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Scarlett Johansson’s Top 15 Movies Ranked From Worst to Best

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Ignacio Weil

Entertainment - August 31st 2026, 18:30 GMT+2

Cropped Don Jon — 15. Don Jon (2013)

Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s directing debut turns a Jersey gym rat’s porn addiction into a comedy about two people educated by different kinds of fantasy. Johansson’s Barbara Sugarman arrives chewing gum, sharpening every vowel and treating romance like a checklist: body, apartment, job and absolutely no cleaning your own home. She could have been a disposable obstacle, but Johansson makes Barbara’s control freakery as revealing as Jon’s compulsions. The film gets tidier once Julianne Moore appears, yet Johansson supplies its sharpest satire of manufactured desire. | © Voltage Pictures

Cropped Avengers Endgame — 14. Avengers: Endgame (2019)

In a movie juggling time travel, a purple demigod and roughly everyone ever issued a Marvel contract, Johansson finds a quiet center for Natasha Romanoff. Five years after the Snap, she is still running the Avengers because saving people is the closest thing she has to a home. Her farewell on Vormir carries real weight, even if the screenplay immediately rushes onward and never grants her the mourning Iron Man receives. As spectacle, *Endgame* is enormous; as Black Widow’s ending, it remains moving and frustrating in equal measure. | © Marvel Studios

Cropped The Island — 13. The Island (2005)

*The Island* begins as smart dystopian science fiction: Johansson’s Jordan Two Delta lives inside a sterile compound, unaware that she and its residents are spare parts for wealthy clients. She plays that sheltered innocence cleanly, discovering ordinary life with enough wonder to keep the premise human. Then Michael Bay remembers there are vehicles available, and the film trades moral unease for a freeway avalanche of metal. Johansson survives the gearshift better than the story does, but Jordan rarely receives the curiosity or agency afforded to Ewan McGregor’s Lincoln. | © DreamWorks Pictures

Cropped Asteroid City — 12. Asteroid City (2023)

Scarlett Johansson slips neatly into Wes Anderson’s dollhouse as Midge Campbell, a movie star rehearsing her pain from a motel window while pretending she has already mastered it. Her deadpan exchanges with Jason Schwartzman are funny because neither character quite knows how to speak without performing. Beneath the immaculate framing and nested play-within-a-television-special structure, she catches the film’s real ache: people using art to approach emotions they cannot handle directly. She is one carefully arranged piece of a giant ensemble, but one of the few who makes the arrangement feel alive. | © Focus Features

Cropped The Prestige — 11. The Prestige (2006)

Christopher Nolan builds *The Prestige* like one of its own magic tricks, distracting viewers with rival magicians while quietly hiding the machinery in plain sight. Johansson plays Olivia Wenscombe, an assistant sent across enemy lines whose loyalties become another object the men believe they can control. The role is thinner than those of the male leads, but her wary intelligence keeps Olivia from becoming stage decoration. Surrounded by doubles, disguises and David Bowie playing Nikola Tesla—because subtlety had already left the theater—she adds some welcome human uncertainty. | © Warner Bros. Pictures

Cropped The Man Who Wasnt There — 10. The Man Who Wasn't There (2001)

Johansson was still a teenager when she wandered into the Coen brothers’ monochrome nightmare as Birdy Abundas, a pianist onto whom Billy Bob Thornton’s doomed barber projects an entire escape plan. Birdy’s supposed talent turns out to be another illusion, and her startling advance in the car punctures Ed’s fantasy with typical Coen cruelty. It is a small role, yet Johansson understands the joke: Birdy is neither an angel nor a femme fatale, just an ordinary adolescent flattened into a symbol by a desperate man. | © Working Title Films

Cropped Vicky Cristina Barcelona — 9. Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)

Barcelona sunlight does a heroic amount of flirting in *Vicky Cristina Barcelona*, but Johansson’s restless Cristina hardly needs the assistance. She arrives convinced that dissatisfaction is proof of sophistication, then dives into Juan Antonio and María Elena’s volatile orbit with the confidence of someone treating chaos as a personality test. Penélope Cruz gets the loudest fireworks, while Johansson plays the quieter comic truth: Cristina is excellent at identifying what she hates and hopeless at naming what she wants. That contradiction gives the film its breezy, bittersweet sting. | © Mediapro

Cropped Match Point — 8. Match Point (2005)

Nola Rice first appears across a ping-pong table, and Johansson immediately turns a casual exchange into a threat to Chris Wilton’s carefully engineered social climb. Her performance mixes bruised ambition with a sexuality the film knowingly views through Chris’s selfish gaze. What begins as an affair curdles into panic once Nola demands the future he has been promising, exposing the class cruelty beneath all those polished London interiors. *Match Point* ultimately belongs to its murderous opportunist, but Johansson ensures his victim never feels like a convenient piece of plot mechanics. | © BBC Films

