Under the Skin

Jonathan Glazer decided to adapt Michel Faber's 2000 novel after finishing Sexy Beast, but Under the Skin took more than a decade to arrive. Early drafts, written first with Milo Addica and then with Walter Campbell, imagined an elaborate, effects-heavy film about two aliens posing as a farming couple, with Brad Pitt at one point attached. Glazer stripped it back to a single figure and a single perspective. The result competed for the Golden Lion at Venice in 2013, where Xan Brooks of The Guardian called it far and away the best picture of the festival.

Scarlett Johansson plays an extraterrestrial in human form who drives a van through Glasgow and the Highlands, luring lone men. She learned to drive the van and mastered an English accent; around her, most of the cast had never acted. Many of the street, nightclub and shopping-centre scenes were filmed unscripted with hidden cameras, the crew building their own rigs and asking permission from their unwitting subjects afterwards. Daniel Landin's photography alternates documentary grain with abstract, glossy darkness, and Mica Levi's score, built largely from viola and strings, is one of the most distinctive of the century, winning the European Film Award for Best Composer.

The film failed at the box office, earning just over seven million dollars against a thirteen-million budget, but its standing has only grown. Cahiers du Cinéma ranked it third in its 2014 top ten, a BBC poll of 177 critics placed it 61st among the greatest films of the 21st century, and The Guardian named it the fourth-best film since 2000. It points directly towards The Zone of Interest.