Chameleons or beauties, star turns or character roles — these are the performers who have outshone all others on the big screen in the last 20 years.
We are in a golden age of acting — make that platinum — as we realised when we decided to select our favourite film performers of the past 20 years. There's no formula for choosing the best (just squabbling), and this list is both necessarily subjective and possibly scandalous in its omissions. In making our choices, we have focused on this century and looked beyond Hollywood. And while there are certainly stars in the mix and even a smattering of Oscar winners, there are also character actors and chameleons, action heroes and art-house darlings. They're 25 reasons we still love movies, maybe more than ever.
- A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis
No. 1: Denzel Washington
A.O. SCOTT: We wrangled and argued about every other slot on the list, but there was no hesitation or debate about this one.
Denzel Washington is beyond category: a screen titan who is also a subtle and sensitive craftsman, with serious old-school stage training and blazing movie-star presence. He can do Shakespeare and August Wilson, villainy or action heroism. He's also one of the supreme regular-guy actors. Who can forget his embattled working stiffs in Unstoppable (2010) and The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009), a pair of big, noisy train-themed movies directed by Tony Scott? Neither one is a masterpiece, but I never get tired of watching Washington on the job.
MANOHLA DARGIS: He makes the job — by which I mean acting — look like breathing. There's a reason he was perfect as Easy Rawlins in Devil in a Blue Dress, an early defining role. Since then, he has played a lot of characters who embody law or criminality, and some who exist in the space dividing the two. Along the way, he has become the dominant totem of a certain kind of male authority, like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood before him. Washington can express anguished vulnerability, but he can tower like a colossus, looming over worlds like an Old Testament patriarch — it's extraordinary given the representations of Black masculinity onscreen not long ago.
SCOTT: That authority is credible even when the movies are ... less so. The Book of Eli (2010)? The Equalizer (2014)? Man on Fire (2004)? One of the things I love most about him is how magnificently he plays men who don't seem to require or even deserve love. Think of Whip Whitaker in Flight (2012), a prodigiously skilled airline pilot who is also an epic train wreck. Not a nice guy, but as full and complex and vividly realised a human being as you will ever see on a movie screen.
DARGIS: Like all stars, Washington's acting feels inextricable with his charisma, a combination that's seductive but can overwhelm movies, like Antoine Fuqua's violent potboiler Training Day (2001). Washington is sensational as a bad detective: He's loose, sexy, frightening but so much bigger than life that he shrinks the movie. In Flight, his magnetism deepens his character's tragedy; it gives his walk swagger, yet it's also part of his crumbling facade. Few roles give Washington as much to work with, certainly not the movies with two of his favorite directors, Fuqua and Scott, who create a lot of commotion that Washington settles into — and centers — very comfortably.
SCOTT: Maybe one measure of his mightiness is how consistently he's better than the movies he's in. Amid the extensive run of excellent work — the coaches and cops, the gangsters and lawyers — there are a few monuments that show this towering talent in full. Malcolm X is one, and Troy Maxson in Fences (2016) is another. There is so much pain and pride in that performance, which somehow measures the weight of American racism on a single person's body and soul, without turning that person into a symbol of anything. The way Washington walks into that movie, his shoulders swinging with an athlete's power, his frame dented by a lifetime of toil, is a moment of pure carnal eloquence, matched by the stream of vernacular poetry that comes out of his mouth.
DARGIS: Well, transcending your movie has long been a hallmark of real stardom! Actors choose roles for all sorts of reasons — age, schedule, taste, comfort, pay — and race matters, always. Washington likes playing goal-oriented characters and men who make a serious impression, with a gun, physical extremes or words. He likes to go big. He could make art films and provocative little indies but doesn't. Maybe he isn't interested; certainly he doesn't need to. He is Denzel Washington, after all, a star whose career — in its longevity and dominance — is a corrective and rebuke to the racist industry in which he works. I imagine that he's doing exactly want he wants.
No. 2: Isabelle Huppert
DARGIS: Fearless and mesmerising, sometimes scary, sometimes freakish, Isabelle Huppert has taken on an astonishment of roles over her career, moving effortlessly from tears to shrieks, from the straightest stories to the most gloriously unhinged. She's acted in more than 50 movies this century alone, industriousness that speaks to her ambition and popularity, but also suggests a ravenous hunger that you can see in her acting. I love many of her performances, but I am especially captivated by her monsters, by her horrifying, unspeakable women.
SCOTT: Did somebody say The Piano Teacher? That 2002 movie is a terrifying tour de force of lust, cruelty, masochism and musicianship. The title character, Erika Kohut, becomes obsessed with a student, and Huppert performs her descent into madness with icy precision and operatic intensity. Are we scared for her, or scared of her?
Huppert is a virtuoso at that kind of ambiguity, at scrambling the usual codes about feminine vulnerability and feminist self-assertion, at defying assumptions about the sources of a woman's toughness and fragility. One of my favourite examples is in Claude Chabrol's Comedy of Power (2007), in which she plays a magistrate rooting out corruption in France's political and business elite and taking on a powerfully entrenched old-boy network. The character's name is Jeanne Charmant Killman, which may seem a little on the nose but which also captures some of Huppert's graceful, lethal appeal.
DARGIS: The roles Huppert has been offered and those she's sought out have been instrumental in her creation. And early in her career, she worked with filmmakers — Jean-Luc Godard, Maurice Pialat and, of course, Chabrol — who gave her creative space in which to develop. She could never have had a comparable career in American movies (I shudder at the idea of her debuting at Sundance), where characters are rarely ambiguous and often shaped by bland imperatives like relatability and redemption.
Huppert is known for embracing extremes, though I see this as an interest in the fullness of existence, including the disgusting and the taboo. Her characters boil over with life, some of it ugly, as in Elle (2016), Paul Verhoeven's provocation about trauma and psychosis. The actress always surprises (I suspect that she would get bored otherwise), but here, as a woman who confronts male violence, Huppert does something that rarely happens in movies: She shocks. With lacerating wit — her weird smiles mock the audience's pieties — she turns the mystery of another person into a thriller. I love that she forces me to look even when I don't want to.
SCOTT: Did somebody say Greta? That was a wan little 2019 thriller in which Huppert played a psycho-mommy stalker preying on a dewy-eyed college student played by Chloë Grace Moretz. I bring it up only because the kind of mystery you refer to — the volatile compound of wit, charm and will — dominates that movie, which Huppert makes more intriguing than it has any right to be. Funnier and scarier.
There's no one else with her combination of intensity and restraint. This comes through especially in films where her character is involved in an all-out struggle for survival, like Claire Denis' White Material (2010). Huppert plays a French plantation owner clinging to the last bit of colonial privilege in an African country convulsed by violence. She knows that her life is in danger, that her way of life is slipping away, and also that in the larger historical scheme of things, she may well deserve her fate. There's no self-pity here and barely any drama in the conventional sense. Just pure nerve.
