Born Adam Spiegel in New York City, Spike Jonze (who got that name from a BMX bike store owner, of course) has carved himself out quite the eclectic career and purview as a filmmaker. Jonze springboarded his interest in extreme sports to an early career directing and photographing unique skateboarding videos. From there, Jonze pivoted to becoming a prolific, in demand, and acclaimed music video director, crafting iconic videos for WeezerThe PharcydeFatboy Slim, and many more. In 1999, Jonze made his feature film debut with Being John Malkovich, a bold and wild meta-comedy from the mind of Charlie Kaufman. Since then, Jonze has continued to foster a particular feature filmography while continuing to film music videos (including this incredible live Karen O/Stephen Colbert piece), documentary pieces, and Jackass universe content — all the while fostering quite the neat side career as an effective supporting actor in works like Three Kings and The Wolf of Wall Street, too!

In celebration of the recent Shout Select blu-ray release of Adaptation., Jonze's second feature film, we've ranked all of Spike Jonze's movies from worst to best. Rewatching all of his feature-length work has revealed more consistencies in aesthetics, themes, and conclusions than I expected, even for such a wide-focused brain as Jonze's, and it was an absolute pleasure to crawl into his portal for some time. Enjoy our ranking below, and for more on Jonze, here's a beautiful commercial the man directed for Apple.

5. Beastie Boys Story

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Image via Apple TV+

Jonze's only misfire, and it's a downright shame if you ask me. Beastie Boys Story is a curious hybrid film, a mixture of documentary, storytelling, and one-man show (er, two-man show), all cut with rampant meta-textual "what are we doing?" interjections from Jonze, who speaks over his subjects, Adam "Ad Rock" Horovitz and Mike "Mike D" Diamond (Adam "MCA" Yauch, the third Beastie Boy, died in 2012 of cancer), via god mic. All of this should coalesce to a perfect fusion of boundary-breaking styles and muckraking sensibilities, especially given Jonze and the Beastie Boys' stunning track record of previous collaborations (The one-two of "Sabotage" and "Sure Shot"? C'mon). And it should be a perfect object for me, who's been a fan of the Beastie Boys since the beginning, and purchased "The Work of Director Spike Jonze" DVD in part to acquire all his Beastie videos.

And yet, I couldn't stand Beastie Boys Story on a granular, minute-to-minute level. Watching Ad Rock and Mike D deliver obviously scripted, rose-colored crafted, cheesily communicated summaries of their lives to a group of applauding superfans felt inauthentic, cornball, self-congratulatory, and unnecessary — all qualities I would never in a million years never assign to either Jonze's nor the Beastie Boys' other works. Jonze tends to give his unusual, interesting subjects an amply simple base reality to pop off and shine. Here, Jonze overworks every element of the frame, stuffing it with quick-cut archive footage, brief snippets of tunes, and these truly embarrassing direct addresses from the Beasties in a matter that feels less like "one of our great filmmakers" and more like "an average VH1 music doc." If you want to watch a great exploration of a great musician from a director named "Spike," this one might do you better.

4. Being John Malkovich

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Image via USA Films

The breakout, debut film for Jonze and screenwriter extraordinaire Charlie Kaufman (and in some way, for the prolific John Malkovich), Being John Malkovich remains a wild blast of imagination, humor, unmerciful psychological examination, and raw bravado — though many elements age strangely, or do not age well at all, upon modern viewing. The Jonze/Kaufman team crystallizes what will become many of their trademarks with ironic confidence, given how much the film is centered on a pathological lack of confidence in its main character, aspiring puppeteer Craig Schwartz (John Cusack, excellent). From its hard to swallow high concept hook delivered with a wonky straight face, its "cerebral made visceral" mode of character examination (i.e. the best way to get into a character's head is to literally travel into a character's head), its high-octane outta nowhere third act thriller plottings, and its relatively simple visual language weaponized to communicate its complicated truths with clarity, Being John Malkovich shows powerful artists ready to work. It's a barn-burner of a picture that still shocks, surprises, and provokes fits of disbelieving laughter.

However, there's lots of reckoning and reframing that needs to come with modern viewings of Being John Malkovich. You can hear me get more into it on a recent episode of the Collider podcast, but it's curious to watch the film now and wonder about both its pointed, intentional comments and casual, flippant jokes on the relentless nature of male desire and the explorations of trans identities. It is so obvious to me that Craig is our villain; he's a destructively self-pitying, venomously jealous, and eventually violent man, a guy who needs to control the women in his life so much that he cages and threatens them at gunpoint, a guy who would be viewed as an out-and-out sociopath were it not for his latent impotence (and the film's relationship to him, but more on that in a bit). Conversely, it is so obvious to me that Lotte (Cameron Diaz, an all-time performance) is our hero; she is shaken out of her whirlpool of malaise by this portal into Malkovich's brain, realizes what an unstable dope she's married to, and begins to reawaken to and engage with the idea that she's queer.

