The last 12 months have provided many good films, if few truly great ones. It’s an entirely different story, however, when it comes to epic, all-consuming, truly unbelievable performances – staggeringly impressive, soul-stirring turns which take up every corner of the screen with their heart and humanity (or lack thereof), and are impossible to forget, even if the projects they appear in don’t rise to the occasion in quite the same way.
Ahead of awards season, these are the seven actors who most deserve your attention, not to mention a sackful of golden statuettes.
The embodiment: Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown
Playing a globally-recognised musical superstar is often a fast-track to winning an Oscar – just think of Renée Zellweger in Judy, Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody, Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose, Reese Witherspoon in Walk the Line, Jamie Foxx in Ray – but what is remarkable about the newly-mustachioed heartthrob’s sombre, subtle, wonderfully contained portrayal of a young Bob Dylan in James Mangold’s freewheeling drama is that it is intentionally unshowy: mumbly, awkward, uncertain, deliberately obtuse and actively shrinking from the spotlight. It’s almost beside the point that he also sings in the Nobel Prize winner’s distinctive drawl, speaks in his gruff voice, adopts his mannerisms and holds himself with the same hunched, anxious reticence – without ever getting bogged down in that minutiae, he simply captures his essence and seems to slip into his skin. Hollywood’s endless appetite for biopics is frequently exhausting, but if more of them contained performances as intricate and masterful as this one, you’ll hear no complaints from me.
The big swing: Lily-Rose Depp in Nosferatu
Perfectly angelic and deliciously devilish, sensual yet with a kind of icy purity, fragile but, at times, utterly ferocious – the hauntingly beautiful Hollywood progeny pulls off an incredible high-wire act, and remains impossible to pin down, all the way through Robert Eggers’s hallucinatory vampire saga, a galvanising remake of the 1922 classic of the same name. With startling precision, she brings vivid, vociferous life to the devoted wife of a 19th-century real estate agent who gets drawn into the web of the titular demon, sinking her teeth fully into every single scene with a seemingly insatiable appetite. She draws on a delicate, childlike innocence (it’s easy to forget, given that she’s been in the public eye since birth, that she is still only 25) and then wrongfoots you with her carnal longing, falls gently into a convalescence and then suddenly rises up, her bones rattling, her eyes rolled back and her body grotesquely contorted as if possessed by some satanic force. No one else on this list goes quite this hard, this consistently – and, as a result, despite the fact that I’m sure many more iterations of this story will follow, it’s literally impossible to imagine anyone else playing this part.
The powerhouse: Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Hard Truths
In Mike Leigh’s intimate portrait of an extended family processing grief, the Oscar-nominated legend, who has kept a low profile since her breakout with 1996’s Secrets & Lies, gives what is easily the performance of the year: a permanently scowling, wise-cracking, eternally nagging raging storm in the form of a petite Londoner, somewhat hilariously named Pansy. Constantly shuffling from room to room, and then from the supermarket to a furniture shop, the dentist’s office and beyond, she torments everyone who crosses her path with a venomous, never-ending tirade against the world. Smiling charity workers, dogs, babies – no one is safe from her ire. It’s hysterically funny – until you begin to scratch away at her many layers, and then it becomes desperately sad. Over time, we come to understand the fears that grip her, the sadness that overwhelms her, and the memories which weigh heavily, but she never, ever loses her bite. There’s a moment, towards the end of the film, when one of her laughs, buoyant and full-throated, dissolves into a heartbreaking cry – it’s extraordinary, and feels destined to become an Oscar clip. If, for any reason, the Academy overlooks her come 2025, it’d be a grave error indeed.
The live wire: Danielle Deadwyler in The Piano Lesson
Malcolm Washington’s poetic, poignant August Wilson adaptation doesn’t really begin until the formidable Berniece, the steely family matriarch, crashes down the stairs to ask what the commotion is all about. Her house is always heaving with men – opinionated older relatives, her swaggering brother, his hapless friend – but she’s the magnetic central force around which they all swirl, as they consider what their ancestors have left them and how best they can honour their legacy. We see her fieriness as she rails against injustice, her softness in her love for her late husband, her fear in her protectiveness towards her young daughter, and her inner conflict as she weighs the benefits of a new marriage proposal against the inevitable losses it would bring. With her effortlessly commanding presence, a thrilling unpredictability and an unparalleled ability to convey multitudes simply with her eyes and the tilting of her chin, the always excellent actor, equally dazzling in Till, weaves all of these strands together to form a complicated and fascinating figure. It all builds to a hair-raising crescendo in which she enters a different plane entirely – and leaves everyone else in the dust.
The revelation: Clarence Maclin in Sing Sing
Colman Domingo is majestic in Greg Kwedar’s soaring ode to a transformative real-life Rehabilitation Through the Arts programme at an otherwise soulless maximum security prison, but it is his outstanding co-star – who totally knocks it out of the park with his screen debut, at the age of 58, no less – who ended up leaving the biggest impression on me. Playing a younger version of himself, a tough-as-nails inmate whose gentler, more introspective side slowly emerges as he joins this rag-tag theatre troupe, he gives a textured, charismatic, endearingly rough-around-the edges and beautifully naturalistic turn that, at points, overshadows the work of his far more seasoned professional actor colleagues. He imbues the part, and the film itself, with a sense of realism and complexity without which it just wouldn’t function. It’s quite a feat, and one which ought to be celebrated.
The transformation: Demi Moore in The Substance
Few bona fide movie stars would be willing or able to do what the Brat Packer and ’90s screen fixture does in Coralie Fargeat’s relentlessly gory, side-splittingly subversive and brilliantly confrontational body horror: namely, embodying a washed-up Hollywood stalwart-turned-TV aerobics instructor who is unceremoniously fired from her job and decides to take a punt on a mysterious new procedure which promises to unleash a more perfect version of herself. There’s all the unabashed nudity, obviously, but also the absurd comedy of hate-cooking French delicacies and progressively transforming into a hunchbacked nonagenarian; the explosive, blood-soaked, leave-your-jaw-on-the-floor action sequences; and the wealth of simmering fury and self-hatred. The latter memorably comes to the surface as our heroine prepares for a first date, endlessly tweaking her make-up and outfit until she tears it all off in an incandescent rage. It’s painfully relatable and, like everything else in this outlandish, hell-for-leather, no-holds-barred performance, an absolute masterclass.
The scene stealer: Jeremy Strong in The Apprentice
Yes, Sebastian Stan is incredibly compelling as a young Donald Trump, as he gradually morphs into the grandstanding, blonde-bouffanted caricature he is today, in Ali Abbasi’s breathless account of his rise in a seedy ’70s and ’80s New York but, in all honesty, the fabled theatre actor and Succession supernova steals the show as the future president’s dastardly, highly influential mentor, Roy Cohn. Tanned and wiry, unbelievably arrogant and disgustingly slick, he looks almost like evil incarnate when we first spot him, sizing up his protégé with a light smirk and an intense, unblinking gaze at a smoky members’ club. But as Trump’s star rises, his falls, and the latter becomes an emaciated, hollow-eyed, desperate man, following the former around at parties; someone we despise and pity in equal measure. Strong commits so fully – mind, body and soul – that you can feel his heartache through the screen, as well as the oppressive, ever-growing dark cloud that permanently hangs over him. When he finally steps out of the story, you feel his loss acutely.