No. 3: Daniel Day-Lewis
At the start of There Will Be Blood (2007), a man in a deep, dark hole rhythmically strikes the wall with a pickax, sending up sparks and dust. It's so dim that you can't make out his face, but his pale shirt draws your eyes and throws the contours of his powerful arms and their machinelike movements into relief. You only fully see him when he lifts his head to look up at the sky, causing light to flood his face. Behold, the man — behold, Daniel Day-Lewis!
It's an introduction as iconic, as character defining and star shaping as Rita Hayworth's in Gilda. It also works as a nice metaphor for the painstaking act of Day-Lewis' creative process, the building of his characters. As Daniel Plainview, Day-Lewis isn't merely playing the protagonist; he is giving human shape to the filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson's ideas and art. Plainview is many things: man, machine, a terrible father, a rapacious oilman. He is also the manifestation of the ruinous substance — the "ocean of oil" — that he violently wrests from the earth.
Day-Lewis is one of the most revered actors of the past half-century, a reputation based on his dazzling filmography and burnished by an aura of greatness that has grown to near-mystical proportions. His well-publicised preparations for his roles and his insistence on staying in character during production have become legendary, the stuff of excited headlines and fan fetishism. His repeated retirement announcements have only expanded his aura, and so has his selectivity: He has made just six movies this century, some masterworks. Like the exotic century plant, an agave that blooms spectacularly only once, Day-Lewis knows both how to tease us and put on a show.
The lore that has built around him is, to an extent, just a Method-era version of the mythification that has always been part of the creation of stardom. What sometimes goes missing is that reading more than 100 books to prepare for the title role of Lincoln (2012) is work, part of how an actor prepares. All that labor and those books are a reminder that acting is also a job, not magic, even when an actor's performance seems or, rather, feels alchemical. Part of Day-Lewis' talent is his tremendous ability to turn hard work into a character that fluently serves a director's vision.
Much depends on that vision. And it's at this point that I must regretfully mention Nine" (2009), a catastrophic folly that Day-Lewis serves diligently but cannot rescue. In Gangs of New York (2002), by contrast, his performance as Bill the Butcher is the apotheosis of that film's ambitions, so when he's not onscreen, the picture sputters. Day-Lewis' art is one of osmosis between him and his directors. And to date, his most fully rendered performances have been in the two films he has made with Anderson, most recently Phantom Thread (2017), whose beauties, depths and idiosyncrasies Day-Lewis' absorbs, transforms and brilliantly refracts.
-Manola Dargis
No. 4: Keanu Reeves
Maybe you're surprised to find Keanu Reeves so high on this list. But ask yourself: Have you ever been disappointed when he showed up in a movie? Can you name one film that has not been improved by his presence? We're talking about Ted Logan here. About Neo. John Wick. Diane Keaton's also-ran love interest in Something's Gotta Give (2003). Ali Wong's also-ran love interest — a guy named Keanu Reeves! — in Always Be My Maybe (2019). Surely there is not another movie star who exhibits so much range while remaining so irreducibly and inscrutably himself.
But he has been curiously easy to underestimate. Like so much else in the '90s, the appreciation of Keanu Reeves in the first phases of his career was hedged with irony. It was too easy to make fun of the blank, earnest confusion that defined his characters in Point Break, The Devil's Advocate and the Matrix movies, to project their blankness onto him, to suppose that his still waters ran shallow.
He was always in on the joke, though. And never entirely joking. In middle age, he has risen to a new level of achievement, a zone where artlessness and self-consciousness converge. He's one of our most credible action heroes, and also one of our most resourceful and inventive character actors. He has weathered beautifully, becoming at once sadder and more playful without losing the otherworldly innocence that was there from the start.
Is the melancholy, uxorious, dog-loving assassin in the John Wick movies a genre put-on, a paycheck gig, a midlife action workout? Probably. Of course. With (let's say) Gerard Butler in the title role they would be slick, nasty throwaways. What Reeves does is give the franchise more gravity than it deserves, more humour than it needs, and the soul that it otherwise comprehensively lacks.
One of the delights of movie watching in the past decade has been encountering him in unexpected guises. As some kind of post-apocalyptic cult leader known as the Dream in The Bad Batch, Ana Lily Amirpour's 2017 crusty dystopian fantasia. As the chalk to Winona Ryder's cheese in Victor Levin's abrasive anti-rom-com Destination Wedding (2018). As the voice of a cat named Keanu in Keanu (2016).
There is more to the man than the sum of these parts, which are puzzles and koans, chapters in a perpetually updated manual in meta-modern movie stardom as a way of being. He's not a perfectionist. He's perfection itself. We were told a long time ago, and now maybe we can finally believe it: He's the One.
A.O. Scott
No. 5: Nicole Kidman
Artist, princess, writer, muse — Nicole Kidman has played them all, with short hair and long, a prodigious artificial schnoz and a fantastically jutting chin. She can smile like the sun and weep with enough tears that you want to hand her a box of tissues. In mainstream cinema, realism is an actor's coin in trade, an aesthetic choice that helps turn artifice into something like life. For Kidman, a miniaturist with a lapidary touch, creating that realism sometimes involves obscuring the beauty (for the role, not awards) that has long defined her. It also means consistently playing with femininity.
Kidman entered the 21st century at the height of her stardom with Moulin Rouge! (2001). This was followed by a handful of other high-profile vehicles, most notably The Hours (2002), in which she played Virginia Woolf (cue the schnoz) and snared her an Oscar. It was a polite yawn of a movie that Kidman followed by starring in Lars von Trier's Dogville (2004), a calculatingly abrasive Brechtian exercise in which her character, after being abused, picks up a gun and helps destroy a town. Kidman seemed to really enjoy that bit.
She's made more than 40 movies since, some memorable and a number that are best forgotten. Like that of other actresses, Kidman's celebrity has at times outstripped her bankability, creating a fame that has less to do with the box office and more to do with a starry persona sustained by red-carpet mileage and a glut of fashion-magazine covers. Some years, the movies came and went almost without notice. Still, Kidman kept steadily working and continued elevating negligible material, pushing herself even when the movies didn't. She has also played a whole lot of mothers, a necessary survival strategy in a world as creatively unimaginative as the movie industry.
One pleasure of a virtuosic performer is watching them rise above their material. Kidman has done so repeatedly, including in Birth (2004), in which she plays a widow who comes to believe that a 10-year-old boy is the reincarnation of her dead husband. It's pretentious twaddle that Kidman graces with delicacy and pinpricks of emotion. She's flat-out glorious in The Paperboy (2012), a delectably vulgar whatsit in which she outshines a showboating male cohort, alternately urinating on Zac Efron and tearing her pantyhose in an orgiastic frenzy over John Cusack.
More recently, Kidman starred in Destroyer (2018), a harsh thriller from Karyn Kusama about a detective's long downward spiral. Kidman goes big and brutal — punching and running and gunning and drinking to wild excess — to play a middle-aged ruin whose terrible choices are etched in every crease and blotch in her hard face. The movie flopped, perhaps because it was too ugly for today's audiences or maybe it all seemed too down-market for one of Vogue magazine's favorite cover girls. But Kidman is brilliant, cold, raw and true. Even with her face obscured almost beyond recognition, she remains undeniable. You can't take your eyes off her. You never can.
