Jodie Foster’s 10 Best Movies (So Far!)

As her first film, ‘Taxi Driver,’ turns 50 this year, revisit (or discover) the actor’s greatest roles

Chris Nashawaty,

Updated February 23, 2026

AARP

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Published November 07, 2022

/ Updated February 23, 2026

a collage with images of jodie foster in her most iconic movie roles

Jodie Foster stars in (from left) "Nyad," "The Silence of the Lambs," "A Private Life," "The Accused" and "Taxi Driver."

AARP (From left: Kimberley French/Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection, Orion/courtesy Everett Collection, Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics, All Star Picture Library/Alamy, United Archives GmbH/Alamy)

Jodie Foster has been acting professionally since 1965. Her first gig: playing a sun-kissed towhead in a Coppertone TV commercial at the ripe old age of 3. Since then, Foster, 62, has starred in more than 50 films and earned a pair of Oscar statuettes in the process. This year, one of her earliest — and greatest — movies, Martin Scorsese’s harrowing 1976 urban drama Taxi Driver, turns 50. To celebrate its golden anniversary, we’ve put together our definitive top 10 list of Foster’s most indelible roles and where to watch them. (It’s also a list of great American movies in the past 50 years.) Grab the popcorn.

Taxi Driver (1976)

Foster was just 12 when she starred in Martin Scorsese’s controversial and violent masterpiece. But by then, she was already an old pro. In fact, Taxi Driver was just one of five movies she would appear in that bicentennial year. Foster earned her first Oscar nomination for playing Iris, a young sex worker on New York’s mean streets. After helplessly seeing her being manhandled by her pimp (Harvey Keitel, now 86) in the back of his cab one night, mentally unbalanced antihero Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, 82, becomes obsessed with saving her, setting him on a path of righteous vengeance. Foster gives an absolutely fearless performance that’s on an entirely different level from the sort of light, Disney fare she’d been in up to that point. Her haunting portrayal proved she wasn’t just a precocious kid actor playing dress-up — she was a major talent to be reckoned with. Later on, her character would become a bizarre footnote in the 1981 shooting of President Ronald Reagan, whose would-be assassin, John Hinckley Jr., said he’d been inspired by Scorsese’s film and wanted to impress Foster.

Watch it: Taxi Driver

Freaky Friday (1976)

The same year as Taxi Driver, Foster starred in this still-charming family comedy about a housewife (Barbara Harris, now 83) and her 13-year-old daughter (Foster) who swap bodies after an argument at the breakfast table. That description probably makes the film sound like a silly slapstick lark. And it is that. But if you squint a little, it also has a lot to say about mutual understanding, appreciation and the generation gap. Both leads are fantastic, but Foster, who always seemed wise beyond her years as a child actor, manages to sneak real emotion and empathy into a trifle that could’ve easily been disposable. The 2003 remake starring Jamie Lee Curtis, 67, and Lindsay Lohan is also worth checking out, if you’ve got time for a double feature.

Watch it: Freaky Friday

The Accused (1988)

Foster earned the first of her two Academy Awards for this disturbing portrait of a victim of sexual assault. At 26, she gives the sort of raw, blistering performance that she hadn’t been allowed up to this point. And Foster’s like an exposed nerve. Her turn has an almost terrifying authenticity, leaving the actor we grew up with deep in the past. Foster plays a woman who is raped by three men in a bar as a rowdy crowd cheers them on: The Accused is, in many ways, a brutal movie to sit through, but Foster’s fierce commitment is a revelation. The reviews were mixed, and the box office was underwhelming, but there was no ignoring Foster’s tour de force performance. On Oscar night, she would end up beating out Glenn Close, now 78, Melanie Griffith, 68, Meryl Streep, 76, and Sigourney Weaver, 76, for best actress.

Watch it: The Accused

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Director Jonathan Demme’s bone-chilling thriller swept the Oscars in early 1992, taking home the so-called “top five” — best picture, best director, best screenplay, best actor (Anthony Hopkins, 88), and best actress (Foster). At the time, it was the rare horror movie regarded as a prestige picture rather than some disposable piece of schlock to be unspooled at drive-ins. As fledgling FBI trainee Clarice Starling, Foster is recruited as bait for Hopkins’ imprisoned Hannibal the Cannibal, in an attempt to get his help catching another serial killer on the loose. Foster’s Clarice is a great feminist heroine, proving her mettle in an all-male environment. She’s tough, clever and obsessive, seeing connections others miss. Thirty-five years later, it’s hard to overstate just how much a part of the zeitgeist The Silence of the Lambs was. The good news: It’s just as fantastic today.

