For Fans of Michael Fassbender

Steve McQueen's debut remains the film people keep returning to as proof of what Fassbender can do. He lost roughly 16 kilograms for the role of Bobby Sands, and the physical preparation is almost a distraction from what he does with his eyes across that extraordinary twenty-minute single-take conversation with Liam Cunningham. It is a performance built on conviction rather than technique, which is exactly what makes it unsettling to watch. If Hunger is the entry point for someone new to Fassbender, every other film tends to retroactively improve.

Prometheus and Alien: Covenant gave Fassbender the chance to play David, Ridley Scott's increasingly unhinged synthetic humanoid, and the performance is one of the more underrated things in recent blockbuster cinema. David is curious, courteous, and deeply dangerous, and Fassbender plays the accumulation of those qualities over two films with a patience that the films themselves do not always earn. It is the kind of work that rewards repeated watching because his choices read differently once you know where the character is going. The Alien games that orbit the same universe offer a similar combination of corporate dread and machine menace if you want more time in that headspace.

Justin Kurzel's 2015 adaptation put Fassbender and Marion Cotillard in Scotland with mud in their beards and grief in every line, and it landed at the wrong moment commercially. The film treats Shakespeare as psychology first and poetry second, which is exactly the right call, and Fassbender's Macbeth is one of the rare screen versions where the man's collapse feels earned rather than inevitable from scene one. It belongs in a conversation with Ian McKellen and Denzel Washington's versions and it rarely is. The games and novels that share its appetite for power corroding character are worth finding alongside it.