For Fans of Scarlett Johansson

Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin asked Johansson to carry a film almost entirely without dialogue, playing an alien predator who gradually develops something like empathy. It is uncommercial, genuinely disturbing, and formally daring. That she agreed to do it between Marvel films says everything about her actual artistic appetite. The film holds up as one of the strangest and most haunting science fiction films of the 2010s.

Spike Jonze cast Johansson as the voice of Samantha in Her after replacing another actor in post-production. She was never on set. The performance she delivered purely through vocal inflection is genuinely moving, charting a relationship arc from curious novelty to something that feels like grief. It remains proof that her physical magnetism, though real, is a secondary quality. The primary instrument is her intelligence about emotional rhythm.

Between 2005 and 2008, Johansson made three films with Woody Allen (Match Point, Scoop, Vicky Cristina Barcelona). Match Point in particular is a genuinely cold-blooded thriller about class ambition and moral luck, and she is excellent in it. These films are often skipped by viewers who came to her through Marvel, but they show a rangy, classical leading-lady quality that the franchise work only occasionally called on.

Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story paired Johansson with Adam Driver in a film about the slow dissolution of a relationship, and it demanded sustained, granular emotional work over two hours. The argument scene alone is among the best acted sequences of her career. The film was a reminder that when given material that matches her intelligence, she can operate at the very top of the medium.