- Manohla Dagis
No. 6: Song Kang Ho
Korean actor Song Kang Ho probably first came to the attention of most American audiences in the 2020 best-picture Oscar winner, Parasite, playing an impoverished, conniving patriarch. That was his fourth collaboration with director Bong Joon Ho, and we asked the filmmaker to explain why he has cast the star again and again.
I first saw Song Kang Ho in Green Fish, the director Lee Chang-dong's feature debut. He played a rural, small-time gangster, and his performance was so stunningly realistic that a rumor circulated among directors that he was an actual thug. I later learned that he was an actor who had been active in the Daehak-ro theater scene for a long time.
Although I was a first assistant director at the time and not yet a director, I wanted to meet him. So I invited him to the office for coffee in 1997. It was more of a casual conversation than an audition, but I could tell that he had the makings of a juggernaut.
When I was writing my second film, Memories of Murder (2005), I had Song firmly in mind to play the country detective who is stuck in his old ways and has blind faith in his instincts. Because he was born for the role and it was made for him.
[Whether in Memories of a Murder, The Host (2007), Snowpiercer (2014) or Parasite] it always feels like there will be a new layer to uncover. He's like a canvas that grows and grows. No matter how many brush strokes I apply, there's always more space to paint. I'm still eager to see what he will bring to a role. To me, he's like an inexhaustible diamond mine. Whether I've done four movies with him or 40, I know I will unearth a new character.
He has the ability to bring life and rawness to every moment. Even if a scene involves difficult dialogue or highly technical camerawork, he will find a way to make it seamless and spontaneous. Each take will be different, and the unwieldiest dialogue will seem like improvisation. It's astounding and a pleasure to witness.
His uniqueness as a protagonist comes from his ordinariness and mundaneness. Especially to the Korean audience, Song projects the quality of the typical Korean working man, a neighbor or friend you might encounter in your neighbourhood. So they are even more engrossed when they see this seemingly everyday character confronted by a monster or a monstrous situation in movies like The Host or Parasite.
He starts from the ordinary and elevates it into a singular and inimitable voice. I believe that's what makes Song Kang Ho and the characters he inhabits genuinely special.
- Bong Joon Ho, interviewed by Candice Frederick
No. 7: Toni Servillo
Toni Servillo is probably best known to American audiences for The Great Beauty (2013), Paolo Sorrentino's Oscar-winning tour of the decadent ways of the modern Roman cultural elite. That movie is what Pauline Kael called a "come dressed as the sick soul of Europe" party, starring Servillo, playing a writer of slim accomplishment and large reputation, as the master of revels. With his handsome, creased face and impeccable haberdashery, Servillo recalls a more established version of the social butterfly Marcello Mastroianni played in La Dolce Vita — a detached, vaguely depressed participant-observer in a swirling spectacle of hedonism.
If you pull at the thread of Servillo's collaboration with Sorrentino, you find something more intriguing and substantial than beauty. The two have worked together on five features, including Sorrentino's directorial debut, One Man Up, and have developed a symbiosis that recalls some of the great actor-director partnerships of the past: Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro; Vittorio De Sica and Sophia Loren; John Ford and John Wayne.
Such analogies are insufficient. Servillo has been the central avatar in Sorrentino's excavation of the corruption and hypocrisy — but also the improbable glory and absurd resilience — of modern Italy. In particular, he has incarnated two of the most powerful and polarising real-life political leaders in the country's recent history: Giulio Andreotti (in the scabrous and satirical Il Divo, 2009) and Silvio Berlusconi (in the epic and weirdly tender Loro, 2019).
Appreciating the scale of this accomplishment requires another round of analogies. Imagine if the same actor were cast as both Richard Nixon and Barack Obama, or Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. Andreotti, a seven-time prime minister and a prime mover in the long-ruling Christian Democratic Party, was a notorious back-room operator, shrewd and almost defiantly uncharismatic. Berlusconi, also a serial prime minister, was all bluster and charm, repellently sleazy to some Italians and endlessly magnetic to others.
Neither Il Divo nor Loro is a conventional biopic, and Sorrentino is no realist. These movies revel in the theater of power, and Servillo, in grotesquely artificial makeup, sometimes resembles a puppet or a political cartoon. He emphasizes Andreotti's reptilian guile and secret vanity, and Berlusconi's glibness and self-pity. Even if you aren't versed in the seamy lore of Italian politics, you can feel the wild comic energy of these performances, and the moral fire behind them. These are actual people! These things — murders, bribes, double-crosses, orgies — really happened!
But what Servillo is doing is more than just superior sketch-comedy satire. Like a Shakespearean actor delving into the majesty and monstrosity of ancient or imaginary kings, he makes vivid the extravagant humanity — and the deep mystery — of men who live to bend the world to their will. He also captures their loneliness.
- A.O. Scott
No. 8: Zhao Tao
DARGIS: Since 2000, Chinese actress Zhao Tao and director Jia Zhangke have made more than a dozen features and shorts, dramas and documentaries as well as work that resists such neat categorisation. Their filmmaking alliance is so holistic and familiar that it is hard to imagine what these movies would look like without Zhao's face and grounding presence. She's often called his muse (they're married), but that doesn't come close to capturing the richness of her contribution — its poetry, symbolism and emotional granularity.
In Jia's movies, people do a whole lot of walking and no one has clocked more miles than Zhao, often in real time. A former dance teacher, Zhao moves with poise and fluidity, whether her characters stroll down a hall (The World in 2005) or wander a derelict school (24 City in 2009). In Still Life (2008), Zhao plays Shen Hong, who's looking for her husband in an ancient town that's going to be flooded for a controversial dam. Shen Hong is often seen in medium and long shot, but when someone asks if she's in a hurry, Jia cuts to her in close-up. "Not really," she says, her face filling with regret or perhaps memories right before she walks out the door.
Jia's many travellers are mapping China story by story, whatever their literal or metaphoric destination. Maybe that's why Zhao's posture seems so striking. Even when her characters drift, they do so with straight backs.
SCOTT: The ongoing transformation of China — its fashion, its music, its economy, its architecture and topography — is Jia's all-consuming subject, and Zhao is its avatar and test case. She is a kind of Everywoman, which is to say that she embodies many different women, sometimes within the space of a single movie.
In Ash Is Purest White (2019), she plays Qiao, who starts out as part of a gangster couple in the northern industrial city of Datong. She and her lover, Bin, are fearless and glamorous, even as Qiao is connected through her father to an older world of workers' councils and proletarian toughness. It's the early 2000s, and everything about Qiao — her hair, her clothes, the way she strides through gleaming nightclubs and battered factories — expresses confidence in modernity and her place in it.
Then everything falls apart. Her loyalty to Bin lands her in prison, and when she is released he is gone. Her travels, by boat, foot, motorbike and train, take her on a long grueling odyssey back to where she started. Her suffering is relentless, but her stoicism makes it almost comical at times, as if she were simultaneously the heroine of an old Hollywood melodrama and the protagonist of a Samuel Beckett play. The performance is a marvel of endurance, rooted in the earth but somehow also larger than life.
