Dakota Johnson - Actor - 2018

(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)

Wed 10 September 2025 3:00, UK

Ok, let’s get the most obvious stuff out of the way when it comes to Dakota Johnson; firstly she’s a nepo baby and secondly Madame Web wasn’t very good at all and people didn’t like it. There, now we can move on. 

Johnson may well have made a few bad movies, the Fifty Shades trilogy springs immediately to mind (although apparently the third one is actually quite popular) but she has also made some excellent ones in her time, and she’s been acting in movies since as far back as 1999. 

Some of the highlights of her career include The Peanut Butter Falcon, the 2019 movie she starred in alongside Shia LaBeouf that was critically acclaimed and ended up becoming the highest-grossing independent film that year. It tells the story of a young man with downs syndrome who dreams of being a professional wrestler and has a whacking 96% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. 

That film came a year later after Johnson won acclaim for her work in the remake of Dario Argento’s Suspiria, the mind-bending horror about an American woman who enrolls in a foreign dance school but ends up in a nightmare.

She also starred in the Johnny Depp mob movie Black Mass in 2015 and appeared in David Fincher’s The Social Network – the latter of which is considered one of the finest films of modern times. Johnson herself has her own all-time favourites too, which she outlined when she sat down with Letterboxd, although she did complain she would rather pick ten than just four. 

First on her list was The Dreamers, the divisive 2003 Bernado Bertolucci movie starring Eva Green about a female student who gets intimately involved with twins in Paris in the late 1960s. Some people love it, some people think it’s astonishingly pretentious and confusing. Johnson obviously loves it.

Next up she chose a film that isn’t divisive at all, because everyone knows just how good it is – 1942’s Casablanca, a movie in which almost every single line is a famous quote, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman play essentially the most iconic couple in film history and that makes everyone who sees it want to live in 1940s Morocco despite it being full of Nazi soldiers.

Also on the Johnson’s list was the brilliant Macauley Culkin comedy Home Alone from 1990, the movie that quite irresponsibly taught young children how to booby-trap their house to most effectively cause injury to any parent walking up stairs and that made a superstar out of its young lead actor.

And finally she chose The Wizard of Oz, 1939’s dazzling musical starring Judy Garland and an assortment of faintly terrifying dayglo small people that still stands up as one of the most entertaining films imaginable even today. Fun fact: the movie’s director Victor Fleming actually abandoned it halfway through in order to helm Gone with the Wind, which is not a bad substitute let’s face it. The Wizard of Oz was then completed by King Vidor, who shot the famous ‘Over the Rainbow’ sequence, which actually almost didn’t make it into the movie. 

Johnson meanwhile is currently starring in cinemas in Materialists alongside the ubiquitous Pedro Pascal and her Marvel buddy Chris Evans. Johnson plays a New York matchmaker who gets caught between the two of them in the romantic comedy distributed by A24.

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