Watch it: The Silence of the Lambs

Little Man Tate (1991)

Eight months after Silence hit theaters, Foster made her directorial debut and starred in this story about a single mother raising a socially awkward 7-seven-year-old boy with a genius-level IQ. Foster’s character, protective mom Dede Tate, is worried about her son being an outcast at school and places him in an academic program for gifted kids. The subject of the film clearly resonated with Foster, and it’s easy to see why: A brilliant child herself, Foster put Hollywood on hold to earn a degree from Yale University. Afterward, she returned to acting with a vengeance, sinking her teeth into a string of memorable roles in the late 1980s and early ’90s, including this story, which may be as close to an autobiography as we ever get from her.

Watch it: Little Man Tate

Contact (1997)

In the 1990s, Hollywood went all in on shoot the works, big-budget blockbusters. Those weren’t the kind of movies Foster liked to star in, at least until this rollicking sci-fi adaptation of a Carl Sagan story came along. Directed by Back to the Future and Forrest Gump director Robert Zemeckis, 73, Contact is a rare cinematic bird — a spectacle with smarts. Foster plays a scientist who believes she’s made contact with extraterrestrials and has to battle both the government and the church to continue her quest. This easily could have been a goofy, preposterous movie. But thanks to Foster’s intelligence, we buy it from the opening scene until the end credits.

Watch it: Contact

Panic Room (2002)

This lean-and-mean home-invasion thriller gets overlooked a lot, which is a shame. Directed by David Fincher, 63, with screw-tightening precision, Panic Room tells the story of a wealthy, recently divorced woman and her teenage daughter (a young Kristen Stewart) whose Manhattan brownstone is broken into by a trio of hair-trigger burglars, forcing them to hide out in the tight, claustrophobic safe space of the title. The film plays like a tense, two-hour cat and mouse game, building suspense slowly and effectively. Fincher zooms the camera around like an acrobat, but it’s Foster’s face that holds your attention. She’s the movie’s best special effect.

Watch it: Panic Room

Carnage (2011)

Adapted from the Tony-winning play God of Carnage, director Roman Polanski’s hot-button domestic drama is like an action movie, but instead of guns and knives, the weapons are words. Ensemble casts don’t come much better than this: Foster is joined on screen by Christoph Waltz, now 69, Kate Winslet, 50, and John C. Reilly, 60. The plot: Two married, upper middle class New York couples meet up to hash out a physical altercation between their 11-year-old sons. But the adults’ masks of civility and politeness quickly fall away, and the story spirals into a shouting match of accusations and blame. Both couples are in denial, unwilling (and perhaps unable) to examine their own lives. As for Foster, she delivers one of her most beautifully modulated performances to date.

Watch it: Carnage

Nyad (2023)

This stirring biopic about the fiery and controversial marathon swimmer Diana Nyad was a Netflix Oscar hopeful in 2023. Somehow it fell through the cracks despite two first-rate turns from its leads, Annette Bening, 67 (as Nyad), and Foster as Bonnie Stoll, her loyal coach and best friend. At 60, Nyad made the decision to give her lifelong dream — swimming the 110 miles of ocean between Cuba and Florida — one last, unlikely shot. Bening’s Nyad can be a prickly, hard-to-like character, but through Foster’s compassionate eyes we get glimpses of her humanity, humor and indomitable drive. An inspiring, underseen gem.

Watch it: Nyad

A Private Life (2025)

If you go on YouTube and search for “Jodie Foster speaking French,” you’ll come across a press interview she did in 1976 when Taxi Driver made its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Her command of the language even back then is astonishing. Nearly 50 years later, she put those French lessons to use again in this twisty, Hitchcockian thriller about a psychiatrist expat in Paris who begins snooping around after one of her patients is found dead. Foster shows us the Vertigo-like obsession that simmers beneath the cool, calm surface of this upper-class expat and amateur sleuth. And we, as the audience, are willing to follow her wherever the mystery takes her.

Watch it: A Private Life

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Chris Nashawaty, former film critic for Entertainment Weekly, is the author of Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story and a contributor to Esquire, Vanity Fair, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.