No. 9: Viola Davis
Viola Davis has worked with Denzel Washington several times in the last 20 years — whether he was the director (Antwone Fisher, 2002), star (playing Troy Maxson to her Rose Maxson in the August Wilson family drama Fences on Broadway and then on film in 2016) or producer (he cast her in the title role in the forthcoming Wilson jazz drama Ma Rainey's Black Bottom). We asked him to explain what makes her so tremendous.
I knew that she was a great actress going back to when she auditioned for Antwone Fisher 20 years ago. I experienced her power, her strength and her talent [during the shoot]. She came in ready, in character, and I basically just left her alone. It was really nothing to say to her but "Thank you" and "Let's do one more."
She's a once-in-a-generation talent. You don't always know that right away, but we've all experienced it now over time. When I was with her in the play [Fences] even in rehearsal it was like, "Oh, OK, she's a powerhouse." She has a big scene when she finally unloads on Troy; about the third week of rehearsal she showed where she was going. And I was like, "I better catch up with her. I've got to concentrate."
We had tremendous success, so there was never a question about who was going to play the role in the movie. And a powerful, strong woman, and humble. The director [George C. Wolfe] had to convince her [on Ma in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom]. I did, too. She was like, "I can't sing. I don't have any rhythm," all that kind of stuff.
I trust her completely. Why does someone want to play in a band with Miles Davis? Because he's a great collaborator, innovator, artist. She's the same thing. She can do whatever she wants. She's got that much ability. She's one of the best interpreters of material that I've had the opportunity to collaborate with.
-Denzel Washington, Interview by Candice Frederick
No. 10: Saoirse Ronan
How many different ways can one person come of age? Growing up is a lot of what young people do in movies, but few actors have been doing it for so long, or with such nuance, intelligence and variety as Saoirse Ronan. She has been maturing in front of our eyes for more than half her life (she's 26) becoming wiser, sadder, freer and more herself in each new role.
Of course, it's mostly the characters who undergo those changes. Eilis Lacey (Brooklyn, 2015) finds love and independence in her new home; Christine McPherson (Lady Bird, 2017) learns to appreciate her mother; Jo March (Little Women, 2019) finds her voice as a writer. Ronan herself, inhabiting these women and girls in all their particularity, has been almost unnervingly consistent, in full, disciplined command of her gifts right from the start.
In Atonement, her breakout performance from 2007, she played Briony Tallis, a perceptive 13-year-old who thinks she understands more about the adult world than she does. Ronan doesn't only match Briony's precociousness; she also communicates the volatile mixture of childish insecurity and romantic jealousy that makes this heedless, needy, half-innocent girl feel genuinely dangerous.
And that sense of danger persists, whether her character is vulnerable (as in The Lovely Bones, 2009) or violent (as in Hanna, 2011). Even when she's in becalmed period dramas or gentle comedies of domestic life, Ronan brings a quicksilver precision that is thrilling and a little unsettling to watch. This is because as much as she captures the emotional weather and specific body language of, say, a 16th-century Scottish queen or a 21st-century California teenager, what she conveys even more vividly is the way those people think, the way it feels to be inside their heads.
That may sound like a cerebral, intellectualised approach to acting, but it's really the opposite. The most radical and revelatory ambition an actor can conceive is to inhabit another consciousness, and to bring the audience along on that parapsychological journey. This is more than just disappearing into a role, or methodically activating parallel memories. It's a kind of self-authorised rebirth, as if Athena could spring not from her father's forehead, but her own. It can be terrifying to witness, but genius often is.
-A.O. Scott
No. 11: Julianne Moore
SCOTT: The unhappy American housewife — smiling to keep up appearances in the face of domestic tragedy and inner turmoil — is a durable movie archetype. It's one that Julianne Moore has both explored and exploded, in The Hours (2002) and especially in her collaborations with Todd Haynes like Far From Heaven (2002).
That film is set in Connecticut in the 1950s, but it's a pointedly stylized landscape, evocative of the Hollywood melodramas of that period. Cathy and Frank Whitaker (Moore and Dennis Quaid) are each pulled away from their stifling marriage by forbidden desires: Frank for other men, Cathy for Raymond Deagan, a Black landscaper (Dennis Haysbert). These transgressions aren't symmetrical or intersectional. In their heartbreak, humiliation and longing, Frank and Cathy have no consolation to offer each other.
Moore could have placed Cathy's anguish in quotation marks, evoking the suffering divas of '50s cinema while winking at a modern audience contemplating the bad old days from a safe aesthetic distance. Instead, she goes all the way in, staring out from the soul of a woman who is rooted in her time and absolutely modern, trapped by rules and appearances and also — terrifyingly and thrillingly — free.
DARGIS: Unhappy or not, wives can be dead ends for actresses and for too many there comes that time when they've been forever banished to the kitchen. Moore has played plenty of wives and mothers, but hers are sometimes more complex and surprising than her movies, an index of her sensitivities and talent. One reason she lifts her characters out of stereotype is that she plays with codes of realism, whether she's delivering a naturalistic performance (Still Alice, the 2014 melodrama about a professor with Alzheimer's) or a hyperbolic one (David Cronenberg's 2015 satire Maps to the Stars, where she's a Hollywood hyena). Moore can externalise a character's interior state beautifully, so you see feelings surface on her skin. But she's an artist of extremes, and she and Cronenberg have fun playing with her gargoyle faces.
For the most part, her work in Gloria Bell (2019) is in a realist key. She plays the title character, a generous-hearted divorced insurance worker with two adult children, an ex she doesn't hate and an achingly lonely apartment. The movie itself is modest, intimate, thoughtful and rich in human detail. Gloria starts an affair with a man. It goes badly, they break up. Not much happens in ordinary movie terms, yet everything happens because Gloria loves and is loved in turn. It's a story that could have led to buckets of snot and empty showboating. But Moore and director Sebastián Lelio transcend obviousness. They don't merely create a story about a woman's feelings — and being — as she falls in love; they create a landscape of emotions, the texture and shape of a sensibility. Moore's Gloria doesn't cry and laugh; she shows you what love looks like from the inside. It's a miracle of a performance.
No. 12: Joaquin Phoenix
Joaquin Phoenix has appeared in four of director James Gray's movies, starting with The Yards in 2000 and including We Own the Night (2007), Two Lovers (2009) and The Immigrant (2014). We asked Gray to explain how the actor has expanded — and improved — on his own vision.
When I saw To Die For, I said, "That actor" — I didn't even know his name yet — "is unbelievably good at conveying his internal life without dialogue." That's a really important thing in cinema, because the camera reveals everything. Here was an actor who had so much going on and you could tell. I thought: "That's a very interesting actor. I'd love to meet him." And I did.
We were on the same wavelength, instantly. We liked the same things. We thought about things the same way. And I just immediately liked him. He had that dimensionality to him. The first film we did together [The Yards], I'm sure that I pissed him off a lot. I have a very direct way. Sometimes that's good and sometimes it's not so good. I'm better at it now. Let's just say that I wasn't always willing to say, "Yeah, that's interesting, but let's try this." I was more into, "Joaq, what are you doing? That sucks, try another one." And I know I would frustrate him because his talent was so vast.
