Two additions to this list (which is pretty good):
Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina. Her performance is controlled, warm when it needs to be, yet somehow alien, foreign. Her ballet training is as much the star as her acting (which is excellent), but that’s not a bad thing. Ava might be an android, but Vikander makes her breathe.
And Elle Fanning in Super 8. She is the only reason to watch that film — her stark, empathetic and wounded performance just blazes off the screen. In this film she is simply amazing and the movie also has the best example of meta-acting that I’ve ever seen (also from her, of course). She’s the best under-twenty actress out there by a long shot and her character feels like the only real one in Super 8. The movie should’ve by all rights been told from her POV.
Based on your reports, I did see Ex Machina (an idea that probably would never have occurred to me on my own).
my thoughts mostly are similar to yours think you’re a little hard on Caleb. It’s made pretty clear that there’s nothing in his background to prepare him for any kind of deep human interactions (the main reason he was chosen for the experiment) and he’s subjected to a pretty intense campaign of over-stimulation and disorientation. It’s hard for me to imagine that my reactions would be a whole lot better (besides being a lot more sceptical about everything from the start).
I’d like to believe I’d do better than Caleb, but I’m not 100% sure either — that’s one of the things that makes the movie so haunting.