In a decade where social media's explosive diversification made self-conscious performers of us all, the art of acting's salutary role in our societies became clearer than ever before. No matter the medium, genre or characters, actors all share one common purpose: to clarify emotions, thoughts and impulses that are, by nature, never clear or easily understood when we experience them. While our digital age's emphasis on conformity, groupthink and self-presentation encourages us to carefully tailor our experiences and expressions to predetermined audience expectations, the best film performances of the 2010s took us outside our comfort zones and into new realms of emotional understanding.
To pick only 30 out of the many, many acting feats that touched my heart this past decade was a cruel challenge. From career highlights by veterans such as Ethan Hawke (First Reformed, Maudie), Willem Dafoe (At Eternity's Gate, The Florida Project) and Cate Blanchett (Carol, Blue Jasmine) to revelatory turns from bright stars like Tessa Thompson (Dear White People), Juno Temple (Killer Joe) and Daveed Diggs (Blindspotting), there is a myriad of outstanding performances from some of my favourite actors that didn't make the list. These include gems from established thespians like J. K. Simmons (Whiplash), Tom Hardy (Locke) and Adam Sandler (Uncut Gems), as well as unknowns like Lily Gladstone (Certain Women), Bernard Pruvost (Lil' Quinquin) and Adam Pearson (Under The Skin). I can only hope these omissions give readers an idea of how truly exceptional the following performances are.
Honourable mentions:
- Steven Yeun as Ben in Burning (2018).
- Timothée Chalamet as Elio Perlman in Call Me By Your Name (2017).
- Daniel Day-Lewis as Woodcock Reynolds in Phantom Thread (2017).
- Cynthia Nixon as Emily Dickinson in A Quiet Passion (2016).
- Viola Davis as Veronica Rawlings in Widows (2018).
30 - Ronald Bronstein as Lenny Sokal in Daddy Longlegs (2010).
As a screenwriter and editor, Ronald Bronstein has been the Safdie Brothers' secret weapon, the frantically beating heart pumping life into their chaotic New York head-trips, infusing them with the same desperate need for human connection he visualized so brilliantly in his little-seen 2008 directorial effort Frownland. As the irresponsible titular dad in the brothers' sophomore feature, that crazed energy animates every bone of his long-limbed body, turning every activity into a madcap adventure he alone experiences, in a maddening display of despair-tinged histrionics that's impossible to look away from - no matter how much you may want to.
29 - Peter Simonischek as Winfried Conradi/Toni Erdmann in Toni Erdmann (2016).
If you thought Lenny was an especially aggravating "cool dad" wannabe, Peter Simonischek's Winfried Conradi is the kind whose mere presence could serve as the ultimate test for sainthood. Neither manic enough to be labelled insane nor openly needy enough to solicit pity or revulsion, he irritates and confounds by continually wrongfooting our emotional expectations and making his antics as much a stonewall for his feelings as a clumsily-improvised bridge to reach out to his workaholic daughter. Like a German Andy Kaufman, his stubborn deadpan forces us to exhaust all our programmed responses until emotion gradually emerges, unexpectedly, as if it had been staring us in the face all this time, waiting for us to notice it.
28 - Issei Ogata as Grand Councillor Inoue Masashige in Silence (2016).
Martin Scorsese's under-seen meditation on faith, ego, power, freedom and cultural conflict boasted magnificent performances across the board but none managed to distil these aforementioned themes as succinctly and as colourfully as Issei Ogata's crafty anti-Christian inquisitor. Alternating between comical impishness, ruthless calculation and smiling affability, Ogata makes Masashige a marvellously complex embodiment of the very human forces and rationales that dictate the politics of religious oppression. It's a mesmerizing performance of deceptive subtlety that blurs lines between reason and folly, truth and falsehood, good and evil - as all good spiritual challenges do.
27 - Lesley Manville as Cyril Woodcock in Phantom Thread (2017).
