5 Highest-Rated Jack Black Movies On Rotten Tomatoes

Actor, musician, and comedian Jack Black first made his film debut back in the 1990s with supporting turns in movies like "The Cable Guy" and "Mars Attacks!" — and he's been a Hollywood staple ever since. You probably know Black, born as Thomas Jacob Black (but made "Jack" his stage name based on his lifelong nickname), from projects like "High Fidelity," "School of Rock," "Orange County," "Shallow Hal," Peter Jackson's take on "King Kong," "The Holiday," "Nacho Libre," and the modern "Jumanji" movies, just to name a few. (To add to that, he's also been half of Tenacious D with Kyle Gass since 1994, though their work is on hold as of July 2024.) So which of Black's movies earned the best reviews from critics?

We should be upfront and say that while Black's films have grossed millions at the box office, many outings — including the aforementioned "Shallow Hal" and the video game adaptation "Borderlands" — were critical bombs, but thankfully, Black has shown up in some legitimately good films adored by critics. From a massive ensemble film to an animated film to one of his most beloved films ever, here are Jack Black's five highest-rated films according to the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, listed from the "lowest" rating to the highest. (One technical note. The PBS special "Richard Linklater: Dream is Destiny," which honored the director's body of work in 2016, is Black's "fourth-best" project on Rotten Tomatoes, but because it features Black as himself being interviewed about Linklater's career, it's omitted from this list.)

Richard Linklater loves making movies based on real journalism and long-form reported content — he did in 2023 with "Hit Man," and before that, he did it in 2011 with his "based on a true story" film "Bernie." Linklater directed "Bernie" and wrote it alongside Skip Hollandsworth, who penned the 1998 article "Midnight in the Garden of East Texas" about a man whose older and extremely wealthy companion died under suspicious circumstances. Based on that, you can probably guess what the movie is about. Black plays the titular Bernhardt "Bernie" Tiede and Shirley MacLaine stars alongside him as Marjorie "Margie" Nugent, an 81-year-old millionaire living in Carthage, Texas who unexpectedly forms a close bond with Bernie, confusing everyone else in the town. Unfortunately, Margie's mental state deteroriates, resulting in her being crueler and crueler towards Bernie, and when Bernie ends up shooting Margie, everything obviously gets much more complicated.

Linklater's trademark "cinema veritas" approach to this story serves it incredibly well, and critics on Rotten Tomatoes ultimately agreed. With a rating of 88%, the critical consensus even centers Black: "Richard Linklater's 'Bernie' is a gently told and unexpectedly amusing true-crime comedy that benefits from an impressive performance by Jack Black." It might not be his best-reviewed project on the review aggregator, but it's up there!

An adaptation of Nick Hornsby's novel of the same name, Stephen Frears' 1991 film "High Fidelity" remains one of Jack Black's most well-loved movies by critics and fans alike, sitting pretty with a 91% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with a critical consensus that declares, "The deft hand of director Stephen Frears and strong performances by the ensemble cast combine to tell an entertaining story with a rock-solid soundtrack." The film truly centers around Rob Gordon, an audiophile and record store manager played by John Cusack who's trying to find love but has trouble meeting and subsequently understanding women, so how does Black fit in?

As Rob decides to seek out five of his exes to try and learn from mistakes he made across various relationships — inspired by "top five" lists of records he and his employees make in their spare time — Black's Barry Judd, who works underneath Rob at Championship Vinyl, is there to provide snarky commentary and promote his own band, which he ultimately dubs "Barry Jive and the Uptown Five." (Rob is enormously relieved, at the end of the movie, to discover that the band is actually pretty good.) "High Fidelity" is a warm, winning portrait of a man who's unlucky in love and tries to fix that by dealing with his own shortcomings, when all is said and done. Unfortunately, the Hulu spin-off of "High Fidelity," which cast Zoë Kravitz in Cusack's role, was canceled after one season — which stinks, because it was one of the very best shows of 2020.