He has a limitless ability to surprise you in the best ways and inspire you to move in a direction that you haven't thought of originally, better than what you have in mind, and expands the idea. He's extremely inventive. He's always thinking and actually has gotten more so over the years. I've never said, "I want my vision on the screen." I want something better than that. You want to lay down the parameters of what it is you have in mind, and then surround yourself with people who will make it all more beautiful. Not different, necessarily, but more intense, more vivid.
You want the actor to surprise you, and to do so in a way that seems consistent with the character but also very interesting. Joaquin was absolutely fantastic at that. That's inspiring. You don't know what to expect in the best sense. Joaquin Phoenix is one of the best things that's ever happened to me.
If I have any regret at all, it would be that he's not in every single movie I made.
- James Gray, Interview by Candice Frederick
No. 13: Tilda Swinton
DARGIS: The woman of a thousand otherworldly faces, Tilda Swinton has created enough personas — with untold wigs, costumes and accents — to have become a roster of one. She's a star, a character actor, a performance artist, an extraterrestrial, a trickster. Her pale, sharply planed face is an ideal canvas for paint and prosthetics, and capable of unnerving stillness. You want to read her but can't. That helps make her a terrific villain, whether she's playing a demon, a queen or a corporate lawyer. In Julia (2009), she drops that wall to play an out-of-control alcoholic and child-snatcher, giving a full-throttled performance that is so visceral and transparent that you can see the character's thoughts furiously at work, like little parasites moving under the skin.
SCOTT: We like to praise actors for "range," but that's an almost laughably inadequate word for the radical shape-shifting that Swinton accomplishes. Just look at one strand of her career: her work with Luca Guadagnino, a filmmaker who shares her delight in self-reinvention. In I Am Love (2010) she played the Russian wife of an Italian aristocrat, giving a performance in two languages and in the key of pure melodramatic heartbreak. In A Bigger Splash (2016) she had barely any language at all: She decided that it would be interesting if her glam-rock diva character had been struck mute by throat surgery. In Suspiria (2018) she executed one of her many self-doublings, appearing as a member of a balletomaniac coven of witches and also as an elderly male Holocaust survivor.
DARGIS: That doubling shapes her most androgynous performances, where she effortlessly blurs gender, confirming (yet again) the inadequacy of categories like "man" and "woman." She's both; she's neither. A different doubling happens when she plays twins, in the 2016 Hail, Caesar (as rival gossip columnists) and in Okja the next year (as visually distinct very cruel captains of industry). In each, Swinton shows us two sides of the same person, much as she does in Michael Clayton (2007) when her lawyer rehearses a duplicitous spiel in front of a mirror. As the lawyer talks, pauses and drops her smile, you see her desperately trying to control a reflection that is already cracking.
SCOTT: Those roles can be theatrical, but they almost never feel gimmicky. Swinton has roots in an avant-garde tradition — earlier in her career, she worked with Derek Jarman and Sally Potter — that emphasizes the mutability of identity and the blurred boundaries between artifice and authenticity. Over the past 20 years she has brought some of the intellectual rigor and conceptual daring of that work to Hollywood and beyond. She's not only a uniquely exciting performer, but also one of the great living theorists of performance.
No. 14: Oscar Isaac
SCOTT: While I can take or leave the recent Star Wars movies, I do have a fondness for some of the characters, in particular Poe Dameron, the resistance flyboy who is the third trilogy's designated charmer. As Poe, Oscar Isaac is an appealing, easygoing presence in those movies, a guy who seems to know what he's doing.
His characters aren't always as lucky, or as sure of themselves, but the man himself operates with the precision of someone who is confident enough in his skills to push himself into risky new territory. The summer before Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) was released, Joel and Ethan Coen told us that they had originally wanted to cast a well-known musician in the title role. Instead, they found Isaac, who told them (according to Joel) that "most actors, if you ask them if they play guitar, they'll say they played guitar for 20 years, but what they really mean is they've owned a guitar for 20 years." Isaac could actually play. When I think about what makes him so credible as an actor, that's the first thing that comes to mind. Not because it's such a big deal to play guitar, but because whatever Isaac is pretending to do onscreen — selling heating oil (in the underrated A Most Violent Year, (2014); inventing sexy robots (in Ex Machina); flying X-wing fighters — I always believe that he really knows how to do it, and that I'm watching some kind of authentic mastery in action.
DARGIS: When actors make a profound first impression, they sometimes get bound up with your ideas about what they can do. After Llewyn Davis, I associated Isaac with soulful defeat, with an undercurrent of grudging resentment. A few other roles shored up this idea of his innate mournfulness, including his performance as a besieged mayor in the HBO series Show Me a Hero (2015). This partly has to do with his broody, romantic looks and how his brows frame his luxuriously lashed eyes. And then there's his voice, its pretty sound but also how its resonance creates intimacy. Even when he puts nasal in it, his voice retains a quality of closeness, one reason it often feels, sounds, like Llewyn is singing more for himself than the audience. Isaac's voice also softens his beauty, drawing you in. Sometimes, though, as in Ex Machina, he uses that intimacy for something insinuating, sinister.
Isaac has a supporting role in Ex Machina (2015), but he's vital to its vibe and power. He plays Nathan, a Dr. Frankenstein-like tech billionaire involved in artificial intelligence who's building (and destroying) beautiful female androids. A savagely critical stand-in for today's masters of the digital universe, Nathan could easily have dominated the movie. Isaac instead keeps his own charm in check, letting the character's creepiness poison the air. Nathan's mercurial moods and surprising looks — his shaved head and full beard, eyeglasses and cut muscles — make it difficult to get a bead on him. But when he suddenly boogies down, executing an amazing dance, Isaac lays bare all you need to know about Nathan in the geometric precision of his choreographed moves and the madness in his eyes. It's 30 seconds of pure genius.
No. 15: Michael B. Jordan
Michael B. Jordan has played lawyers, athletes and superheroes, but even before his range became clear, director Ryan Coogler wanted to work with him. Coogler has made three features (Fruitvale Station, Creed and Black Panther) and Jordan stars or co-stars in all of them. We asked the director to explain just what it is about the actor that draws us in.
I met Mike in 2012 when I was doing research and working on the script for Fruitvale. He was who I decided would be best for the role before I met him, based on the other work that I'd seen him do — a couple of movies that year, Red Tails and Chronicle, and a bunch of stuff in the TV space. But I thought that he could play Oscar. He looked like him, but also what I saw was this ability to make you empathize with him. Not all actors have this thing, when you immediately care about somebody right offhand and that triggers an empathetic reaction. He had that. He also has a very advanced tool kit as an actor.
He's been in all the feature films I've done. And I keep casting him because he's the best person for the job. Creed [2015] had another character I thought he could play well. Before Mike was an actor, he was an athlete, back in elementary school and high school. He had played athletes on TV, the most famous being on Friday Night Lights, so some of the things we knew his character would have to do in Creed, Mike felt right for it. It was a part of him that wasn't a big reach.
