For Fans of Tilda Swinton

Sally Potter's 1992 adaptation of Virginia Woolf put Swinton on the international map and established the template for everything that followed. The film asks the audience to accept a person who lives four hundred years and shifts sex without ceremony, and Swinton plays it with such matter-of-fact grace that the strangeness settles into something that feels more true than most realism. It remains the clearest distillation of why her best work works: commitment so complete it makes the impossible feel inevitable.

Lynne Ramsay's adaptation of Lionel Shriver's novel gives Swinton the role of a woman trying to understand what she might have produced in her son, replaying memory against dread. What she does with silence and averted eyes in that film is a masterclass in restraint as expression. The novel that preceded it is equally unsparing, and reading them in either order doubles the experience rather than cancelling it.

Jim Jarmusch's 2013 film casts Swinton and Tom Hiddleston as centuries-old vampires bored with modernity and sustained by literature and music. It is less interested in menace than in melancholy, and Swinton's Eve is one of cinema's most quietly convincing portraits of someone who has simply been paying attention for a very long time. The film's attitude to art, time, and human carelessness feels more relevant now than when it was made.

Luca Guadagnino's remake plays Swinton against herself in multiple roles, including a performance under heavy prosthetics as an elderly male psychoanalyst, and deploys the witch-coven premise as an argument about bodies, power, and political violence in late-1970s Germany. It is too long, too committed to its own logic, and entirely unwilling to be merely fun, which is exactly why it is essential. Fans of Swinton's later work will find it central to understanding what she is willing to do.