Samuel L. Jackson has played assassins, superheroes, detectives, soldiers, criminals, mentors and villains. He has fought dinosaurs, giant apes and intergalactic armies. He has worked with Quentin Tarantino repeatedly, joined both Star Wars and Marvel, and turned even relatively small roles into characters audiences remember years later.

The Academy, which presented Jackson with an Honorary Oscar in 2022, has credited him with appearances in more than 100 films and described his work as resonating across genres and generations.

So choosing only 10 is almost unfair.

This ranking is not based on box-office totals. If it were, Jackson’s MCU appearances would dominate the conversation. Instead, the films below are ranked by four things: Jackson’s individual performance, the quality of the movie around him, the role’s cultural impact and how rewarding the film remains to revisit.

That means Nick Fury makes the list — but Marvel doesn’t come close to taking the crown.

10. Kong: Skull Island (2017)

Jackson did not need to be the biggest creature in Kong: Skull Island to feel like one of its most imposing presences.

As Lieutenant Colonel Preston Packard, he plays a military commander whose mission turns into something increasingly personal after Kong destroys his helicopters and kills members of his unit. Packard’s determination hardens into obsession, transforming Jackson from an authority figure into a human antagonist willing to challenge something far beyond his power.

It is exactly the sort of part Jackson can elevate with a glare. Packard’s refusal to retreat gives the monster spectacle a surprisingly human conflict. The Warner Bros. production placed Jackson alongside Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, John Goodman and John C. Reilly in its 1970s-set Kong adventure.

9. Shaft (2000)

The movie itself may not be Jackson’s greatest, but the casting feels inevitable.

John Singleton’s Shaft handed Jackson a character built around authority, attitude and absolute confidence. He played John Shaft in a continuation of the franchise made famous by Richard Roundtree, who also appeared in the film.

Jackson’s career already contained plenty of intimidating characters, but Shaft helped crystallize the screen persona audiences would increasingly associate with him: the man who walks into a room already expecting everyone else to listen.

Even reviews that were mixed on the movie tended to acknowledge the force of Jackson’s presence. He simply looked like he belonged in the coat.

8. Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

Nick Fury had appeared throughout the MCU before The Winter Soldier, but this is where Jackson finally got to make the character feel vulnerable.

Instead of merely arriving to deliver information to superheroes, Fury becomes part of the conspiracy thriller himself. His ambush in Washington — an escalating attack that turns his armored SUV into a collapsing fortress — remains one of the MCU’s strongest street-level action sequences.

Marvel itself promoted the sequence around Fury fighting off his attackers, while contemporary reviews singled out Jackson’s expanded role and the chase.

For once, Nick Fury wasn’t simply the man organizing the Avengers.

He had to survive without them.

7. Black Snake Moan (2007)

Anyone who knows Jackson mainly from franchises should watch Black Snake Moan.

He plays Lazarus, a deeply wounded former blues musician whose attempt to save an equally troubled young woman, Rae, played by Christina Ricci, becomes the center of an intentionally provocative Southern drama.

The premise is extreme, but Jackson plays Lazarus as far more than another intimidating tough guy. There is exhaustion, loneliness, anger, faith and regret in the performance. Roger Ebert praised Jackson’s willingness to disappear into the character and noted the energy and intensity he brought to the role.

It remains one of the best arguments that Jackson’s quieter work deserves another look.

6. The Hateful Eight (2015)

Give Samuel L. Jackson a room, a dangerous group of characters and pages of Quentin Tarantino dialogue, and he does not need much else.

As Major Marquis Warren, Jackson spends much of The Hateful Eight trapped inside a snowbound Wyoming cabin with people who may be lying about virtually everything.

The film is deliberately talk-heavy, turning conversations into confrontations. Jackson thrives in that environment. His voice, pauses, expressions and ability to shift instantly between humor and menace make Warren one of the movie’s gravitational centers. Critics singled Jackson out among the ensemble performances.

Few actors can make a long speech feel this dangerous.

5. A Time to Kill (1996)

Before Jackson became permanently associated with blockbuster swagger, A Time to Kill demonstrated how emotionally devastating he could be in a straight drama.

He plays Carl Lee Hailey, a Mississippi father who is put on trial after taking justice into his own hands following the brutal assault of his young daughter. Matthew McConaughey plays the lawyer defending him.

Jackson’s performance earned him a Golden Globe nomination for supporting actor.

The role works because the anger never completely hides the grief beneath it. Jackson doesn’t simply make Carl Lee powerful. He makes the audience understand the anguish driving him.

4. Unbreakable (2000)

Long before cinematic superhero universes became Hollywood’s default business model, Jackson played one of the strangest comic-book characters of his career.

Elijah Price is physically fragile, intellectually formidable and obsessed with discovering whether someone exists at the opposite end of his own condition. That search leads him to Bruce Willis’ seemingly indestructible David Dunn.

Jackson deliberately suppresses much of his familiar explosiveness. Elijah speaks carefully and moves cautiously. That restraint makes him more unsettling, not less.

Roger Ebert described the character as intelligent, sophisticated and quietly menacing, qualities Jackson sustains until the story reveals just how far Elijah’s obsession has taken him.

3. Django Unchained (2012)

Stephen is one of Jackson’s most disturbing creations precisely because his power isn’t immediately obvious.

Working inside Calvin Candie’s plantation household, Stephen initially appears to be an elderly servant devoted to Leonardo DiCaprio’s monstrous plantation owner. Gradually, Jackson reveals someone far more perceptive and influential than the performance Stephen presents to outsiders.

Jackson himself described Stephen as essentially the “power behind the throne,” and critics repeatedly identified him as one of the film’s most unsettling figures.

It is an intentionally ugly character in a film dealing with an ugly institution. Jackson makes him impossible to dismiss.

2. Jackie Brown (1997)

Ordell Robbie proves Jackson did not need to repeat Jules Winnfield after Pulp Fiction.

Ordell is relaxed, conversational and often amusing — until the temperature changes. Jackson makes those changes frighteningly effortless. The menace comes not from shouting but from the sense that Ordell is constantly calculating what everyone around him is worth.

The performance earned Jackson a Golden Globe nomination and the Silver Bear for Best Actor at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Among Jackson’s Tarantino characters, Ordell may be the least celebrated.

He may also be the most deceptively controlled.

1. Pulp Fiction (1994)

There really couldn’t be another No. 1.

Jules Winnfield did not begin Samuel L. Jackson’s career, but he changed its scale.

Jackson takes a contract killer who could have been remembered mainly for intimidating speeches and gives him something far more interesting: an awakening. Jules begins the film confident in violence and ends it questioning the meaning he has assigned to his own life.

The performance earned Jackson his only competitive Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actor. Pulp Fiction itself received seven Academy Award nominations and won for original screenplay, later becoming one of the defining American films of its era.

The speeches became famous. The attitude became imitated. Jackson’s delivery became instantly recognizable.

But what keeps Jules above Nick Fury, Shaft, Elijah Price and every other character on this list is that there is an actual transformation underneath all that cool.

Marvel helped make Samuel L. Jackson unavoidable to another generation.

Pulp Fiction helped make him an icon.