Best Scarlett Johansson Movies

Still Johansson's best-reviewed film (95% on the TomatoMeter), this character study was hailed as a revelation upon its release in 2003, both for its leading performance by Bill Murray and for Sofia Coppola's stylish and elegant direction. But it's Johansson's performance that gives the movie the profound sense of existential ennui that Coppola seems to always try to evoke in her films. Johansson plays Charlotte, a recent college graduate visiting Tokyo. Though newly married, Charlotte feels adrift in her life and uncertain about her future. She befriends Bob (Murray), a fading actor now slumming his way through Japanese whiskey commercials, who feels similarly lost as he flounders through middle age. The two keep each other company for a few days in Tokyo, forming a deep bond over their sense of alienation.

The film landed Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director and Screenplay for Coppola, and Best Actor for Murray — though scandalously none for Johansson — and was acclaimed as an instant classic by critics. Terry Lawson of The Detroit Press summed up the general appeal, writing, "There is real magic afoot in Lost in Translation — the sort that is created not at the wave of a wizard's wand, but by the coming together of two wayward souls."

Though this article focuses primarily on Johansson's live action work, the actor has also lent her voice to a number of prominent films, including The Jungle Book, Isle of Dogs, and Sing! Though she enlivened animated animals in each of those films, her most acclaimed voiceover work to date came as the operating system in Her, written and directed by Spike Jonze. The near-future sci-fi film, which won an Oscar for Jonze' original screenplay (it was also nominated for Best Picture), chronicles the romantic misadventures of the sad-sack Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), who falls in love with the artificially intelligent virtual assistant "Samantha."

No higher praise can be given to Johansson's performance than to say it is easy to see why Theodore falls for her, even though she has no corporeal form. Samantha's soulful personality, humor, empathy, curiosity, intelligence, and sex appeal all comes through Johansson's voice performance. Samantha also conveys a certain wistfulness about experience that feels all too human. Of course, she's not human, and (spoiler) eventually she achieves the singularity — when an AI becomes sentient and moves far beyond human abilities and restrictions. Critics were charmed and dazzled by Jonze's vision, with Empire magazine declaring, "Jonze has made a sweet, smart, silly, serious film for our times, only set in the future."

Ghost World was an early critical success for Johansson and an important transition from her career as a child actor. Though she was still only a teenager during production, the 2001 movie, co-written and directed by Terry Zwigoff of Crumb fame, is a mature and serious work about two young women facing an uncertain world after high school graduation. For Johansson, Ghost World – adapted from Daniel Clowes' comic book series Eightball — was also her first foray into a genre that would catapult her into the top (and highest-paid) ranks of international stardom. 

The movie stars Thora Birch as Enid, a classic Generation X character: ironic, lost, and darkly cynical. Johansson plays her close friend, Rebecca, who is a little more tethered to the world, and with whom Enid has an eventual falling out. Ghost World was not popular with audiences, but it was widely praised by critics, who appreciated its emotional honesty and its unsparing depiction of adolescent angst. As Roger Ebert wrote, "I wanted to hug this movie. It takes such a risky journey and never steps wrong. It creates specific, original, believable, lovable characters, and meanders with them through their inconsolable days, never losing its sense of humor."

The 2014 Captain America sequel, The Winter Soldier, was something of a welcome departure for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Phase 2 of the MCU had gotten off to a bit of a rocky start with the successful but uninspired Iron Man 3 and the middling Thor: The Dark World. Both films had been hits, but it was clear the MCU needed a fresh approach. The Winter Soldier delivered by fusing the superhero material with elements of the spy/conspiracy thriller genre so popular in the 1970s in movies such as The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor — Robert Redford, of the latter film, even co-starred in The Winter Soldier. Critics were impressed with the crackerjack action setpieces and a thoughtful story about the price of freedom and "security" in the age of surveillance.

As Black Widow is the primary Avenger featured alongside Captain America in the film, Johansson benefited from the film's acclaim, and was subsequently prominently featured, for better or worse, in Avengers: Age of Ultron. But while that film's reputation has diminished, The Winter Soldier has emerged as something of a classic over the last few years, with Johansson a big part of its continuing appeal.

Given her comic talents, and her natural fit as a sultry femme fatale-type in post-war Los Angeles (see her work in The Black Dahlia), Johansson was a no-brainer to join the all-star cast — George Clooney, Channing Tatum, Ralph Fiennes, Frances McDormand — of this Coen Brothers comedy set in 1950s Hollywood. She plays an Esther Williams-type who performs in the synchronized swimming routines that were popular at the time. When her unplanned pregnancy threatens her career and the studio's bottom line, a studio fixer played by Josh Brolin is tasked with covering it up.

Critics liked the movie (though audiences not so much), praising the Coen Brothers' playful spirit and the performances. One critic said that Johansson is always good playing "a brassy dame." The Guardian's Mark Kermode wrote of the film as a whole, "It's utterly chaotic and ridiculously indulgent, and it would amount to intolerable cruelty were Hail, Caesar! not so consistently, uproariously, affectionately funny."

One of the hallmarks of Johansson's impressive career thus far is the number of top flight directors she has worked with, including Christopher Nolan, the Coen Brothers, Woody Allen, Sofia Coppola, Noah Baumbach, and Wes Anderson, among others. Add to that growing list the Kiwi director Taika Waititi, whose own star has taken off over the last few years. (Waititi and Johnson are both MCU alumni as well, with Waititi having directed Thor: Ragnarok.) Jojo Rabbit, directed and written by Waititi — he won an Oscar for his adapted screenplay — tells the story of Jojo, a member of the Hitler Youth who discovers that his mother Rosie (Johansson) is secretly anti-Nazi, and is hiding a teenage Jewish girl in his late sister's bedroom.

The 80 percent fresh rating on the Tomatometer shows that critics generally liked the movie, praising its humor, charm, and anti-hate message. As with most comic takes on Hitler and Nazis (see Life is Beautiful), Jojo Rabbit generated its share of controversy, with Joanne Laurier writing that the movie "inadvertently or not trivializes Nazism and turns people away from a study of the concrete historical processes that produced such horrific carnage."

Johansson followed up the success of Match Point with the role of Olivia Wenscombe in The Prestige, Christopher Nolan's well-received follow-up to Batman Begins, which — like several of Nolan's early films — has become something of a cult classic. Olivia is both assistant and lover to rival magicians played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale who vie for the mantle of top stage magician in 1890s London. If critics were less than impressed by the film's somewhat confusing narrative (a persistent critique of Nolan, it would turn out), they reveled in the film's production design and Nolan's richly atmospheric evocation of Edwardian England.

Despite generous screen time, Johansson doesn't have much of consequence to do in a film that's obsessed with the pride and rage of its male protagonists. Still, having acquired period bona fides in movies such as Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Black Dahlia, she looks right at home in the costumes and hairstyles of the era. Some viewers were less than impressed with her English accent, but even that has been ascribed as a clever choice on Johansson's part to play the role as a secret American faking the accent.