Lesley Manville's nigh unmatched ability to completely disappear into her characters has always owed a lot to the beautiful ordinariness of her face. That face, with its blend of multi-faceted expressiveness and unaffected normalcy, is a crucial anchorage point in Phantom Thread's emotional turbulences, as her character's observation of the protagonist's sadomasochistic games subtly shifts from apprehension to acceptance, and with it our own perception of her position, power and values. In a film dominated by its magnetic central duel, Manville is a humbling reminder that quiet reactions can speak just as eloquently - if not moreso - than the commanding displays of acting mastery that prompt them.
26 - Vicky Krieps as Alma Elson-Woodcock in Phantom Thread (2017).
It is tempting to frame Vicky Krieps's quietly incendiary turn as a possessive fashion designer's muse-turned-conqueror as a triumph on the grounds of her surpassing Daniel Day-Lewis at his best, but to do so would be to reproduce the exact pattern of artistic masculine domination the film critiques so magnificently. Krieps's achievement, more than anything, lies in the masterful way she negotiates the confines of her given space to create a voice that amplifies, flickers, dampens and sparks alight until it echoes beyond the frame.
25 - Mya Taylor as Alexandra in Tangerine (2015).
Sean Baker's Tangerine was one of the most extraordinarily generous works of art produced this decade, carried by a cast of non-professional trans actors whose performances outclassed more experienced professionals. Chief among those was the sublime Mya Taylor, whose tender sensitivity complemented the livewire outrage of Kitana Kiki Rodriguez (more on her later) with astonishing adroitness, culminating in a rendition of "Toyland" that somehow pinpoints its childish soul and enhanced it to transcendent levels. A supporting performance in every good sense of the word.
24 - Kathryn Hahn as Rachel in Afternoon Delight (2013).
In my review of Jill Soloway's underrated examination of suburban ennui and frustrated desire, I singled out Kathryn Hahn's extraordinary juggle with her character's emotional conflicts and unrealized impulses as one of the film's greatest assets. I would simply like to add that Hahn is herself one of the greatest assets of American audiovisual storytelling and register my frustration that so few seem to be aware of that. May this spectacular performance stand as incontrovertible evidence.
23 - Kitana Kiki Rodriguez as Sin-Dee Rella in Tangerine (2015).
As of this writing, Kitana Kiki Rodriguez has not acted since making her début as a wronged sex worker tracking down her doublecrossing pimp. If that performance remains her sole contribution to cinema, she will still have done more to advance the art form than most Oscar-winning actors ever have. As I described it on Twitter, her portrayal of Sin-Dee is "an explosive scream of indignant rage and toughness that gradually flames out into a soft lament of lost love and regret." Long may it be heard, and Rodriguez's artistry celebrated, for as long as love of performance and people exists.
22 - Nilbio Torres as Young Karamakate in Embrace Of The Serpent (2015).
The best cinematic male lead performance of 2015 went completely unrecognized by all award bodies, though it's a small mercy that the film itself did not. In Ciro Guerra's hallucinogenic journey back and forth thirty years of colonialism and Indigenous Amazonian tradition, Nilbio Torres's portrayal of the younger version of a last surviving tribesman is the audience's moral and emotional compass. A compass that takes the form of Torres's unflinching gaze which seems to burn right through the screen as his eyes accumulate centuries of anger, loss, hope and faith - all channelled into a performance of tranquil incandescence whose effects only grow days after the film has ended.
21 - Helena Howard as Madeline in Madeline's Madeline (2018).
What is acting? Is it transforming from one state of being into another, or temporarily occupying the persona of another? To whom do that state or persona belong to? These are the questions at the heart of Josephine Decker's superb third feature, all of them transcendentally incarnated by Helena Howard in a first-time performance built on a series of spontaneous discoveries about her body and identity that seem to be occurring for the very first time. Like Decker's film, Howard's work here is a rough gem carved in unexpected shapes and directions before our eyes until its full form emerges in all its unpolished glory, as it was always meant to be.
