For Fans of Natalie Portman

Black Swan won the Oscar and dominates the cultural memory, but Pablo Larrain's Jackie may be the more astonishing technical feat. Portman carries almost every frame of a film that is told largely in close-up, translating grief, calculation, and self-mythology into micro-expressions across 100 minutes. She does not play Jackie Kennedy as a monument. She plays her as a woman who understood that grief is also a political act, and who chose, deliberately, what the world would remember. It is a performance about performance itself, which makes it the perfect companion to Black Swan.

Alex Garland's Annihilation tanked at the box office and went straight to streaming outside the US, which is almost the clearest possible proof of what it is: uncompromising science fiction for adults. Portman's performance as a biologist who volunteers to enter an unexplained environmental collapse is quiet, withholding, and precisely calibrated to the film's refusal to explain itself. Jeff VanderMeer's source novel and its two sequels are essential reading before or after. For games, Control by Remedy Entertainment constructs a nearly identical uncanny-government atmosphere with the same refusal of tidy answers.

Padme Amidala is a genuinely compelling character trapped in dialogue that was never written to match what Portman could do. The political dimension of the prequels, a democracy sliding toward authoritarianism through manufactured crisis and democratic vote, is more interesting now than it was in 1999. The best way to engage with that material is alongside the Claudia Gray Star Wars novels (Lost Stars, Master and Apprentice) and the animated series The Clone Wars, which gave Padme the writing her live-action appearances were denied. The games Jedi: Fallen Order and Jedi: Survivor build their themes around exactly the authoritarian collapse the prequels dramatized.

Mike Nichols' 2004 adaptation of Patrick Marber's stage play has four people, no action, and almost no sympathy to offer any of them. Portman's Alicia and Julia Roberts' Anna are not positioned as victims of the men around them: all four characters lie, manipulate, and wound with equal clarity. It is a film that trusts the audience to sit with discomfort rather than resolution, and Portman's strip-club scene with Clive Owen remains one of the most electrically uncomfortable exchanges in mainstream 2000s cinema. Read the play after: Marber's dialogue lands differently on the page.