Released in 2022, one of Jack Black's most critically acclaimed movies is the animated flick "Apollo 10 1⁄2: A Space Age Childhood," which is helmed entirely by filmmaker Richard Linklater (he directed, wrote, and produced the movie and based it on his own childhood). Like Linklater's other animated films "Waking Life" and "A Scanner Darkly," "Apollo 10 1/2" was filmed partially in live action and then translated into an animated format later, giving its cast — which includes frequent Linklater collaborators Black and Glen Powell — room to play around with their characters. Black portrays and voices the film's main character Stanley, who narrates what it felt like to watch the 1969 moon landing as a child (with the young Stanley voiced by Milo Coy), and the movie performed quite well with critics; its Rotten Tomatoes rating is 91%, and the critical consensus calls the film "sweetly nostalgic" and that it "finds Richard Linklater reusing visual and thematic ingredients in a deeply personal, freshly inspired way."

The movie is clearly personal for Linklater, but here's something cool: it was personal for Black too. His mother, Judith Love Cohen, wore a lot of hats in her life — she was a professional dancer and wrote children's books — but she was also an engineer with NASA who helped rescue the crew aboard the Apollo 13. In an interview with IndieWire in 2022, Black said of his mother, "She was much smarter than me, I did not inherit those mathematic genes. Still, he said working on the movie was particularly special because of his mother's legacy: "But there's a sense of pride and connection to telling this story, 'cause I know my mom was in there working on it too." Cohen passed away in 2016, so the fact that Black got to honor her with this film is honestly quite touching.

At the risk of being too on-the-nose here, "School of Rock" absolutely rocks. Directed by Richard Linklater and written by Mike White, who also appears in the movie (yes, that Mike White of "The White Lotus" fame and acclaim), the film — which used a real Philadelphia music school as its loose inspiration — introduces us to one of Jack Black's most relatable and best characters, Dewey Finn, who pretends to be his roommate Ned Schneebly (White) and masquerades as a substitute teacher while he's trying to make some money to support his musical dreams. Dewey is unbelievably unqualified to teach a fourth-grade class at the prestigious Horace Mann prep school — and the school's headmaster Rosalie Mullins (Joan Cusack) does seem to catch onto this pretty quickly — but once he realizes that the kids in his class yearn to have fun and be creative, he starts teaching them how to play music. Before long, the class has formed a full-fledged band and support staff (including costume designers and stage managers), and when they go rogue and compete in the Battle of the Bands as "School of Rock," they blow the audience away.

With 92% on Rotten Tomatoes and a critical consensus that reads, "Black's exuberant, gleeful performance turns 'School of Rock' into a hilarious, rocking good time," there's no question that "School of Rock" is one of Black's best movies, and it also might well be his best lead performance ... or at least one of his most memorable.

It feels a little bit like cheating that Jack Black's best movie on Rotten Tomatoes is technically "The Muppets," because he plays himself in a very small role ... but also, 2011's "The Muppets" is so good that it's going at the top of this list anyway. Directed by James Bobin and written by Nicholas Stoller and Jason Segel, the latter of whom stars in the movie as Gary, "The Muppets" centers Walter, a Muppet voiced and performed by Peter Linz who loves "The Muppet Show" and dreams of performing with the talented puppets. How does Black factor in?

He plays himself as a version of Jack Black who runs an anger management clinic — which is admittedly a very funny bit — attended by Animal (puppeteered and voiced by Eric Jacobson) before Animal is recruited to perform alongside the rest of the Muppets again. It's a tiny appearance, but Black is great, and again, this movie is genuinely incredible, which you can tell from its Rotten Tomatoes score of 95% and a critical consensus that declares, "Clever, charming, and heartfelt, 'The Muppets' is a welcome big screen return for Jim Henson's lovable creations that will both win new fans and delight longtime devotees."