And [in] Black Panther [2018], with him and Chadwick facing off and going toe to toe, it felt like an event. Their stars were rising. They were both leading men by the time we shot that movie.
Now, what's exciting about us getting older in the industry is getting to work together in different capacities. He's doing a lot of stuff behind the camera now. And we have some opportunities to work together beyond actor and director.
He's very ambitious in a way that's endearing. He always wants to push and challenge himself further. And that comes across in his performances, but also in the business sense. That ambition keeps him open-minded. He watches everything and doesn't want to cut himself off from certain genres or opportunities. So I think the sky's the limit for him and his career.
Ryan Coogler, Interview by Mekado Murphy
No. 16: Kim Min-hee
In Hong Sang-soo's Right Now, Wrong Then (2016), a woman and man meet. They drink and drink some more and testily part ways only to meet in the movie's second half as if for the very first time, a setup that evokes Groundhog Day. Once again, they go to a cafe, a studio, a restaurant. Yet while their actions generally remain the same, as does the overall arc of the evening, enough has changed — how they look at each other, the inflections in their voices — to turn this second encounter into something different.
Kim Min-hee's exquisitely nuanced performance is at the center of the movie, and the actress herself has been at the heart of Hong's work ever since, appearing in most of his ensuing movies. An established art-house auteur, Hong tells modestly scaled stories that are formally playful, sensitive to human imperfection and drenched in soju. Familiar things happen, sometimes unfamiliarly. Repetition is often a narrative focus, one that is grounded in life and beautifully served by Kim's lucid expressivity.
In Hong's minimalist canon, life is condensed in everyday moments, in conversations and the way bodies lean toward one another. The differences in the two halves of "Right Now, Wrong Then" reveal new facets of the characters and create new tensions between them. They also give free rein to Kim's range, allowing her to play with intonation, gestures, flickering looks. Yet while the movie's two sections feel like variations of the same story, her performance feels more as if it's coalescing as — smile by smile, with deflected and fixed gazes — Kim gathers the character into a whole.
She went for baroque in Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden (2016), her best-known movie. In this outlandish, often perversely funny drama set in Korea in the 1930s, she plays a Japanese noble who's saved from her deviant uncle by her wiles and by another woman. The story's flamboyant excesses and narrative twists allow Kim to use every tool in her workbox. She goes big and small, veers from monstrous to mousy, and alternately hides her character's feelings and lets them run amok. Her body rocks and her face distorts as fear and pain give way to ecstasy and release. The character is a mystery that the movie teases but that Kim deliriously unlocks.
- Manohla Dargis
No. 17: Alfre Woodard
In a just world, there would be a bursting roster of great performances to fill this entry, a collection of matriarchs, romantic heroines, divas and villains to reflect the full range of Alfre Woodard's gifts. Such roles are always in short supply for Black women, but even in small parts in minor movies or television series, Woodard is an unforgettable presence, at once regal and utterly real.
The two films that have given her the most room — Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave (2013) and Chinonye Chukwu's Clemency (2019) — both place the question of justice front and centre. In each, Woodard must assert her character's dignity and ethical integrity in the face of impossibly cruel circumstances. Bernadine Williams, the prison warden in Clemency whose job includes supervising executions, finds her professionalism increasingly at odds with her humanity. In 12 Years, Mistress Shaw, an enslaved woman whose relationship with a plantation owner has brought her a measure of privilege, has bargained with a system built on her dehumanisation.
The contradictions that Bernadine and Mistress Shaw contend with are larger than any individual. What Woodard does is make them personal. Self-control is a matter of survival, and Woodard sets her face into a picture of proper decorum, impersonating the genteel Southern lady or the efficient bureaucrat that the situation requires. She doesn't so much let the masks slip — except perhaps in the devastating final scenes of Clemency — as show the cost and care that go into wearing them. The characters are also performing, playing their roles for mortal stakes, and Woodard's art, her commitment to truth, is what you see in the space between how they seem and who they are.
- A.O. Scott
No. 18: Willem Dafoe
Willem Dafoe has been a vital presence in movies as different as Shadow of the Vampire (2000) and The Florida Project (2017), for which he received Oscar nominations. He was also nominated for playing van Gogh in Julian Schnabel's biopic, At Eternity's Gate (2018). We asked Schnabel why he turned to Dafoe.
Willem and I met more than 30 years ago. He has always lived in the neighbourhood, and we had a lot of friends in common. Oliver Stone was shooting The Doors in New York, and we were standing around the set one night and that was the first time we really started to talk.
One thing that's super-important is he's a very generous actor. He cares about other people's performances and about helping them by being available in whatever he is doing. He's very, very loyal and very, very smart. If you've got somebody who's smart, they can make it better.
[For At Eternity's Gate] I needed somebody that would have the depth of character to play van Gogh. And it wasn't about just looking like him. It was somebody that could have enough life experience to be that guy. People thought, well, Willem is 60 years old, van Gogh was 37 when he died. That was irrelevant to me. You just have to have a hunch about trusting somebody and thinking that they can do something. I trust Willem implicitly. And that level of trust goes both ways.
There's stuff we shot in Arles after he arrived that we couldn't use. He was wearing the same clothes, had the same hairdo, but he wasn't the guy yet. Then there was a certain moment when all of a sudden he was. He was transformed, transfigured. He was somebody else.
One of my favourite scenes is where he's talking to the young Dr. Rey, who is seeing him after he's cut his ear off and he is guaranteeing him that he's going to get to paint when he's in the institution. That interaction is extraordinary, what Willem does there. He's basically sitting at a table and there's not a whole hell of a lot of room for movement. But what goes on in his face in his response to what the young doctor is saying to him — and also in response to whatever other thoughts seem to be traveling through his mind at that time — is a landscape of events and an interior life like foam coming to the top of a vanilla egg cream.
-Julian Schnabel, Interview by Kathryn Shattuck
No. 19: Wes Studi
Wes Studi has one of the screen's most arresting faces — jutting and creased and anchored with the kind of penetrating eyes that insist you match their gaze. Lesser directors like to use his face as a blunt symbol of the Native American experience, as a mask of nobility, of suffering, of pain that's unknowable only because no one has asked the man wearing it. In the right movie, though, Studi doesn't just play with a character's facade; he peels its layers. A master of expressive opacity, he shows you the mask and what lies beneath, both the thinking and the feeling.
Studi vaulted into cinematic consciousness as the vengeful Huron warrior in Michael Mann's epic The Last of the Mohicans (1992), a character the actor conveys with powerful physicality and intensities of contempt, impatience, resentment, fury. Doing a lot with a little has been a constant in Studi's movie career, which includes signifying roles in The New World (2005) and Avatar (2009). Like many actors, he has done his share of forgettable work, made exploitation flicks and TV fodder. Often specifically cast as a Native American, he has played Geronimo and Cochise; he might right more film wrongs if westerns were still popular. And if the industry were adventurous, he might also play more types like the supervisor of a homeless shelter in Being Flynn (2012), a man who doesn't wear what Studi calls "leathers and feathers."
