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The 25 Best Film Performances of 2016

All of these performances exude a preternatural understanding of human complexities and emotions.

The 25 Best Film Performances of 2016
Photo: Paramount Pictures

This year, Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine gave us a rare and comprehensive look into how an actor prepares for a role. For Kate Lyn Sheil, the actress at the heart of the film, that involved copious research into the life and mindset of Christine Chubbuck, the WXLT-TV newscaster who took her own life on live television on July 15, 1974. Though Sheil’s process is fascinating to watch, it reaffirms what we’ve always known about the best of film actors: That they are, in a way, their own auteur. Take the genius who is Isabelle Huppert, whose decades-perfected gravitas in Elle tricked us, however briefly, into thinking we’re not just watching a film starring Isabelle Huppert, but a film by Isabelle Huppert. Her performance is just one of an uncommonly large number in 2016’s slate of films that exude a preternatural understanding of human complexities and emotions, each uniquely and brilliantly applied to even the most outlandish of characters. Wes Greene


The 25 Best Film Performances of 2016

Casey Affleck and Lucas Hedges, Manchester by the Sea

As Lee, the would-be guardian who can’t escape his self-abnegating sadness, and Patrick, the orphaned son who doesn’t know how to accept that his perfectly normal life has taken an abrupt turn, Casey Affleck and Lucas Hedges offer equally compelling studies in the avoidance of grief. A testy comedic energy emerges from the actors’ contrasting styles, helping Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea screenplay realize its potential as a full-hearted ode to a family whose hearts are broken. Christopher Gray


The 25 Best Film Performances of 2016

Kate Beckinsale, Love & Friendship

Whit Stillman’s mellifluous, literate prose has never been a cake walk for the modern actor, and Jane Austen’s Victorian dialect is no simpler. Incredibly, that all seems a non-issue for Kate Beckinsale, whose second-nature elocution of Love & Friendship’s dense verbiage enables her to channel her energy into the masterfully passive-aggressive body language that really makes Lady Susan such an intimidating character. Carson Lund


The 25 Best Film Performances of 2016

Tom Bennett, Love & Friendship

In Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship, Tom Bennett steals every scene he’s in as a buffoonish country squire. It’s easy to underrate his performance due to the ease with which he garners laughs that expose the hard socioeconomic realities of his milieu. Bennett’s Sir James Martin is the foolish yet benevolent master who’s wise enough to placate his social inferiors by letting them get the better of him. Oleg Ivanov


The 25 Best Film Performances of 2016

Sonia Braga, Aquarius

As Brazil held on to the last remnants of its democracy, Sonia Braga held a sign at Cannes that read “A Coup Took Place in Brazil” with the same poise and fearlessness of Clara, her character in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius. Braga is so mystifying not because she flawlessly transports herself into someone else’s persona. This bewilderment is, instead, in her muddling the borders between Clara, the sole survivor in a banana republic taken over by capitalist termites, and Sonia herself, the elusive myth that both conquered and failed Hollywood. She’s Brazilian and foreign, a prey and a beast, a nobody and a star, ensnared and free at the same time, in the same face, in the same gaze. Diego Semerene

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The 25 Best Film Performances of 2016

Jeff Bridges, Hell or High Water

Jeff Bridges has been an icon for decades, but he reaches an autumnal peak in Hell or High Water as Marcus Hamilton, looming over the film as a more humble incarnation of one of John Wayne’s rugged law enforcers, investing wise-old-racist-codger shtick with haunting rage and despair. Bridges quietly telegraphs an amazement at his own legacy that proves contagious. Chuck Bowen


The 25 Best Film Performances of 2016

Margherita Buy and John Turturro, Mia Madre

Margherita Buy and John Turturro walk a lovely, delicate tightrope in Mia Madre—she playing the practical, damaged foil to his exacting and poignant parody of an American blowhard. Buy embodies the grace and strength that are inherent to Nanni Moretti’s heartbreakingly rich vision of art and family, while Turturro hits big and unsettling comic notes, elucidating on the ugly embarrassment of need. Bowen


