in Terrence Malick’s Song to Song, premiering today at SXSW, with a handful of other projects slated for release soon, including the HBO miniseries We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves and Alex Garland’s sophomore film Annihilation.

Her latest, Jackie, isn’t so much a traditional biopic, but equal parts tone poem and horror film about the days surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy from the perspective of his wife and chief architect of his legacy. In the titular role, Portman displays remarkable growth and maturity as an actress. She nails Jackie’s odd, lilting, affected voice without slipping into caricature or parody. And with great technical prowess, she fully embodies the burden of being a highly scrutinized public figure, mother, and widow reckoning with grief and regret in theshifting career tastes differently. It’s the sagacious attempt of a woman trying to shed her image. During the press cycle for Black Swan, leading up to her winning the Academy Award for Best Actress, Portman told USA Today, “I’m trying to find roles that demand more adulthood from me because you can get stuck in a very awful cute cycle as a woman in film, especially being such a small person.” Her wildly different explorations of genre, style, highbrow, lowbrow, camp, and drama can be seen as a way to break free from the narratives that place her value in relation to her youthfulness. In this light, the way Portman explores women at points of grand transition in their lives becomes a consistent theme in her work, not