We watch movies for so many reasons: the spectacle of great cinematography, the experience of connecting with a director’s ideas, the sheer pleasure of watching a story unfold before us. But we all know, deep down, that it’s the allure of faces that really draws us. Actors open a direct conduit between us and the screen, sending a current of energy we can can feel in our very bones. Screens are such a huge part of our everyday lives: we read words there, we look at numbers and play games there, and we process lots and lots of images. But even on those days we feel we can’t spend another minute looking at a screen, there’s always a face that beckons.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Here are 10 performances that gave me great joy or moved me deeply—or both—in the last year. Every one is a tribute to what actors, at their best, can do—and a reason to keep going to the movies, one of the best ways to feel connected to other humans in an often inhumane world.
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Is the main character of Mike Leigh’s acutely observed and deeply moving film Hard Truths a misanthrope? A person suffering through grief or serious depression or both? A human in physical pain who can find no relief? Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, a woman whom no one can stand to be around for long. She berates cashiers and salespeople as a matter of course. Her husband and grown son tiptoe around her, hoping to avoid her scowling tirades. Her sister (played by the superb Michelle Austin) is the only person who has any patience with her, and even she loses it now and then. Neither Leigh nor Jean-Baptiste telegraph in any obvious way the reasons for Pansy’s behavior. Instead, they simply invite us to get to know her, resplendent in both her anger and her veiled emotional anguish. Pansy is impossible. But you might find yourself thinking about her long after the film is over, wondering how she’s doing, as if she were a real person. That’s how great Jean-Baptiste is in this role. It’s the performance of the year.
Daniel Craig is one of our great shapeshifters, able to segue from a tuxedo’ed James Bond into a lovesick gay adventurer with seemingly very little effort. In Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, adapted from William Burroughs’ autobiographical novel of the same name, Craig plays Bill Lee, a muscular lothario swaggering through postwar Mexico City in search of drink, drugs, and men, perhaps not necessarily in that order. It seems as if his libido is the vital force holding him together; as Craig plays him, he’s mercurial, evasive, manipulative. But it turns out he’s capable of love, too. The object of his affection is a possibly straightish American named Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), who doesn’t always return his ardor in equal measure. Yet in Allerton’s presence, Lee becomes a charmer who seems as guileless as a stammering schoolboy. This is a muscular, erotic performance, but the tenderness shining through is what makes it. That’s the sizzling enchantment Craig, at his best, is capable of.
Nicole Kidman is one of the few big-time movie stars who can still surprise us. In Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, she plays Romy, a top executive at an Amazon-type company, who has everything she could want out of life: gorgeous city and country dwellings, a hot, adoring husband (played by Antonio Banderas), two teenage daughters who don’t give her too much trouble. Then a smoldering intern, Harris Dickinson’s Samuel, creeps into her life. At first, she rebuffs him; then she can’t seem to live without him. Babygirl is steamy, all right. But it also lays bare all sorts of feelings and desires that people often feel uncomfortable talking about. As Romy, Kidman draws emotions from deep within, bring them into the open like night-blooming flowers. We feel the crackle of her attraction to Samuel, as well as her regret that she doesn’t feel quite the same way about her loyal spouse. Sometimes Romy’s adventures lead to moments of embarrassment—Kidman knows how to get a laugh. Yet she’s deeply affecting, too. Babygirl is partly an exploration of shame, and our reasons for feeling it. Kidman, a figure of nearly unearthly perfection and beauty, is fearless about facing what some may call ugly truths—though if desire is part of what makes us human, the last thing we should be calling it is ugly.
Two cousins who used to be close but have grown apart, Jesse Eisenberg’s David and Kieran Culkin’s Benji, take a trip to Poland to honor their late grandmother, who’d grown up there—and who’d survived internment at Majdanek Concentration Camp, which will be the most painful stop on their tour. David, who lives in Brooklyn, has a wife and kid, and a decent job. Benji lives in Binghamton and, it’s suggested, gets by doing odd jobs. He’s been hit hard by the death of his grandmother; he’s the kind of sensitive soul who sometimes needs to be shielded from the harshness of the world. A Real Pain, which Eisenberg both wrote and directed, hands the spotlight to Culkin’s performance, even though the two actors are technically co-stars. Culkin plays Benji as a gregarious cutup, a guy who makes friends everywhere he goes by striking up cheerful, inquisitive conversations—he has a knack for simultaneously annoying people and endearing himself to them. But as this gem of a movie works its magic, we come to see that what makes Benji exasperating is also what makes him great. He’s alive to the present every moment, the best way to live but not the easiest. Culkin moves through the picture with the figurative grace of a tap dancer. Because sadness isn’t always a stultifyingly heavy thing; sometimes it’s just the thing you’ve got to learn to carry along with you, unbowed.
