Annual Top Films Lists

Top 100 Most Anticipated Films of 2013: # 78. Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin

Published on January 11, 2013

Under the Skin

Director: Jonathan Glazer
Writer(s): Walter Campbell
Producer(s): Nick Wechsler and James Wilson
U.S. Distributor: Rights Available
Cast: Scarlett Johansson

Re-shoots delayed this from being a 2012 release, but what’s an extra year wait in a more than eight year drought since Birth? Perhaps a distant cousin of Blade Runner, on paper, Under the Skin certainly comes across as an oddity, but where Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast) excels in as a filmmaker is outfitting societies’ fringe characters with empathetic, human-like qualities. Working with several subject themes related to humanities’ ill ways, coming out of left field, this could be the “it” film of the ’13 campaign.

Gist: Based on Michel Faber’s 2000 novel, this is about Isserley (Johansson), an extraterrestrial sent to Earth by a rich corporation on her planet to pick up unwary hitchhikers.

Release Date: Cannes is now looking increasingly ideal for the lieu of a world premiere. Theatrically this looks like a great release for the fall.

Eric Lavallée

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).