not telling the story of a conspiracy ... [it's] telling the story of a human life." That humanity, brought into sharp relief by the dialogue of Nora Ephron (with fellow screenwriter Alice Arlen) and the performances of Meryl Streep and Cher, among others, exemplifies one of Ephron's most extraordinary skills. Karen Silkwood is not a saint — as none of us are — and is instead portrayed as a normal, complicated, sassy, brutal, tender, loving, rough-edged, beautiful, flawed woman who meets her end under mysterious circumstances while trying to expose the greed and carelessness of the big corporate machine she works for. Is that machine responsible for her death? Who's to say? In this film, as written and with the superb direction of Mike Nichols, the responsible party is beside the point. Karen is the focus. Not her death, but her life. 

"Silkwood" marked Ephron's first feature film screenplay and the first of three Oscar nominations. While the Academy ultimately rewarded the more socially acceptable portrayal of a dying woman with "Terms of Endearment," Ephron had made a striking impact that began her storied rise to her status as Hollywood royalty. Silkwood has an IMDb rating of 7.1 and Rotten Tomatoes scores of 76% and 78%, giving it a cumulative score of 7.5 and placing it in the penultimate position as Ephron's second-best film.