The 25 Best Film Performances of 2016

Willem Dafoe and Christopher Matthew Cooke, Dog Eat Dog

Willem Dafoe and Christopher Matthew Cooke respectively embody the two tones that are prominently at war in Dog Eat Dog, Paul Schrader’s best film in years. Dafoe stirs up comic anarchy, investing it with pathos just when you think you’ve got the performance figured out. Cooke quietly burrows deep into his tough-guy role, revealing an entire life of submerged anger and loneliness in clipped gestures that serve as wordless pulp haikus. Bowen


The 25 Best Film Performances of 2016

Viola Davis, Fences

Throughout Fences, one can feel Denzel Washington’s exhilaration to be working with Viola Davis, as she’s the rare performer who can match his intensity, who can outfox his big gestures with grace notes that resound throughout the film like fine musical instruments in an echo chamber. Playing Troy’s (Washington) second wife, Rose, Davis subtly lowers her voice, suggesting a life spent making quick points in between the flamboyant oscillations of loud men, investing each line with punchy, plaintive urgency. Bowen

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The 25 Best Film Performances of 2016

Danny DeVito, Wiener-Dog

Your feelings on the cinema of Todd Solondz probably depend on whether you find the filmmaker’s hopelessness richly existential or self-consciously cruel. Danny DeVito embodies all these qualities at once in Wiener-Dog, spinning graceful comic sonatas of anger, contrasting their vitality with the sloped, unforgettably defeated physicality of a man almost too damn miserable to breathe. Bowen


The 25 Best Film Performances of 2016

Adam Driver, Paterson

In Paterson, Jim Jarmusch builds an entire film on Adam Driver’s poetry of stifled longing, utilizing the actor as a canvass for dramatizing the war waged between the healing, reassuring solace of creativity and the daily toil of survival. Driver’s intuition and trust in his audience are startling, as he allows us to gradually discover his character’s fragility in his very gentleness. Bowen


The 25 Best Film Performances of 2016

Ralph Fiennes, A Bigger Splash

Ralph Fiennes waltzes through A Bigger Splash drunk on his excessive scenery chewing, daring you to call him out on the impression that he gives of his being paid wildly to take a European vacation under the pretense of playing this role. Yet, Fiennes is also aware of the humanity that resides deep underneath this engagingly obnoxious charlatan. Bowen


The 25 Best Film Performances of 2016

Lily Gladstone, Certain Women

In an avowedly understated film like Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, Lily Gladstone’s performance as Jamie, the ranch hand who falls for a visiting night-school teacher (Kristen Stewart), stands out for its sheer legibility. Willing herself into unrequited acts of grand romance, Jamie reinvents the terror and thrill of first love by welcoming her feelings without hesitation. The universe rewards her efforts with a lush field to crash-land in. Gray

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The 25 Best Film Performances of 2016

Andre Holland, Moonlight

For all its swoon-worthy needle-drops and pregnant pauses, the third act of Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight surpasses simple romantic longing. Repeatedly asking “Who is you?” of Trevante Rhodes’s quiet, insulated Chiron, Andre Holland’s adult Kevin represents a naked (and hugely charismatic) plea for both empathy and self-acceptance. Turning a spontaneous meal into a long-overdue therapy session, Holland orchestrates a charm offensive in the key of radical transparency. Gray


The 25 Best Film Performances of 2016

Isabelle Huppert, Elle

Who else but Isabelle Huppert could have played Michèle Leblanc, the eponymous heroine of Paul Verhoeven’s Elle? The exuberant gravitas, the unapologetic condescension, the classily managed aggression that only the most French of faces could ever entertain—Huppert reduces us to our prosaic mortality with a glance, the pursing of her lips, the nearly imperceptible raising of an eyebrow, or the perverse delivery of a syllable. With her unassailable gaze, Huppert shuts down facile gut-reactions around violence, the reactionary faux-feminisms that could have crippled the film, and forces us to confront the ambivalences of desire—like a sphinx. Semerene


