11.
I wanted to put a contemporary movie in this list and I haven’t seen Alex Garland’s new film Annihilation yet which is coming onto Netflix soon but with this one, it’s just a beautiful, beautiful, film; it’s like a three hander: it’s Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac and Alicia Vikander. It could almost be done like a play. There are some other characters, some other sort of synthetics that exist around that little threesome, but it’s mostly them; it’s so beautifully written and shot. I’ve always admired Alex Garland as a writer but he’s such an assured director. I’m not sure who his DP was but the film just looked so beautiful as well. It is a fantastic musing on the notion of Artificial Intelligence and what it means, as well as being a thriller, a horror and a romance too. It’s just a really, really great movie and I was so impressed by it when I saw it as a debut from a film maker: it’s so confident and super, super smart.
He’s written a shit tonne of stuff – he wrote 28 Days Later and I think being around those filmmakers who have a very assured aesthetic helped him. He waited until he was absolutely ready and made something that was one of the best films of that year. That year you had The Force Awakens, both of which starred Oscar and Domhnall, and at the other end of the spectrum you had Ex Machina which is a smaller but no less weighty sci-fi.