But does the film agree with this read? And does that matter? It's hard not to feel like Kaufman (and likely to a lesser extent, Jonze) is positioning Craig to be a relatably pathetic hero, an everyman who just can't get what he wants, including cheating on his horrible wife with super-hot Catherine Keener and gaining unwanted control of another human's sentience and committing sexual assault against Malkovich by using his body as a vessel of sex, and isn't that so annoying and don't you just want him to succeed? Additionally, it's not hard to feel like Lotte's reckoning with her queer and/or trans identity is played for cheap laughs, and meant to be discarded as an absurd thought, especially from the point of view of Craig/Kaufman/the audience. For one, the film's conflation between being lesbian and being trans is too casually blurred together, and not in any reasonably interesting way. And for two, a big line of the film comes when Lotte says to Craig, "Don't stand in the way of my actualization as a man." Diaz and Jonze, to their credit, play this line with straightforward, earnest, and genuine desire — but it is very clearly meant as a joke, as a "isn't it so wild that this woman thinks she's a man?" piece of transphobic comedy.

For all of these complicated reasons — and the film's not-quite-there third act shenanigans — Being John Malkovich cannot be Jonze's best film, but it remains a vital one, and one worth our mental energy to reckon with.

3. Her

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Image via Warner Bros.

Jonze won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for his work on Her, to date the only feature film he directed that he has sole screenwriting credit on. I agree with this accolade and how it relates to the rest of Jonze's work — for the most part. When Jonze is working as a screenwriter himself, as opposed to, say, directing a Kaufman screenplay, I find his narrative and emotional choices to match his aesthetic predilections very satisfyingly; which is to say, they're much more appealingly clear, direct, accessible, and given ample room to find "the truth." And the truth about the first two acts of Her is that they're wondrous. Again, Jonze is working with a wonky high concept that speaks to human desires and existential identity crises in a wildly direct way — Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with Siri! — and again, but this time more effectively, Jonze gives it to us straight. As Phoenix (excellent) and Scarlett Johansson (beyond excellent) as our lovable OS fall further and further in love, there's never any wink, any hint that this is unusual, any brash voice of reason to squelch this inherent idea. It's a movie of pure empathy, of pure listening, of pure communication and understanding. Its raw humanity, ironically tracked to a piece of artificial intelligence, can't help but warm the heart, even (especially?) as it touches the borders of "saccharine twee". And its visual language? My goodness is it simply splendid to watch this all bolstered by incredible, clean, intuitive production design, camera work, and location shooting.

And then, Jonze hits us with one of his trademark third act "plot goes into overdrive" moves, and Her starts to unravel for me. The hard sci-fi ideas and conclusions introduced in the back moments of Her are intriguing and worthy of examination — just, perhaps, in a different film entirely. While I enjoy the consistent frankness at which these ideas, which broadly involve the exponential evolution of artificial intelligence beyond a need for humanity, are introduced, they feel completely out of nowhere, less an intuitive extension of what's set up in the first two acts and more a compulsive need to wrap up the picture as quickly and startlingly as possible. It doesn't feel like the inherent conclusion to either main character's arc (in fact, I feel like it sorta clips Phoenix's short, or at the very least dramatically reroutes it), and even in many of the film's early, lovely, self-evident "showing not telling" near-future sci-fi society elements, this conclusion is never foreshadowed. Does this work as an appealing surprise for some viewers? I'm happy if it does. But for me, it remains a bug, not a feature, in Her's otherwise peerless UX.

2. Adaptation.

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Image via Sony Pictures Releasing

Finally, a Jonze film where the third act helps, rather than hinders, the first two acts! Adaptation. is a baffling film, from inception to execution and everything in between. Somehow a story about screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage, wow) attempts to adapt Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief into a film, an actual bonafide film adaptation of Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief (featuring Meryl Streep in a flawless performance as Orlean), a Being John Malkovich-esque criticism of basic people who live basic lives and follow basic story structure, and most miraculously, a much-needed reckoning with that criticism as being short-minded and lacking love. There's a lot of plates spinning in Adaptation., and it's a small miracle that Jonze is able to cut through all of Kaufman's cerebral trickery with his trademark "crystal clear" visual language to find and illuminate its beating heart, not just for the sake of narrative cogency (though that is appreciated), but for the sake of making the film more than a clever intellectual exercise.

