Taylor Swift is one of the best-selling music artists working today, but how do her movie roles rank from worst to best? It's true the 11-time Grammy winning artist hasn't crossed over into total movie stardom. She doesn't have an Oscar like Jennifer Hudson, nor has she managed to land a major Christopher Nolan vehicle like Harry Styles did with Dunkirk. Her film career has been varied and filled with mostly misses, but her onscreen persona has never been an embarassment. While she's excelled fantastically in all other aspects of her career, it feels like she's just getting started on the big screen.
Somehow, between selling 200 million records worldwide, winning Album of the Year three times, and writing and performing on nine albums, Swift has found the time to plant the seeds of a film career. While she has appeared in cameos on shows like New Girl, and while her performances in her cinematic music videos have always been stellar, her movies have had a hard time catching on with both critics and audiences. From Cats to The Giver, hers may not be the most impressive filmography, but she has brought something uniquely her to each of the four films in which she's appeared.
Swift just experienced one of her most successful years, releasing the phenomenally successful albums Folklore and Evermore in 2020, as well as the acclaimed documentaries Miss Americana and Folklore: The Long Pond Sessions. While both those films are indeed excellent, this list will focus solely on her performances in narrative features. Here are Taylor Swift's movies, ranked from worst to best.
4. Valentine's Day (2010)
In 2010, Garry Marshall directed this total bomb of a romantic comedy, weaving together a starry ensemble's struggles with love over 18 hours on Valentine's Day. Many critics noted its copycat nature compared to 2003's Love Actually, another star-filled rom-com centering around a major holiday, but even naysayers of that film would have to agree it looks like Citizen Kane compared to this bland, Hallmark greeting card of a film. In her first onscreen acting role, Taylor Swift rounds out a massive cast that also features Razzie-winning turns from Ashton Kutcher and Jessica Alba. It's a shaky debut, particularly since her ditzy role wastes the recording artist's laser-focused smarts. There's a lot of awkward, fumbling line readings, and for much of the movie she's forced to carry around a life-sized teddy bear. Of course, this is also a bit of a time capsule film: her onscreen romantic partner is Twilight's Taylor Lautner, who she would go on to date in real life. The star also recorded a song for the film's soundtrack, the country-pop tune "Today Was a Fairytale," recently updated for Swift's re-recorded 2021 version of her 2008 album Fearless.
3. The Giver (2014)
Anyone who's gone through a middle-school English class has experienced Lois Lowry's Newberry Medal-winning YA novel The Giver. A coming-of-age tale set in a dystopian society where Sameness is valued above all else, the book tells the story of a young boy named Jonas, chosen by his community to receive past memories from the Giver (Jeff Bridges). As he learns more and more about the time before Sameness, he becomes more and more attuned to his emotions and thus rebels against society. Bridges was apparently attached to the film for years before it was eventually made, and his performance gives a sense of the infinitely superior movie that could have been crafted from this striking source material. Alas, the film of The Giver opts for a more futuristic, action-packed, Hunger Games vibe, spoiling much of the textural hauntedness of the novel and introducing a hackneyed love triangle. A brunette Taylor Swift in The Giver is actually one of the least offensive parts of the movie, playing the expanded role of the Giver's daughter, Rosemary, who introduces Jonas to music. While playing an emotionless young woman isn't such a natural fit for the bleeding-heart singer-songwriter, it's a clever use of her persona in one of the film's key emotional moments.
2. The Lorax (2012)
Lois Lowry could certainly commiserate about lackluster screen adaptations of fantastic books with the late, great Dr. Seuss, whose iconic prose has inspired a litany of cinematic disasters, from the garish Jim Carrey Grinch to Mike Myers' unwatchable The Cat in the Hat. Somewhere right in the middle of the pack of these disappointing adaptations is The Lorax, which at least boasts an animation style somewhat complementary of Seuss' iconic art. Of course, it also is forced to expand on the elegant simplicity of one of the writer's greatest works, tacking on a story about a boy named Ted (voiced by Zac Efron) who lives in a nature-less town and wants to win the heart of local girl Audrey (Swift) by bringing her a Truffula tree. Swift gives a solid vocal performance, and the whole film adds up to perfectly enjoyable family entertainment, but one can't help but feel the fable quality of the book's tale of nature vs. environmental destruction getting lost in the film's zany antics.
1. Cats (2019)
This could very well be the only ranked "worst to best" list that Cats ever tops. The bad news is that it's hardly the film Tom Hooper believes he made. At the movie's New York premiere, Hooper introduced it as a film about the "perils of tribalism," but this is largely a four-alarm bit of chaos that's disproportionately self-serious for a film about singing cats, as well as possessing a look that can only be described as Absolutely Insane. The good news is that virtually none of that matters; not only is it no fun to say the Cats movie is bad, it's also just incorrect. There's too much strangeness going on, too much oddly endearing Theater Kid energy to count this as a total failure.
Anyone who's seen this film in a theater with a rowdy, amped audience understands the communal joy Cats can bring, a Jellicle Ball that transcends hate-watching and lands somewhere inescapably pure. Yes, James Corden and Rebel Wilson are reprehensible in it, but that's ignoring Sir Ian McKellen's honestly Oscar-worthy turn as Gus the Theater Cat; Dame Judi Dench's deeply strange, bizarrely regal, and unmistakably flirty performance as Old Deuteronomy; and Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat, whose tap number would honestly be at home in any Golden Age movie musical. Taylor Swift has a brief role singing one of the score's most genuinely good songs, "Macavity," a vampy jazz tune which climaxes with a pas de deux with Cat Idris Elba, and she's having a blast. For a film featuring hordes of disturbing CGI cats, along with a five-minute sequence of James Corden eating trash, her performance is that of an old pro.