Jodie Foster has made a living out of playing women in serious danger: An underage prostitute in Taxi Driver. A rape victim in The Accused. A young FBI agent battling psychopaths in The Silence of the Lambs. A single mother fighting burglars in Panic Room. A woman searching for her missing child in Flight Control.

In every one of them, she manages to convey both the fragile desperation and the steely determination to survive and beat the odds. We believe her characters every step of the way, and we root for her again and again.

In The Brave One, directed by LGBT-friendly helmer Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, Breakfast on Pluto), Jodie plays a happy woman whose life is completely upended by the senseless murder of her fiance (Naveen Andrews from Lost). She buys a gun to protect herself, but unexpectedly finds herself in situations where she has to use the gun to protect others as well.

One police detective (Terrence Howard) suspects that she may be responsible for a string of mysterious vigilante killings, but has no way of proving it…

On paper, this may sound like a standard action drama. But because The Brave One is made by such sterling talents as Neil and Jodie, the film never descends into the miasma of pure violence for violence's sake. It is careful to show Jodie as a woman who is neither justified nor unjustified in carrying out the vigilante murders. It clouds its morals to show a woman who had little choice but to do what she did.

Interestingly, this is the second role that Jodie accepted after Nicole Kidman rejected it. Jodie was offered the Panic Room role after Nicole pulled out of the project. And Jodie got The Brave One lead after Nicole gave it up. At this point, we couldn't care less about Nicole and her string of expensive flops. Give us good ole' butch Jodie anytime!

Nicole and her cold mannequin perfection could never upstage Jodie's brand of raw human vulnerability and the will to survive. Jodie is, in short, an extraordinary lesbian — oops, we mean 'thespian'.