All 10 Best Jacob Tremblay Movies Ranked (Best to Worst)

Confined inside an eleven-by-eleven-foot garden shed, Lenny Abrahamson's adaptation of Emma Donoghue's novel transforms sheer physical claustrophobia into a profoundly moving meditation on human perception and maternal devotion. The film's brilliance hinges entirely on filtering the terrifying reality of captivity through a mythology of survival, contrasting suffocating containment with the overwhelming sensory onslaught of the free world. Tremblay carries this monumental architecture on tiny shoulders, avoiding sentimental theatrics to deliver a transcendent, unvarnished portrait of Jack. His reactions upon seeing the sky for the first time remain etched in modern film lore, cementing his legacy as an extraordinary screen talent right out of the gate.

Adapting R.J. Palacio's beloved novel required balancing unvarnished middle-school cruelty with unyielding kindness, a balance director Stephen Chbosky strikes through layered shifting perspectives and sincere emotional clarity. Auggie Pullman's journey into public school could easily drown in treacle, yet the film grounds its sentimentality by letting family exhaustion and adolescent vulnerability breathe honestly. Acting beneath intricate prosthetic facial appliances, Tremblay communicates entire worlds of trepidation, wry humor, and bruised dignity through eyes and inflection alone. He strips the premise of condescension, turning Auggie into a resilient, witty kid rather than a walking moral lesson, and securing his status as a formidable box-office anchor.

Enrico Casarosa's radiant sun-drenched pastoral brings an irresistible mid-century Italian Riviera aesthetic to Pixar's canon, swapping existential dread for gelato, Vespas, and glistening turquoise shores. The narrative glides on the bittersweet thrill of summer friendships that quietly reshape one's worldview, using the sea monster metaphor to celebrate difference with gentle elegance. Providing the voice of the curious, wide-eyed titular creature, Tremblay imbues Luca with tremulous yearning and an infectious thirst for discovery. His voice work anchors the whimsical fantasy in genuine adolescent yearning, demonstrating that his expressive timing translates effortlessly across mediums.

Gene Stupnitsky's unabashedly filthy coming-of-age romp operates on a delightfully pure central contradiction: foul-mouthed sixth graders navigating middle-school social minefields while comprehending absolutely nothing about the adult vices they accidentally stumble across. Packed with sharp physical sight gags and rapid-fire dialogue, the picture thrives on the frantic panic of boys trying to fix a ruined drone before dinner. Tremblay shines brilliantly against type as the anxious moral compass Max. His spot-on comic timing, earnest anxiety, and refusal to play winkingly to the camera elevate the adolescent debauchery into genuine, laugh-out-loud adolescent mayhem.

Mike Flanagan crafts an unusually tender supernatural fable that prioritizes grief and trauma recovery over cheap jump scares, exploring an orphaned boy whose vivid dreams and terrifying nightmares manifest into physical reality while he sleeps. Flanagan stages the nocturnal manifestations with painterly, shadow-drenched dread that feels deeply rooted in fairy-tale tradition. Tremblay infuses Cody with heartbreaking exhaustion and guilt, playing a frightened child desperately fighting off sleep to protect his new foster parents from his own psyche. It is a quiet, haunting performance that proves his innate ability to anchor sophisticated adult horror.

This breezy Pixar animated short serves as a sweet coda to Portorosso's sun-soaked seaside escapades, checking in on Alberto as he attempts to impress his stern foster father Massimo while his best companion studies in the city. Though modest in scope and running barely eight minutes, the animation sparkles with bright Mediterranean kineticism. Tremblay's presence via epistolary voiceover and cameo warmth grounds Alberto's emotional journey. While hardly a major dramatic test, it remains an affectionate, expertly rendered footnote that highlights his enduring imprint on this animated universe.

Xavier Dolan's sprawling, divisive English-language debut aims for grand operatic excess, cross-cutting between a closeted television star's tragic downfall and the young English boy whose fan-mail correspondence keeps him tethered to hope. Dolan's signature needle-drops and hyper-stylized melodrama often threaten to topple the film's structural coherence under their own ambition. In the childhood timeline, Tremblay delivers a remarkably fierce, lonely performance as Rupert Turner, navigating domestic volatility and schoolyard bullying with wounded defiance. Even when Dolan's screenplay succumbs to melodrama, the young actor's unbending conviction keeps the movie's fragile emotional core beating.

Revisiting the infamous trajectory of Ted Kaczynski from troubled Harvard student to isolated domestic terrorist, this austere psychological period piece dissects the brutal MKUltra psychological experiments that warped a brilliant mind. While the production occasionally struggles under television-biopic aesthetic constraints, its intellectual stakes remain chillingly fascinating. Tremblay steps into the demanding role of a young Kaczynski subjected to psychological degradation, capturing the early fractures of alienation and simmering social resentment. His disciplined, brooding turn signals an intriguing willingness to tackle difficult, historically fraught territory as he matures into adult character roles.

Colin Trevorrow's infamous suburban thriller remains one of the most baffling narrative tonal shifts in modern cinema, pivoting abruptly from a sickly sweet family drama about an eleven-year-old financial genius into an unhinged vigilantism procedural. The script's audacious choices defy narrative logic at nearly every turn, creating an artifact fascinating purely for its sheer lack of restraint. Tremblay plays Peter, the younger brother caught in the orbit of his brother's bizarre blueprints, bringing honest sweetness and tearful distress to scenarios that border on absurd. His grounded empathy almost salvages scenes that otherwise collapse into sheer cinematic confusion.

Shane Black's chaotic attempt to inject irreverent, quip-heavy machismo into the classic sci-fi creature franchise disintegrates beneath conflicting studio mandates, messy editing, and deeply ill-conceived story mechanics. What begins as a fun assemble-the-mercenaries premise devolves into a loud, disjointed chase where thematic continuity is entirely discarded. Tremblay is saddled with the problematic trope of an autistic child whose condition is lazily framed as an evolutionary superpower allowing him to decipher alien tech. Despite his professional screen poise, the character feels like an awkward plot device, rendering this the undisputed low point of his otherwise sterling resume.