20 - Elisabeth Moss as Catherine Hewitt in Queen Of Earth (2015).
In the pantheon of great faces of cinema, Elisabeth Moss's dishevelled, hooded, razor-eyed stare in Alex Ross Perry's Bergmanesque enclosed drama ranks up there with the greats. With a venomous tongue and her lips curled in a permanent snarl, her Catherine is a monster of self-pity, communicating her grief and rage at the world in silk-sheathed tirades and prostrate fits of tears that solicit as much fear as they do compassion. Without once crossing the admittedly blurry line between playing an attention-seeking character and calling attention to your acting, Moss shifts between emotional extremities and mental depths in a psychological adventure from which no return seems possible.
19 - Michael Shannon as Curtis LaForche in Take Shelter (2011).
He may be best-known for his villain roles but I think part of Michael Shannon's appeal derives from the uncanny-valley way his appearance reflects traditional white American masculinity: His torso just a little too long, his eyes just a little too wide, his forehead just a little too large, his jaw just a little too square. And nowhere is this put to better use than in Take Shelter, where Shannon's astounding capacity for conveying existence on the edge of mental and psychological precipices infuses Jeff Nichols's dissection of patriarchal values with unexpectedly poignant compassion. Both prophet and madman, protector and oppressor, Curtis is a quintessentially American creature whose suffering reflect broader self-inflicted ills.
18 - Anna Paquin as Lisa Cohen in Margaret (2011).
To this day, no film has dived into the post-9/11 New York psyche with more acerbic precision or boldness than Kenneth Lonergan's epic 3-hour drama, and no actor has embodied that state of adolescent emotional confusion with more terrifying accuracy than Anna Paquin. As Lisa Cohen, she is a maelstrom of barely-processed grief, guilt, anger and terror, devastating everything in her path as she struggles to put herself back together. Paquin's performance is a masterclass of form and tone as she hones in on her character's injured sense of security and self-knowledge without ever inviting our pity or mockery, instead making Lisa a person whose depth escapes even herself until her final cathartic scene of quiet self-realization.
17 - Ben Foster as Will in Leave No Trace (2018).
Ben Foster is best known for playing unpredictable loose-cannon sidekicks to traditionally stoic masculine heroes in such films as Hell And High Water and James Mangold's 3:10 To Yuma remake, so it's fittingly ironic that his greatest achievement in cinema is a magnificently sensitive, non-judgemental exploration of that brand of masculinity and its impact on the very people it's designed to protect. As PTSD-stricken homeless vet Will, Foster's face is a mask of buried pain struggling for expression, his eyes alert without seeming entirely present, too busy looking out for invisible enemies to reckon with those he carries within himself. His performance is one long silent scream that only finds some form of release in a penultimate scene that singlehandedly outclasses every Oscar-nominated male lead performance of 2018.
16 - Brady Jandreau as Brady Blackburn in The Rider (2018).
Is it unfair to praise a performance as one of the best of its year if it's given by a non-actor essentially playing himself? Not if you've witnessed the breathtaking power of Brady Jandreau's performative autofiction and marvelled at how effortless he makes it all look. His acting in this film is a perfect combination of pure instinct and self-reflection, an intricate web of complex emotions, memories and discovery that could only be weaved by someone without any formal training. In this self-reflective distillation of his own life, dreams and failures, Jandreau achieves an unassuming majesty that most experienced film actors never come close to.
15 - Essie Davis as Amelia Vanek in The Babadook (2014).
Western horror experienced its most creatively flourishing decade since the 1970s, of which Jennifer Kent's metaphorical exploration of grief, depression and parenthood stood as an exceptionally poignant example. Much of the film's success is owed to Essie Davis's boldly transformative performance, which turned a widowed mother's pain, loneliness and mixture of frustration and fear of her own child into a physical force capable of twisting and bending her face and body to its will. Yet these spectacular displays are but extensions of unfiltered expressions of feelings too frightening to confront and deal with; it's Davis's honest, naturalistic embodiment of these feelings that give the film's scares their true power and help make The Babadook one of the best horror films ever made.
