Scarlett Johansson has spent more than two decades doing something surprisingly difficult in Hollywood: moving between enormous blockbusters and intimate character dramas without allowing either side of her career to define the other.

To millions of moviegoers, she will always be Natasha Romanoff, the spy who became an Avenger. But Johansson was already an acclaimed actress years before entering the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and some of her most daring performances came in films where she barely spoke—or, in one remarkable case, never appeared onscreen at all.

Her range stretches from lonely newlyweds and artificial intelligence to alien predators, desperate mothers and superheroes.

Ranking those movies means balancing the quality of the film itself with the importance of Johansson’s performance. These 10 titles best capture how she developed from a gifted child actor into one of the most recognizable stars of her generation.

10. Lucy (2014) — Lucy Miller

Luc Besson’s Lucy takes an outrageous science-fiction premise and pushes it as far as possible.

Johansson plays an American living in Taiwan who is forced into working as a drug courier. After a synthetic substance enters her bloodstream, her mental and physical abilities begin increasing at an extraordinary rate.

The science is intentionally fantastical, but Johansson gives the movie its center. Lucy gradually loses the ordinary emotions that once defined her as her intelligence expands, forcing Johansson to become colder and stranger as the film progresses.

More importantly for her career, Lucy demonstrated that Johansson could carry an international action blockbuster without the Avengers beside her.

9. Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003) — Griet

Released the same year as Lost in Translation, Girl with a Pearl Earring revealed a completely different side of the young actress.

Johansson plays Griet, a servant who enters the household of Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, portrayed by Colin Firth. Their relationship develops through art, observation and emotional tension rather than conventional romance.

The performance depends heavily on Johansson’s face.

Griet is cautious, intelligent and aware of the boundaries surrounding her. Much of what she feels must remain unspoken.

Johansson received a BAFTA leading-actress nomination for the performance, making 2003 the year it became impossible to dismiss her as merely a promising former child star.

8. Match Point (2005) — Nola Rice

Woody Allen’s Match Point gave Johansson one of the darkest roles of her early career.

She plays Nola Rice, an aspiring American actress in London who becomes involved with Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ ambitious Chris Wilton despite his marriage into a wealthy British family.

What begins as attraction slowly becomes obsession, deception and desperation.

Johansson makes Nola both seductive and painfully vulnerable. She is not simply the dangerous other woman of a thriller. She is trapped in a relationship in which the balance of power becomes increasingly cruel.

The film helped move Johansson decisively away from teenage roles and toward complicated adult characters.

7. Ghost World (2001) — Rebecca

Before Lost in Translation made Johansson an international star, Ghost World provided one of the earliest clear signs of what she could do.

Based on Daniel Clowes’ comic, the film follows teenage friends Enid and Rebecca as they finish high school and discover that adulthood may separate them more quickly than expected.

Thora Birch has the larger and more eccentric role as Enid, while Johansson plays Rebecca with understated practicality.

That restraint becomes important.

As Enid grows increasingly disconnected from the conventional world, Rebecca begins moving toward it—finding work, planning an apartment and imagining a future.

Johansson was still a teenager during this period of her career, yet the cool, natural screen presence that later became one of her trademarks was already visible.

6. Avengers: Endgame (2019) — Natasha Romanoff

Johansson first appeared as Natasha Romanoff in Iron Man 2 in 2010. Nine years later, Avengers: Endgame gave Black Widow one of the most consequential moments in the entire Marvel saga.

Following Thanos’ victory in Infinity War, Natasha becomes one of the people holding the surviving Avengers together.

The woman introduced as an isolated assassin has effectively created a family.

That evolution gives her eventual trip to Vormir with Clint Barton its emotional power. Both characters are prepared to sacrifice themselves, but Natasha ultimately makes the choice.

Endgame is not Johansson’s greatest acting showcase, yet it is difficult to discuss her career without acknowledging the character she played across roughly a decade of Marvel filmmaking.

Natasha helped make her one of the biggest movie stars in the world.

5. Jojo Rabbit (2019) — Rosie Betzler

The same year audiences watched Natasha Romanoff sacrifice herself, Johansson appeared in a radically different movie.

Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit casts her as Rosie, the mother of a German boy indoctrinated by Nazism during World War II.

Rosie hides a Jewish teenage girl in her home while quietly trying to teach her son empathy.

Johansson plays the character with warmth, humor and sadness. Rosie can dance, tease her son and make their home feel safe even though enormous danger exists just beyond—or inside—its walls.

Her supporting performance earned an Academy Award nomination.

Remarkably, it was not her only Oscar nomination that year.

4. Under the Skin (2013) — The Woman

Few major stars would choose a movie as strange and uncompromising as Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin.

Johansson plays an unnamed extraterrestrial being moving through Scotland and luring men into a horrifying fate.

For much of the movie, she behaves less like a human than an entity studying humanity.

That makes the gradual transformation fascinating.

As the character observes ordinary people, experiences vulnerability and begins questioning her purpose, Johansson subtly changes how she moves and responds to the world.

The film strips away many of the qualities associated with conventional movie-star acting. There are few explanatory speeches and little psychological guidance.

Johansson must make the audience study her the same way her character studies everyone else.

It remains one of the boldest performances of her career.

3. Her (2013) — Samantha

Scarlett Johansson never appears onscreen in Her.

She does not need to.

Spike Jonze’s science-fiction romance follows Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix, as he falls in love with Samantha, an artificial intelligence operating system voiced by Johansson.

The entire relationship depends on a voice without a body.

Johansson makes Samantha playful, curious, intimate and increasingly independent. The performance allows the audience to understand why Theodore falls in love with someone he cannot physically touch.

As Samantha develops beyond the limitations of a human relationship, Johansson also makes the AI seem simultaneously more emotionally recognizable and less human.

The film earned five Academy Award nominations and won Best Original Screenplay.

Johansson’s absence from the acting nominations remains notable precisely because her voice is so central to why the story works.

2. Lost in Translation (2003) — Charlotte

Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation transformed Johansson’s career.

She was only 17 during filming, yet Charlotte feels emotionally much older: a young woman in Tokyo questioning her marriage, identity and what she wants her adult life to become.

Then she meets Bob Harris, Bill Murray’s aging movie star experiencing a different form of loneliness.

The relationship between them refuses easy definition.

It is friendship, attraction, emotional refuge and something neither person can comfortably name.

Johansson’s performance is quiet enough that another actor might have disappeared beside Murray. Instead, her silences become part of the film’s language.

A glance from a hotel window or a conversation in the middle of the night can reveal more than a dramatic monologue.

Her work earned her the BAFTA Award for Best Actress and established her as a serious leading performer while she was still in her teens.

1. Marriage Story (2019) — Nicole Barber

If Lost in Translation announced Scarlett Johansson’s talent, Marriage Story showed what decades of experience had turned it into.

Noah Baumbach’s drama follows actress Nicole Barber and theater director Charlie Barber, played by Adam Driver, as their initially cooperative separation becomes an increasingly painful divorce.

Neither is treated simply as the villain.

Johansson’s Nicole is a woman who realizes that she has gradually allowed her husband’s ambitions to dominate the life they built together. She loves Charlie while also understanding that remaining with him has cost her part of herself.

One of Johansson’s finest scenes comes when Nicole meets divorce attorney Nora Fanshaw, played by Laura Dern, and slowly explains how her marriage reached its breaking point.

The performance does not depend on glamour, action or mystery.

It depends on emotional specificity.

Johansson earned her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for Marriage Story while simultaneously receiving a supporting nomination for Jojo Rabbit.

Those two nominations in the same year captured the unusual career she had built.

One film needed her to be a warm, defiant mother inside an absurdist wartime satire. The other asked her to make the collapse of a marriage feel painfully ordinary.

Neither looked anything like Black Widow.

That is ultimately why Johansson’s best filmography is difficult to reduce to one type of role.

She can dominate a Marvel battlefield, create a romance using only her voice or hold the camera through a quiet conversation about a marriage ending.

The blockbuster career made Scarlett Johansson globally famous.

Movies like Marriage Story, Lost in Translation, Her and Under the Skin explain why, after decades onscreen, she remains far more than simply a movie star.