14) Natalie Portman
Alex Garland’s visionary, unsettling “Annihilation” doesn’t fall into the same neat categories as so many recent films in what has been a sci-fi genre boom of late. Whether it’s the big films like “Blade Runner 2049” or the Netflix ones like “Mute” and “The Cloverfield Paradox,” sci-fi is everywhere in the late ‘10s, with most of it owing to a great deal to some combination of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001,” Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner,” and the Wachowskis’ “The Matrix.” Even within this resurgence, rarely do you see a film that’s built from the templates of Tarkovsky films like “Solaris” or “Stalker,” movies that used sci-fi in a discomfiting, emotional register because, well, that kind of filmmaking is incredibly difficult to pull off. It’s so difficult in fact that Paramount had no idea what to do when they saw “Annihilation,” barely promoting it, holding it from the press until a few days before release, and selling it to Netflix for international markets. Maybe they’re still burned by the failure of “mother!” but they’re burying a genre gem here, an ambitious, challenging piece of work that people will be dissecting for years. Don’t miss it.
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