The 25 Best Film Performances of 2016

Nicole Kidman and Dev Patel, Lion

In Garth Davis’s Lion, Nicole Kidman and Dev hauntingly attest to the feelings of estrangement that simultaneously separate and bind together adopted children and their families. In the film’s finest scene, the silently cataclysmic mix of confusion and anguish that washes across Patel’s face when Saroo stumbles upon a plate of jalebis at his friend’s house captures the young man’s ineffable connection to the homeland he barely remembers. And in the film’s second finest scene, Kidman’s tearful acknowledgement of Sue’s desire to adopt Saroo as her “only path” resonates as a kind of prayer—one that brings mother and son closer together at the same time as it gives him license to go on the Proustian journey to finally understand himself. Ed Gonzalez


The 25 Best Film Performances of 2016

Tracy Letts, Wiener-Dog and Indignation

One can sense playwright Tracy Letts’s theatrical background in his physicality and delivery of dialogue, which are both marked with a profound sense of control, of measuring and reevaluating gestures and behaviors. Letts particularly knows when to bite off a line, informing it with hard, succinct musicality. In Wiener-Dog and Indignation, Letts uses his instruments to render two damningly textured portraits of casual monsters. Bowen

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The 25 Best Film Performances of 2016

Vincent Lindon, The Measure of a Man

It’s through a painful failure to withhold any and all feelings that Vincent Lindon animates Thierry Taugourdeau’s wounded masculinity in The Measure of a Man. With unflappable nuance, Lindon conveys the impossible stiffness required of being a man; it’s in the suddenly unemployed Thierry pleading for work during a Skype interview, and to no avail, or in his trying to avoid male contact with his dance instructor, and ever so awkwardly. Through Lindon’s performance, manhood comes to life as something so frail, so depressive, that any glimmer of emotion promises its humiliating implosion. Semerene


The 25 Best Film Performances of 2016

Glen Powell, Everybody Wants Some!!

Leaving the strongest impact among Everybody Wants Some!!’s throng of gung-ho newcomers, the über-charismatic Glen Powell is practically a born fit for Finn, a character who can’t help but command a room. Whether delivering a drive-by wisecrack, a morsel of two-bit wisdom, or simply turning his head, Powell performs everything with ostentatious conviction—as college freshmen discovering themselves often do. Lund


The 25 Best Film Performances of 2016

Michael Shannon, Midnight Special, Elvis & Nixon, and Nocturnal Animals

It was a memorable year for connoisseurs of Michael Shannon, as the actor added three great new rogues to his expanding gallery of vividly wounded American males. In Midnight Special, Shannon reveals a level of yearning that’s extraordinary even for him. In Elvis & Nixon and Nocturnal Animals, he turns badass tropes inside out, pinpointing the ache that resonates underneath iconography. Bowen


The 25 Best Film Performances of 2016

Kate Lyn Sheil, Kate Plays Christine

Kate Lyn Sheil, playing a version of herself, provides a deceptively multilayered performance in Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine. On one hand, she’s the actor preparing for a role, emotive with pronounced body language and enormous empathy that allows her to become fiercely protective of the tragic Christine Chubbuck. On the other, Sheil channels uncommon levels of vulnerability in her everyday life, playing the quiet, restrained, and emotionless woman neurotically grappling with people’s perception of her. Greene

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The 25 Best Film Performances of 2016

Peter Simonischek, Toni Erdmann

As serial prankster Winifried in Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, Peter Simonischek creates an effective foil to his character’s daughter, Ines (Sandra Hüller), a humorless victim of corporate culture. Simonischek’s relaxed physicality and demeanor while interacting with Ines and other self-serious people within her orbit suggests how Winifried, to paraphrase the man’s words, refuses to lose the humor. And as Winifried’s alter ego, Toni Erdmann, Simonischek’s wildly contorted expressions, freewheeling line readings of non-sequiturs, and perfectly timed comic gestures elegantly contextualize a father’s love for his daughter and concern over her workaholic lifestyle. Greene

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