Sean Baker’s Anora is both a screwball romantic comedy and a heartbreaker: Mikey Madison stars as the Anora of the title, though she prefers to go simply by Ani—coming around to the regal quality of her full given name is part of the movie’s surprise ending. Ani is a dancer and sex worker who lives in Brighton Beach: her job at a strip club pays the bills, but who could blame her for wanting more? She thinks she’s found that “more” in rich-kid Ivan (Mark Eydelshtein), who sweeps her off her feet. Ani is an opportunist; you see it in her mischievously glittering eyes when Ivan proposes to her—she taps her engagement-ring finger to indicate that he’s got to produce a diamond, a big one. But Madison gradually reveals what’s beneath Ani’s protective armor. Her face—joyful, expectant, but also sober and watchful as she fears that the happy ending she hopes for is slipping away—carries you through the movie. Forget the ring; you want the world for her.
Sometimes it’s what an actor doesn’t do that makes a performance. In Greg Kwedar’s based-on-real-life drama Sing Sing, a group of incarcerated men at the notorious upstate New York correctional facility embrace a prison theater program that gives some of them their first taste of Shakespeare. Colman Domingo plays one of those men, John “Divine G.” Whitfield, who’s serving a sentence for a crime he didn’t commit, hoping his name will someday be cleared. He helps oversee the theater program, and spots the potential of Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin (a real-life alumnus of a similar arts program, playing a version of himself), the toughest guy in the yard. Divine G is frustrated that his own ambition—to have the play he’s written performed by the company—is consistently thwarted. And he clashes with Divine Eye, a gifted actor who resists the emotional openness necessary to give a great performance. Everything Domingo does here is behind the beat. He watches and listens with precision and clarity, giving Maclin the space he needs to shine. Still, he too appears to glow, quietly, from his very core. With Divine G, Domingo shows us a man who understands there’s nothing easy about redemption. It’s a fire that needs constant tending and care, but the warmth of the flame is its own reward.
In RaMell Ross’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s devastating inspired-by-real-life novel, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor plays Hattie, the grandmother of a smart, ambitious young man, Elwood (Ethan Herisse), who’s sent to a cruel reform school after a wrong-place, wrong-time arrest. The movie opens in the early 1960s; we see how Hattie wraps the young Elwood in a cocoon of love and security. Later, her anguish over his unjust plight—and her inability to rectify it—is both a galvanizing force and a heartrending reality. A scene in which she tries to visit her grandson, showing what happens when she’s sent away, opens a door into the world of warmth and generosity this character has built over a lifetime. Ellis-Taylor forges a great performance from small, lived-in moments; the film breathes, and expands, whenever she’s on-screen.
To describe in too much detail what Yura Borisov does in Sean Baker’s Anora risks giving away the movie’s ending, an astonishing and deeply moving sequence that needs to be experienced first-hand. So let’s just say that Borisov—as Igor, a Russian thug hired to guard the movie’s main character, a sex worker named Ani (the marvelous Mikey Madison)—shows what an actor can do with a glance, glimpsed at the edge of a movie frame. How does Igor feel about America, about the Brooklyn apartment he shares with his grandmother, about a woman’s place in the world? Borisov says it all with his eyes. Anora is worth seeing twice: the second time, once you know where Borisov’s character ends up, you can focus on how he gets there, and marvel.
There’s something spellbinding about seeing a woman—especially a woman of a certain age—face the camera with a near-naked face. In Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl, Pamela Anderson plays Shelly, a longtime Vegas dancer—part of an old-school troupe, stepping out in spangled unitards and precarious jeweled headdresses night after night—who learns her show is closing. A dancer in her fifties doesn’t have many options, and Shelly scrambles to find a new gig. We see Shelly mostly in her off hours, without her heavy stage makeup, just going about her days and nights. And though there should be nothing unusual about this, Anderson’s take-me-as-I-am face intensifies both the vulnerability and the defiance she brings to the role. There’s nothing more honest, and perhaps more unforgiving, than the face you start with at the beginning of the day. As Shelly, Anderson silently makes the case for greeting it as friend, not foe.
Edward Norton is so clearly serious about his craft that in the first few minutes of any of his performances I find myself thinking, “Oh, come off it, Mr. Actor Man!” Then before I know it I’m a total mess of emotion, ready to follow him anywhere. In James Mangold’s glorious, mysterious not-quite-a-biopic A Complete Unknown, Norton plays legendary folksinger Pete Seeger, a man with sunshine in his voice—but also one who stood up fearlessly to the House Un-American Activities Committee. In A Complete Unknown, we watch as he befriends and protects the young Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet), newly arrived from Minnesota in New York, ready to invent himself. Norton’s Seeger is in awe of what he sees and hears in the young Dylan; a pretty buoyant guy to begin with, he’s rapt every time his young protegée opens his mouth to sing. As great and unknowable as the former Robert Zimmerman eventually became—and still is—he didn’t become Bob Dylan all by himself. Seeger helped fan the spark with his casual generosity, and that’s the spirit Norton captures here, in a performance as sweet and clear as the whistle of a teakettle, a train coming down the track, a bird celebrating the bright blue sky.