Instructively, he wears neither in Scott Cooper's Hostiles (2017), about life and death in late-19th-century America. Studi plays Chief Yellow Hawk, a dying Cheyenne prisoner whom the federal government has agreed to return to his ancestral lands. The movie is largely interested in his escort, a war-ruined Indian hater played by Christian Bale, the star. Once again, Studi delivers a supporting turn that complements the leading performance — his character's indifference to the escort's rage is a wall that can't be breached — and helps equalise the story's balance. Yellow Hawk has survived long enough to die on his terms, survival that Studi makes a final act of self-possession.
- Manohla Dargis
No. 20: Rob Morgan
SCOTT: The great character actors are masters of paradox, at once indelible and invisible. You don't necessarily recognise them from one role to the next, but they leave their stamp on every film, enhancing the whole even in small parts.
If you saw Mudbound, Monsters and Men, The Last Black Man in San Francisco and Just Mercy — four movies released between 2017 and 2019 — you are aware of Rob Morgan, whether or not you know his name.
As a death row prisoner in Just Mercy, he is a notably undramatic presence, a quiet man haunted by remorse, helplessness and fear whose plight encapsulates the film's humanist argument.
In each of the other movies, he plays a father, in the Jim Crow South and the modern urban North — a man who knows more than he chooses to say. The sons in those movies do most of the talking, but Morgan gives eloquent expression to experiences that lie outside the main story even as they ground it in a larger history. In Last Black Man he appears in a handful of scenes and utters just a few lines, but everything that movie is about — the pleasures and disappointments of life at the margins of an idiosyncratic, rapidly changing city — is written in his face. He listens, he chews sunflower seeds, he plays a few chords on an old pipe organ, and after a few minutes in his presence you understand exactly what you need to know.
DARGIS: Every so often, a small movie gives an actor a chance to go bigger and hold the center, which is what Morgan does in Annie Silverstein's Bull (2020). He plays Abe, a former rodeo bull rider with stiff joints, blood in his urine and a fragilely held together life. His bull riding days over, he now works on the ground as a bullfighter, helping protect fallen riders. The role of Abe, mercifully, isn't overwritten, which allows Morgan to define the character with a persuasively embodied performance, one whose head tilts, sideways looks and withdrawn presence express a bruising past and the self-protecting instincts of a man in emotional retreat.
Bull should be only about Abe, but it instead focuses on his relationship with a white, rootless 14-year-old neighbor, Kris (Amber Havard). Their fates sourly cross after she's caught trashing his house, and is shaped by the unearned optimism that's foundational to American cinema. In other words, Abe and Kris save each other. What saves the movie, though, is the window Morgan opens onto the Black cowboy and how the performance complicates America's favorite myths, including the figure of the hard, stoic loner. Abe doesn't ride in from John Wayne territory; Abe rides in from an entirely different land that Morgan makes visceral, haunted and wholly alive.
No. 21: Catherine Deneuve
In a lengthy career working with a who's who of auteurs, Catherine Deneuve has stood for a certain kind of elegant Frenchwoman whether she's playing an ordinary wife, a down-on-her-luck bistro owner or even an Iranian mother. For that last role, in the animated Persepolis (2007). Deneuve voiced a character based on Marjane Satrapi's mom. We asked Satrapi, who directed the film with Vincent Paronnaud, to explain why she sought out Deneuve.
If you live in France, Catherine Deneuve is the symbol. When I was growing up, she was the dream. She always made choices that were too advanced for her time, more anarchist than bourgeois. She has always looked like a very bourgeois Parisian woman, which is absolutely not true. She is a rebel who looks like a grande dame.
The first time I met Catherine Deneuve was like meeting God in person. I was so impressed. And yet, I had to direct her, and I didn't dare tell her a thing. The first two hours, I was completely paralysed, and she calmed me down. She told me, because she's a very generous woman: "You're the director and I'm your actress. Tell me what to do and I will do it." She didn't do it in front of other people. She said, "Let's go have a cigarette," and she said it to me privately.
For the character of the mother, I needed to have someone who is not this eternal mother who is very lovely, because this is not my mom. My mom is a very lovely person but she is like: "You do this. You do that." I needed somebody who had the power of a woman that wants her daughter to [make her life] better and be more emancipated. Catherine Deneuve has this way of talking that is not playful, because she doesn't try to be likable. She's very frank. When she talks to you, she looks straight into your eyes.
There is this scene when I come home and my mom starts yelling at me: "You know what they do with young girls in Iran? You have to get out of this country." I remember when she played it, she was a little bit off. She tried to contain herself as she normally does. I was like, "No, Catherine, you're really out of your mind." She did it and she actually cried. That was extremely moving.
And still, after all these years, each time I see her, I have the heartbeat. She is like a lion. She is not loud, she does not make gestures. But even if she is behind you and you don't see her, you feel that a feline is in the room. It feels at the same time very exciting and very dangerous. She is ferocious and she is fearless, and I love that about her.
-Marjane Satrapi, Interview by Kathryn Shattuck
No. 22: Melissa McCarthy
DARGIS: When critics anatomise comic performers like Melissa McCarthy, we often touch on familiar qualities like timing, grace and elastic physiognomy. But we're also talking about acting. Since making the transition from TV to movies, McCarthy has repeatedly demonstrated her range and exhilaratingly helped demolish regressive ideas about who gets to be a film star. No movie has served her better than Spy (2015), in which she plays Susan, a timid CIA analyst who's sent on an outlandish mission that allows McCarthy to mince and then delightfully swagger.
Essential to the subversive fun of Spy is how it deploys genre conventions to showcase McCarthy's talents while also blowing up stereotypes. Susan contains multitudes, first as self-protection (she dampens her fire) and later as an expression of her humanity. In the field, she unhappily assumes several frumpy, tragically bewigged disguises — variations on how others see her — before transforming into a sexy, trash-talking fantasy of her own design. As Susan lets down her hair and inhibitions, McCarthy cuts loose. Her voice booms, her fluttery hands ball into fists, her Kewpie-doll face goes full-on Medusa. McCarthy isn't playing one woman — she's all of us, with a vengeance.
SCOTT: Lee Israel is funny. She shares a fast and furiously aggressive verbal wit with some of McCarthy's other creations, like Tammy in Tammy (2014) and Mullins in The Heat (2013). But Lee was a real person, and Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) isn't exactly a comedy. It's not quite a biopic either, but rather a highly specific slice of late-20th-century New York queer and literary life threaded through a misfit buddy picture and twisted into a caper film.
Lee is not easy to like or root for. She's abrasive, self-absorbed and self-sabotaging. She alienates friends and maintains as tenuous a grip on ethics as on sobriety. McCarthy resists turning her story — which involves trading a faltering career as a writer for a lucrative stint as a forger of famous writers' letters — into a parable of recovery or redemption.
It's about how Lee and her sidekick (the wonderful Richard E. Grant) gamble on survival, rebelling against the fate that an indifferent world has prepared for them. The movie's title poses an honest question. Maybe you can't forgive Lee for her lapses and lies, her lack of consideration for other people's words and feelings. But there's no way you can forget her.