14 - Ralph Fiennes as Monsieur Gustave H. in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014).
Ralph Fiennes was always funny, as anyone who has seen In Bruges or Wallace & Gromit In The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit can attest, but his portrayal of the ultra-mannered gerontophilic hotelier at the center of Wes Anderson's finest film thus far is a comedy lesson unto itself. Not a single gesture is superfluous, not an expression overdone or undersold, not one line reading hits anything but a bullseye; Fiennes moves and speaks with the combined timing of a Looney Tunes character and Buster Keaton, using that famous mellifluous voice of his in conjunction with the impeccable rhythms of Wes Anderson's writing and Barney Pilling's editing to deliver a comedic performance that ranks among the genre's greatest.
13 - Loubna Abidar as Noha in Much Loved (2015).
If film performances were ranked on courage alone, Loubna Abidar's life-threatening portrayal of one of many women punished by a misogynist society for answering its own demands would be number one. But her performance is not made great by the fact that it earned her death threats, a physical assault and effective banishment from Morocco. It is great because of her pitch-perfect attunement with her character's hopes and disillusionments, and the profoundly moving keenness with which she captures fleeting moments of respite amidst her efforts to negotiate what little power she is granted. It's a towering achievement for which both cinema and human culture at large are made richer.
12 - Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf Of Wall Street (2013).
Leonardo DiCaprio's greatest asset was always his energy; even at his quietest, you could detect the passionate lust for life boiling behind his eyes, hear it in the undertones of his voice, feel it in his movements. In The Wolf Of Wall Street, that energy is fully unleashed, burning up every frame and infecting every character he comes across like an explosive virus as Scorsese relates through him a history of late-stage American capitalism run amok. Who would have thought this decade's best performance of physical comedy would embody such a monster?
11 - Lupita Nyong'o as Red and Adelaide in Us (2019).
Of all the performances listed here, only six received Oscar nominations and only one of these won. For the Academy to ignore most of each year's best performances is nothing new but the recent omission of Lupita Nyong'o for her transfixing mirror role in Us stung particularly hard. Through her meticulous work, Adelaide and Red are simultaneously distinct and one, two separate bodies inextricably linked by their intertwined lives, each a negative reflection of the other in movement, tone and gesture. Dual performances abounded this decade (the underrated Cam, 2014's double-whammy of Enemy and The Double, Zhang Yimou's splendid Shadow) but what makes Nyongo's stand out is how subtly it suggests, even more pointedly than the screenplay, that each woman could easily have been in the other's place. Few actors have personified their film's central ideas and themes as completely or as hauntingly, and the American film industry's failure to recognize this through its award bodies is but one of many recent embarrassments that may condemn it to irrelevance.
10 - Karidja Touré as Marieme/Vic in Girlhood (2014).
For all the praise lavished upon Céline Sciamma's Girlhood - or Bande De Filles (Gang Of Girls) as it is known in its native France - upon its release, its portrayal of black womanhood and life in France's predominantly non-white banlieues has come under much criticism by French black feminists for its perceived stereotypes and white middle-class gaze. None of the film's limitations, however, affect the spellbinding performance at its heart; as a rebellious teen seeking the love, affirmation and empowerment so many girls her age crave, Karidja Touré makes every frame sing with passion. Her face, magnified by Sciamma's camera, conveys such a multitude of desires, joys and pains with such magnetic eloquence that it positively dwarfs the screenplay's flaws. It's a performance whose rich humanity and powerful lack of flourish elevate both the film and its audience.
9 - Natalie Portman as Nina Sayers/The Swan Queen in Black Swan (2010).
