Flightplan (2005)

Taut thriller directed by Robert Schwentke and later seemingly echoed by Non-Stop (2014). 

The oddly named Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster) is a recently widowed aviation engineer. She is transporting her husband’s body from Germany back to the USA, with her six-year-old daughter Julia, travelling on a plane she herself helped to design. When Kyle wakes from a sleep, her daughter has gone missing. Has she been kidnapped? Or is Kyle delusional? Was Julia ever actually on the flight? And if she was, how can anyone go missing on a plane anyway?

The film is stylishly filmed, with some refreshingly unusual angles and visual treatments. The luxurious-but-claustrophobic environment is expertly rendered in the set design. It avoids cliché, and – unusually – even the slow-motion sequences work. Always watchable, Foster is good in “anxious mother” and “tech expert” modes. 

The ageless Sean Bean plays the pilot. Peter Sarsgaard plays a somewhat creepy air marshall. Greta Scacchi has a brief and slightly odd role as a therapist. 

Unfortunately, there are at least three major plot holes, which could have been avoided with slightly more sophisticated writing. But if you try not to think about them, it’s a hugely enjoyable film that keeps you hooked until the end.

Inside Man (2006)

Directed by Spike Lee, this is an unusual and original thriller focused on a hostage siege during a New York City bank robbery. 

Clive Owen masterminds the heist. Denzel Washington is the detective and hostage negotiator, who finds that the case is stranger than his usual tasks. Jodie Foster plays a mysterious power broker who tries to help the bank’s founder Christopher Plummer protect something in his safe deposit box. 

It’s edgy and dynamic, and also occasionally funny. 

The music by jazz musician and trumpeter Terence Blanchard is oddly jarring at times, but it works. 

The three leads are all at their best, although I would have liked more dialogue from Clive Owen.

Freaky Friday (1976)

Excellent body-swap comedy from Disney. 

A mother and daughter switch roles, with comedic results. Jodie Foster plays the daughter, while Barbara Harris plays the mother. There’s plenty of silly slapstick, as pretty much everything goes wrong for both of them, but the film also makes some interesting points about gender roles (Annabel realises that her idealised father is actually a chauvinist pig) and the expectations of US society in the 1970s. 

Foster is fine enough at playing her own mother, but Harris is superb as her own daughter – really making you believe she's a teenager trapped in an adult's body.

There’s a superb theme song, too – "I’d Like to Be You for a Day" – although there's some confusion about whether or not it's sung by the two female leads.

Sommersby (1993)

From the back of the DVD: “People remember Jack Sommersby. They know him as a bitter, loutish man. But when Jack returns home after the Civil War, he's tender, caring and resourceful. Has the war changed him. or is the man calling himself Jack Sommersby an impostor?”

This is a brilliant drama starring Richard Gere and Jodie Foster as a married couple living in extraordinary circumstances. There are themes of identity running through it – Jack may or may not be who he says he is – and it also explores issues of race and personal relationships.

Foster and Gere are both excellent, juggling several plot threads: the story about who Jack is, the story of their marriage and the story of the town's agricultural fortunes. It’s moving and it keeps you guessing. 

James Earl Jones has gravitas as a judge, even if I can only hear him as Darth Vader.

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

This scared the pants off me – possibly even more so than on first viewing 30 years ago.

Adapted from the Thomas Harris novel, it’s a psychological thriller with more intelligence than your standard film from that genre. Trainee FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) tries to capture a serial killer nicknamed Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) with the help of another killer, who is living out his life in prison – Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter (Anthony Hopkins).

Director Jonathan Demme’s masterstroke is to make it as much about the Starling/Lector relationship as it is about solving the case. He develops both characters brilliantly, sometimes filming them face-on for added intensity – without making it look like a tricksy fourth-wall device. Lector is a talented psychiatrist with the uncanny ability to get inside people’s heads, and Hopkins captures that quality with perfect menace. He plays the character as a refined gentleman who just happens to like eating people. Foster also gives the performance of a lifetime, being forced to confront the fears from her childhood alongside the very real terrors of her new job.

The climax, in which Starling is stalked by Buffalo Bill in total darkness while he wears night-vision goggles – accompanied by The Fall’s “Hip Priest” on the soundtrack – is as hypnotic and chilling as cinema ever gets.