This beating heart, this humanity, this emotional focus very cleverly, and very expertly, comes into clear focus in its raucous-but-touching third act. One of the main (and my favorite) B-stories involves Charlie's twin brother Donald (also Cage, wow) breaking into the screenwriting business himself, following "classic story structure" (which Charlie views as dumb, of course) to perversely commercial ends, and gaining wild success not just in Charlie's field of choice, but in "regular life" things like women and happiness, too. Donald's clear-eyed, earnest enthusiasm and joie de vivre, which Jonze thankfully renders with plainspoken (yet impressive split-screen) photography that allows its audience to distance themselves from Charlie's misanthropic POV, eventually does resonate with an increasingly despondent and desperate Charlie. So he goes to a seminar from infamous story structure guru Robert McKee (Brian Cox, magnetic), and McKee shoves a ton of potentially hackneyed story (life) advice about goals, action, and chasing what you need in Charlie's brain. Then, like magic, the film itself takes McKee's script advice, resulting in an audacious third act rife with goals, action, and people chasing what they need. Everyone goes through a phenomenal, beautiful, smart, and yes clever arc by Adaptation.'s end in ways both telegraphed performatively and executed earnestly. An incredible series of magic tricks that's interested in the human magician behind it all, Adaptation. will floor you every time.

1. Where the Wild Things Are

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Image via Warner Bros.

From beginning to end, from its scribbled-on studio logos to its scribbled-on closing credits, Where the Wild Things Are knows exactly what it wants to say — nay, needs to say, yearns to say — and says it loudly, beautifully, with every ounce of its alive, tactile being. And it does this all by undoubtedly scarring all the children and oblivious parents who just wanted to watch a nice adaptation of the nice children's classic by Maurice Sendak (an author whom Jonze wound up making a short documentary about during the making of this feature). But Jonze, who certainly knows his way about the fraught and messy process of adaptation, understood the inherent desperation, pain, and eventual catharsis embedded within the subtext of a story about a young boy who needs to escape the doldrums of normal childhood to rumpus around with a bunch of damn wild things. Or, at the very least, Jonze knows that a feature-length adaptation needs these pieces of intense catharsis to sustain itself, and commits 910% to them.

Jonze's skills at simple-but-stylish visuals and frank presentation of high concept ideas come to an all-encompassing, immersive, and fully realized apex of filmmaking in Where the Wild Things Are. When our hero Max (Max Records, excellent performer, excellent name), whiplash shifts between desiring peace and love from his divorced, single mom (Catherine Keener, finishing her Jonze appearance trilogy) and needing to cause chaos wherever he goes, it feels exactly like what it felt to be a young kid whose emotions are too big, bold, and bright to be understood or processed correctly by the boring nuances of adulthood. Jonze works, for the first and only time, with a wider 2.4:1 aspect ratio, and he and regular DP Lance Acord tend to squish everything around Max with jarring, handheld, unadorned compositions that subjectively align themselves with Max's jarred realities. And when Max makes his way to the realm of where the wild things are, Jonze and Acord don't really change their visual tactics, despite the fact that we're now in a surreal, otherworldly desertscape with a bunch of giant creatures (beautifully, astonishingly rendered with practical suit performers boosted by CGI enhancements). This makes the fantasy world feel as real for us as it does for Max — and makes it all the more easy to get swept up in, even overwhelmed by.

Each wild thing has their own blunt, broad, and pure pieces of personality, manifested from the many strands of Max's splintered, sprawling childhood, and tracked perfectly to their voice actor. James Gandolfini plays Carol, our leading wild thing and immediate ally to Max, with impetuous shifts in emotion. Catherine O'Hara's Judith is vindictive and has a mean streak. Forest Whitaker's Ira is soft, gentle, and loving. Paul Dano's Alexander is bullied, sensitive, and needy. Most importantly, none of these physical, wild manifestations of Max's variously churning inner life engage with Max with any sense of skepticism, nor he them. This is a place of destruction, fighting, and maybe some rebuilding, too — but it's not a place of cynicism, of questioning, of anything other than raw, unfiltered acceptance.

Or is Where the Wild Things Are that simple? I love the film for its full commitment to its "one idea screamed loud" ethos, but there's a lot more going under the hood than its surface-level rumpusing. Jonze and co-writer Dave Eggers give some of the wild things very, well, Jonze and Eggers-esque neuroticisms and quirks. Chris Cooper's Douglas, Carol's best friend, is a prickly adult in a bird-thing's body, always trying to maintain a semblance of order while offering brief, sardonic bon mots. Lauren Ambrose's KW, so easily denigrated and banished by Carol, is relatively emotionally stable, kind, patient, and accepting of growth. These more nuanced wild things give Jonze and Eggers a ton of room for "clash of context comedy" (hearing giant wild things talk like the intellectuals at the party Streep attends in Adaptation. will never not be funny), but also give Max the opportunity to fulfill his surprisingly gentle, beautiful, and necessary arc.

We have lots of room inside of us. Room for wild things who need to destroy, cause chaos, and rumpus around. But also room for serene things who need to love, communicate, and give each other space. The way we grow is to know when to tap into either side, and accept that others have similarly wide journeys to go on, too. Where the Wild Things Are tells us this in splendid, fierce, and uncompromising detail. It remains Jonze's finest, most pure work to date.