Sometimes the Academy gets it right. Natalie Portman's Oscar for her dual portrayal of Nina Sayers and the character she strives to embody in Black Swan represents one such occasion - a worthy reward for Portman's richest and most complex work to date. More than just a display of agony and suffering, her twisted transmogrification of Nina's strive for validation cuts to the heart of the very notion of performance and how it influences our expectations and responses. It's her acting, more than the gory effects and oppressive directing, that scares us because she's giving us exactly what we want - all while showing us why we shouldn't.
8 - Arielle Holmes as Harley Boggs in Heaven Knows What (2015).
Uncut Gems has rightly earned the Safdies their highest praise yet but this no-holds-barred account of physical, mental and emotional dependence still remains their best film. Much of this is owed to Arielle Holmes, who dramatizes her days as an addict to both heroin and a toxic relationship with a fellow user in a fearlessly brazen, raw-nerved performance that's completely one with its subject, never once drawing attention to itself or relying on pathos alone to provide meaning. As an acting début, Holmes's work here stands proudly above all other first-time performances this decade. As an act of storytelling, it is courageous and truthful in ways few can ever be.
7 - Jake Gyllenhaal as Louis Bloom in Nightcrawler (2014).
No film character this decade has held a mirror up to Western societies quite like Louis Bloom. In the notoriously cutthroat world of TV journalism, his manipulative, sexually predatorial, image-obsessed psychopathy make him the perfect Millennial antihero for today's culture of freelance economy and omnipresent performance-driven media. Gyllenhaal's genius is to embody all these characteristics with enough ambiguity to make him seem just in the right realm of human normalcy, effectively creating - as I described in my original review - "an exceptional mise en abyme of acting itself". His skin-crawling performance, akin to watching an alien learn about humans by imitating the images they project of themselves, embodies the film's scathing critique of the viewing habits and culture that produce such monsters. It's the smartest, most fleshed-out role of Gyllenhaal's career as of this writing, and the acting highlight of its year.
6 - Toni Collette as Annie Graham in Hereditary (2018).
It's no accident that so many entries on this list are female leads in horror films. While the genre's history of female representation is at least as complicated as any other, it has often provided a framework with which to explore realms of feeling and being usually denied to female characters in other genres. In the magnificent Goyaesque tableau of generational trauma that is Ari Aster's Hereditary, Toni Collette lays claim to a continent of grief, anger and terror so vast her body appears physically incapable of processing it. The resulting scorched-earth performance feels at once gigantic and uncomfortably intimate, erupting in volcanic fits of destruction even as her vocal undertones keep the hurt grounded in kitchen-sink realism. Like most great horror, Hereditary's scares are the expression of profound, indescribable pain; it's Collette's ability to reify that pain, to push the capacity of human expression to almost superhuman degrees in order to make it tangible, that cements its place in the pantheon of horror.
5 - Desiree Akhavan as Shirin in Appropriate Behavior (2015).
In the area of female lead performances in film, 2015 was one of the best years on record. From Alicia Vikander's star-making turn in Ex Machina to Charlize Theron's understated ocular storytelling in Mad Max: Fury Road, the year saw newcomers and established thespians alike paint complex, diverse experiences of femininity and self-actualization in very different conditions. Yet out of all of them, including the four others on this list, none matched the stupendous emotional and psychological precision Desiree Akhavan shows as both star, writer and director of her feature-length début. Taking inspiration from her own background as a bisexual Persian Brooklynite, Akhavan conveys Shirin's misadventures in self-discovery with a keen awareness of body language and razor-sharp comic timing that are almost frightening in their accuracy. Every move she makes, every syllable she utters, materialize as if no human being has ever attempted them before, taking unpolished yet impeccably-timed shape as each builds a block of her character's identity. I've seen plenty of characters go through such a journey, but never has the excitement, terror and discomfort of finding out who you are and what you want been reproduced with such devastatingly poignant or hilarious frankness as Desiree Akhavan has in this triple masterpiece of a performance.
4 - Juliette Binoche as Camille Claudel in Camille Claudel 1915 (2013).