Contact (1997)

Sci-fi directed by Robert Zemeckis, adapted from the Carl Sagan novel.

A radio astronomer, Ellie (Jodie Foster) discovers deep-space signals of intelligent life. These turn out to include instructions on how to visit their distant system. 

The slow build-up is interesting. I like the way that political and religious interests get in the way of the pure science that Ellie represents, as this seems quite “real” in terms of how people might react to this sort of news. 

The “space” content of the film occupies only a few minutes of the lengthy running time. In some ways that’s disappointing, and what you actually see feels like a cop-out, but really this is a story about humans’ reactions to learning we are not alone in the universe – rather than a saga about aliens. 

Foster is highly convincing in the lead role. Cameos from John Hurt and Rob Lowe don’t add a great deal, but James Woods is always enjoyable to watch. Matthew McConaughey is OK as Foster’s love interest, a Christian whose spiritual leanings meet in the middle with Foster’s scientific rationality.

Taxi Driver (1976)

A masterpiece. Robert De Niro is utterly transfixing as Travis Bickle, a New York cabbie who becomes obsessed with cleaning up the city – whatever the cost. 

Cybil Shepherd and Jodie Foster are excellent as Betsy (the campaign volunteer for a presidential candidate) and Iris (a child prostitute), while Harvey Keitel is suitably creepy as Iris’s long-haired pimp. 

It’s beautifully filmed: you could freeze almost any frame and make a poster of it. And Martin Scorsese’s subtle handling of tension was never better judged. 

The original score by Bernard Herrmann makes a compelling, noirish film even more so. 

You can interpret it as a film about PTSD or a story about isolation and loneliness. 

Disturbingly, this classic was an influence on John Hinckley Jr., who in 1981 attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan in order to impress Jodie Foster.

Carnage (2011)

Set in one evening in a New York apartment, Carnage features two couples rowing over an incident between their children. Directed by Roman Polanski, the real-time scenario works (it’s adapted from a play by Yasmina Reza) and the disintegration of relationships and social niceties is handled with ruthless precision. Not one of the four characters is likeable, so you move beyond feelings of “taking sides” to a realisation that the whole lot of them are self-centred and childish. It’s filmed in such a way that the slightly queasy angles cleverly emphasise their grotesque qualities as the tension escalates. It’s brilliantly twitchy and uncomfortable.

There’s an especially memorable scene in which a hair-dryer is used to dry Jodie Foster’s precious art catalogue after it becomes splattered with Kate Winslet’s vomit. You might think that would be the low point for the characters, but things continue to get worse.

Elysium (2013)

Dystopian sci-fi action thriller. It’s 2154, and Earth (specifically, Los Angeles) is a ruined slum whose inhabitants live in desperate poverty. Meanwhile on Elysium, a huge nearby space station, the elite citizens enjoy lives of luxury with advanced technology and healthcare bays that can cure seemingly anything. (The rich/poor social divide brings to mind The Hunger Games – plus, the shuttles look suspiciously similar.) A fairly convoluted plot sees this injustice and the social order challenged by a bunch of tech-savvy L.A. thugs.

Matt Damon plays the hero, Max Da Costa, who – dying of radiation poisoning – has Elysium’s data stored in a brain implant in exchange for a chance to travel there and be healed. Jodie Foster is the ruthless Defense Secretary Jessica Delacourt, who is out to stop him and who, script-wise, has little to get her teeth into. Alice Braga is Frey Santiago, Max’s childhood friend whose daughter also needs urgent medical treatment. As with Foster, she’s not given much to actually act with and the romance you expect to see never flourishes. Sharlto Copley is pretty awful as the one-dimensional nasty sleeper agent Kruger.

It’s extremely violent and there’s a lot of pointless swearing. The dialogue is banal at best. The film makes some interesting points about class and society, but risks becoming just another shoot-’em-up – albeit in a more exotic setting. You want to explore the miraculous environment of the space station, but instead have to watch sweaty men fighting and throwing hand grenades at each other. A shame, because somewhere in there is an intriguing idea that could have been developed in a much more sophisticated and rewarding way.