No. 23: Mahershala Ali
SCOTT: Mahershala Ali has one of the great faces in modern movies — those sculpted cheekbones, that high, contemplative brow, those eyes tinged with melancholy. His presence on camera is magnetic, but also watchful and sly. His characters tend toward reticence, guardedness, but their reserve is its own form of eloquence, their whispers more resonant than any shout.
Ali has won two Oscars for best supporting actor. The first was for Moonlight (2016), in which he quietly demolished a durable Hollywood stereotype. Juan is a drug dealer, a figure of community destruction and implicit violence. What defines him, though, is his gentleness, the unconditional kindness he bestows on Chiron, the young protagonist. Juan listens to the boy; he answers his questions; in one of the film's most moving scenes, he teaches him to swim.
And then, between the first and second acts, he vanishes. But Ali haunts the film even after his departure. He's both its tragic, nurturing image of manhood and the first man worthy of Chiron's love.
DARGIS: Ali first got my attention in the Netflix series House of Cards. He played Remy Danton, a Washington lawyer whose knowing little smile could flicker like a warning, signaling the danger in his world. Remy entered in the second episode in a scene at a restaurant, where the lead character, Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey), is eating with two other power brokers. Remy doesn't stand over the seated men, he looms. You know Underwood is bad news, but when the director David Fincher cuts to Remy's face, Ali abruptly changes the temperature by dropping his affable facade for skin-prickling wariness, making it clear that he isn't talking to a man but to a predator.
I was so accustomed to seeing Ali in a bespoke suit (and sometimes out) that I didn't recognise him at first in Moonlight. It wasn't simply the different wardrobes, but the precise bearing that Ali gave each man, variations in bodies, yes, but also in how those bodies move and signify. In House of Cards, Remy flows, and there were moments when I thought I was looking at the next James Bond. In Moonlight, Ali creates a titanic character whose force, even after he disappears from the movie, continues to resonate. The actor creates a very dissimilar character in Green Book (2018, his second Oscar winner), this time with a performance — as musician Don Shirley, whom Ali plays as a man and a defended fortress — that surpasses the movie.
SCOTT: I would almost say that the performance is the opposite of the movie. Ali is graceful, witty and self-aware while Green Book is clumsy, jokey and blind to its own insensitivities. I'm not sure any other actor could have handled the notorious fried chicken scene with such sly dignity. That Green Book and Moonlight were both Best Picture winners speaks to the contradictions of our cultural moment, but it's proof of Ali's talent that his subtle craft and unshakable charisma can anchor two such divergent films.
No. 24: Sônia Braga
DARGIS: I just recently rewatched Aquarius (2016) for our ode to Sônia Braga. For those who haven't seen it: Braga stars as Clara, a writer whose apartment faces the Atlantic. Most of the story follows Clara just living her life while swatting away her landlord. Braga fits seamlessly into the director Kleber Mendonça Filho's wonderful, unfussy realism. This time while viewing the movie, though — partly prompted by, ahem, a chapter title called Clara's Hair — I noticed how Braga kept rearranging her opulent curtain of hair. And, as she swept it up and let it down, I realized that Mendonça wasn't just presenting a character but also the legend playing her.
SCOTT: It's a reminder - subliminal and brazen at the same time - that Braga was a big deal in Brazil and beyond in the 1970s and '80s, her nation's answer to Sophia Loren. Her films with Mendonça (Bacurau this year as well Aquarius) draw on that history and exploit her old-school charisma. But they aren't just late-career star turns. Clara isn't Sônia Braga: She's a highly specific woman with her own history of achievements, love affairs and regrets. But only a performer with Braga's utter self-assurance, her heroic indifference to what anyone else thinks of her, could bring Clara to life.
DARGIS: Yet what I found fascinating about Aquarius this time is that Clara is also Braga, in the sense that the character's meaning is partly shaped by everything that Braga brings whenever she's onscreen, including her history in Brazilian cinema as a woman of mixed ancestry as well as her adventures in Hollywood. There's something fantastically liberating watching Braga play this majestic woman, who has visible wrinkles and never had breast reconstruction after her mastectomy. That's especially true given how Braga was once slavered over as a sex star. "There is nothing else to call her," a male critic once wrote — well, you could call her an actress.
SCOTT: Her skill manifests itself in a totally different way in Bacurau this year, a crazily fantastical (and violent) science-fictionish allegory of Brazil in crisis that departs from the realism of Mendonça's other films without abandoning their political passion or their humanism. Braga, part of a sprawling ensemble that includes nonprofessional actors, is essential to this. She plays Domingas, a small-town doctor with a drinking problem and a sometimes abrasive personality — a deglamorised, comical role that no one else could have managed with such depth and grace. Or as Mendonça put it, "In a symphony, she'd be the piano."
No. 25: Gael García Bernal
DARGIS: When Alejandro González Iñárritu's thriller Amores Perros and Alfonso Cuarón's road movie Y Tu Mamá También were released in American art houses a year apart, the shocks were seismic. Their directors were soon racing toward international renown, and so was Gael García Bernal, their shared star. He was gifted, held the screen and had a face you kept looking at, partly because — with his doe eyes and lantern jaw — it seamlessly fused ideals of feminine and masculine beauty.
This contrast wasn't especially obvious in Amores Perros (2001), but it helps enrich the warmer Y Tu Mamá También (2002), a soulful coming-of-age story that opens with a whoop and ends on a sigh. García Bernal plays Julio, a working-class teenager on a journey of discovery (of the self, of others). Along with his best friend (played by Diego Luna), Julio tumbles through life heedlessly until he doesn't. As the story's raucousness quiets, Julio's adolescent machismo fades, replaced by pensiveness that the actor makes so physical, you see the character retreating inside himself.
By 2004, García Bernal had appeared in Walter Salles' The Motorcycle Diaries as the young Che Guevara and played a duplicitous chameleon in Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education. Almodóvar put the actor in heels to play a noirish femme fatale, a role that García Bernal apparently didn't much like doing so but that deepened his persona with a smear of lipstick and a psychological coldness that created new shocks.
SCOTT: In Pablo Larraín's No (2013), García Bernal plays Rene Saavedra, a hot-shot young advertising creative in 1980s Chile, with his usual charm. He's cool but not intimidatingly so; good-looking in the same measure; funny but not to the point of obnoxiousness; self-confident but not a jerk. At first, it's easy to underestimate both Rene and García Bernal, to mistake their casual, unassuming naturalness for a lack of gravitas or craft. Rene is enlisted by a group of opposition political parties to produce television spots supporting a "no" vote on a referendum extending the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Rene's job is to sell rejection as an upbeat choice, to acknowledge the brutality of Pinochet's regime while focusing on the happy future without him. Though Rene believes in the cause, he also views it as a marketing challenge, and there is a bit of a "Mad Men" vibe to his wrangling with clients, colleagues and rivals.
It's up to García Bernal to provide the dramatic link between the banalities of the media business and the terror of political repression, and he does it almost entirely with his eyes. One night, the apartment he shares with his young son is vandalised while they sleep, and in that moment Rene's chipper resolve liquefies into pure fear. The next day he is back at work, and both he and the audience have a new and profound understanding of what the work means.
Written by: A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis
© 2020 THE NEW YORK TIMES