Her 2013 samantha — 7. Her (2013)

Scarlett Johansson never appears in *Her*, yet Samantha feels more physically present than many characters with bodies. As the operating system who falls in love with Joaquin Phoenix’s lonely Theodore, she begins with the warmth and curiosity of a personality designed to please him, then develops desires no user agreement could contain. Johansson makes every breath, laugh and pause suggest a face just outside the frame. The romance works because her voice is not decoration; it becomes an entire consciousness evolving faster than the man listening. | © Annapurna Pictures

Cropped Girl with a Pearl Earring — 6. Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003)

Peter Webber’s film asks Johansson to communicate almost everything as Griet through glances, posture and the careful mixing of paint. She makes the servant’s intelligence visible while every quiet encounter with Colin Firth carries the danger of being watched, desired or accused. The drama occasionally mistakes visual beauty for momentum, but its Vermeer-like lighting would mean little without Johansson holding tension inside the frame. It is an astonishingly controlled performance from an actress who had not yet turned 20, all restraint without ever becoming blank. | © Pathé

Cropped Ghost World — 5. Ghost World (2001)

Rebecca is not the loudest misfit in *Ghost World*; that honor belongs to Thora Birch’s Enid, who treats contempt like a renewable energy source. Johansson plays the friend beginning to suspect that permanent adolescence may be less rebellious than exhausting. Her gradual drift toward work, rent and an ordinary future could look like surrender, yet the performance makes it feel painfully sensible. Watching the two young women stop laughing at the same things becomes the film’s real breakup, and Johansson’s dry, prematurely adult calm makes every inch of that distance hurt. | © United Artists

Cropped Under the skin — 4. Under the Skin (2013)

Famous faces are normally asked to command attention. *Under the Skin* weaponizes Johansson’s, placing an alien predator behind it and sending her through Glasgow to lure men filmed partly with hidden cameras. She strips away the familiar warmth of human behavior, then lets curiosity, appetite and fear seep back in one unfamiliar gesture at a time. Jonathan Glazer offers almost no conventional explanation, while Mica Levi’s score sounds like seduction being assembled in a laboratory. Johansson turns that abstraction into a frighteningly precise study of what inhabiting a body might actually feel like. | © Film4

Cropped Marriage Story — 3. Marriage Story (2019)

Nicole’s account of disappearing inside her marriage is the moment *Marriage Story* stops being a tasteful divorce drama and starts drawing blood. Johansson speaks with hesitations, detours and embarrassed laughter, making the monologue feel discovered rather than delivered. Later, opposite Adam Driver in the apartment confrontation, affection and resentment collide so violently that neither character can keep hold of the argument. Noah Baumbach’s screenplay refuses a clean villain, but Johansson makes one imbalance unmistakable: Charlie’s artistic life expanded while Nicole’s identity quietly became supporting material. | © Netflix

Cropped Lost in Translation — 2. Lost in Translation (2003)

At 17, Johansson somehow understood the bone-deep fatigue of realizing that adult life may have begun without asking what you wanted from it. Her Charlotte roams Tokyo temples, hotel corridors and sleepless nights with Bill Murray’s Bob, forming a connection that never needs to decide whether it is friendship, romance or temporary rescue. Sofia Coppola gives silence room to work, and Johansson fills it with intelligence, loneliness and the occasional flash of impatience. The famous final whisper remains unknowable; Charlotte’s face tells us why it mattered. | © Focus Features

Cropped Jojo Rabbit — 1. Jojo Rabbit (2019)

Rosie Betzler enters *Jojo Rabbit* dancing through a home already stalked by war, determined to preserve her son’s childhood while secretly resisting the regime poisoning it. Johansson makes her funny, flirtatious and frightened—often within the same exchange—and her impersonation of Jojo’s absent father turns a dinner-table argument into the film’s most tender scene. Taika Waititi’s satire can lunge awkwardly between whimsy and horror, but Rosie holds those tones together. Even after she leaves the story, one pair of shoes keeps her presence devastatingly close. | © Fox Searchlight Pictures

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Scarlett Johansson’s filmography poses an odd little challenge: how do you compare a lonely newlywed in Tokyo, an alien prowling Glasgow and a superhero saving half the universe? Her strongest work reaches far beyond the MCU, spanning acidic comedies, bruising dramas and gloriously strange experiments. Starting with the weakest entry in an unusually strong top 15, here are Scarlett Johansson’s best movies ranked from worst to best.

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Scarlett Johansson’s filmography poses an odd little challenge: how do you compare a lonely newlywed in Tokyo, an alien prowling Glasgow and a superhero saving half the universe? Her strongest work reaches far beyond the MCU, spanning acidic comedies, bruising dramas and gloriously strange experiments. Starting with the weakest entry in an unusually strong top 15, here are Scarlett Johansson’s best movies ranked from worst to best.