Juliette Binoche is one of those actors whose boldness, range, depth and insight into human nature mature and grow in tandem with their age and experience. Indeed, half her best performances - Certified Copy, Clouds Of Sils Maria, Paris, Let The Sunshine In - are from this past decade. Yet none of them, not even her stellar work in the first two, even come close to the resplendent grace she achieves in Camille Claudel 1915. As the martyrized sculptor, she radiates a lifetime's worth of passion and hunger for life that have been all but starved out of her. In long close-ups that evoke Renée Jeanne Falconetti's Joan of Arc, her face is a symphony of suffering, possessed with incomprehensive grief as she struggles for physical and spiritual freedom. Yet within that pain, and through her interactions with the non-professional patients of the Avignon Montfavet Hospital Center, Binoche finds a way of representing life that could not take form by any other means. Her art reveals, as Robert Bresson would say, humanity which otherwise would never have been seen.
3 - Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lancaster Dodd in The Master (2012).
When Philip Seymour Hoffman tragically lost his battle with addiction in 2014, a whole galaxy's worth of lives died with him. No other American actor of his generation infused their characters with as complete a sense of history or as intimate an understanding of their inner mechanisms; every role, no matter how small and no matter the film, felt lived-in and independent. He didn't play parts - he played people, and no performance exemplifies this better than Lancaster Dodd. Channelling Orson Welles's posture and vocal inflexions, Hoffman erects a monument to charismatic masculine authority which he proceeds to chip away at through melancholic contemplation, profane outbursts and moments of childish bliss. He makes Dodd a polyvalent figure, at times comical and buffoonish, other times imposing and serene, other times still lonely and helpless; a man made vulnerable by the constant flux of his identity. Hoffman's unrivalled ability to colour each of these facets with his personal brand of painful everyday faultiness makes Dodd one of the most endlessly fascinating creations to populate cinema - and the late actor's greatest individual triumph.
2 - Joaquin Phoenix as Freddie Quell in The Master (2012).
It was tempting to tie The Master's two main performances together for second place, so symbiotic are their contrary energies and styles. But Phoenix's borderline avant-garde lead turn ultimately gained the edge; through sex-addicted, PTSD-suffering drifter Freddie Quell, Phoenix gives a raw, constantly shifting shape to profound human impulses and uses it to illuminate them in strange and frightening new ways. Looking at the world with a constant snarl and eyes whose mocking stare just barely conceals his inner confusion, Freddie lumbers across the film like a lost Lon Chaney character in a semi-conscious quest for love and meaning, communicating mainly through grunts, snickers, sex and violence. The genius of Phoenix's performance lies in his ability to subtly convert these displays of prehistoric brutishness into poetic expressions of unexamined feelings, underlining the emotional and spiritual void they fill through minute alterations in tone and mood. Everything about Freddie's behaviour seems as primevally simple as can be, yet every one of Phoenix's choices makes his true nature more of an enigma - including the question of whether or not he even has one. No male actor this decade has given a more compelling, complete or challenging film performance.
1 - Isabelle Huppert as Michèle Leblanc in Elle (2016).
What Isabelle Huppert achieves in Elle is not only, as I described previously, the pinnacle of a unique career; it's the most detailed, complex and exhilarating work of characterization produced by any cinematic artist in the past ten years. Her performance never lets the viewer settle on a single settled opinion, forcing us to readjust our responses as she stealthily shifts across different emotions while keeping her cards close to her chest. Every glance, every gesture and intonation convey an inner battle of instincts, memories and desires, as if her body itself was the battleground of a war for sexual, societal and filial independence. Huppert's masterstroke is to keep these battles in plain sight for us to see so she can better engage with their emotional repercussions, letting them seep into our subconscious and grow as we react to her character's choices. Her performance, more than any other this decade, pushes the art of acting outside cultural comfort zones and into unexplored territories where our most complicated thoughts, feelings and behaviours take on a beautiful new form. It's the greatest work of film acting of the 2010s and one of the finest examples of the craft ever put to screen.
