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The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017

A sense of autobiography invests these performances with a life force that transcends the direct confines of the screen.

The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017
Photo: Sony Pictures Classics

Remarkable acting often concerns the emotional and social perils of performance itself, as this art is often informed with an implicit sense of auto-critique. Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance in Phantom Thread is partially about the power that he himself enjoys as a prominent artist, while Get Out’s Daniel Kaluuya skillfully elaborates on the role play that’s necessary for African-Americans to navigate white-dominated society. Not that role play is relegated solely to socializing outside of the home, as Geena Davis illustrates in Marjorie Prime, riffing heartbreakingly on the armor that a daughter must assume when dueling with her mother. And James Franco took notions of nesting performances to a particularly flamboyant and literal degree in The Disaster Artist, playing a terrible actor and director who might embody his own personal fears of failure. This sense of autobiography—of neurosis and emboldened expression—invests the following performances with a life force that transcends the direct confines of the screen. Chuck Bowen


The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017

Mathieu Amalric, Son of Joseph

Mathieu Amalric renders Son of Joseph’s Oscar, a book publisher, so selfish that he’s likeable. There’s a suggestion in Amalric’s blissful performance of a child who’s finally getting to satiate his fantasies of wealth and women, and who’s overjoyed to be making a pig of himself. Amalric creates discomfiting comedy out of Oscar’s cruelty, particularly when the character gleefully insists on not bothering himself with trivial details, such as the number of children he actually has. Bowen


The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017

Timothée Chalamet, Call Me by Your Name

Timothée Chalamet’s performance in Call Me by Your Name comes to its climax at the very end of the film, in the very long take of the actor’s face as it digests and regurgitates heartbreak a million times over while the world behind him has the audacity to go on as normal. The scene, and its impossible task of bringing cinematic closure to a film about the endlessness of lust for sex and knowledge, is entirely dependent on Chalamet’s uncanny—and organic—ability to convey seemingly countless contradicting nuances. His is the face of mourning a love that did dare to speak its name and still perished. Chalamet’s tour de force is also in the carefree intellectual masculinity he conveys so effortlessly throughout the film, rendering its erudite dream world believable: a young man un-tortured by the gendering process and emancipated enough to roam around the labyrinths of desire wherever they may lead. Diego Semerene


The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017

Lily Collins, To the Bone

As Ellen, a young anorexic pushing her body closer and closer to self-digestive disaster, Lily Collins informs her body with a subtle angularity that’s complemented by her curt and defensive line deliveries. To the Bone revels in female vulnerability and in corporeal anxiety that can be understood by both genders, and Collins grounds these emotions in tactile details, from the bend of her overworked back during sit-ups to her casual recitation of any food’s caloric intake. Collins informs Ellen’s purposefulness with terror, intelligence, and transcendent dignity. Bowen


The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017

Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project

Willem Dafoe grounds The Florida Project with his seeming casualness of being—with his understanding of his presence as a kind of found object. Dafoe has played deeply strange men for so long that his normalcy, when evoked, carries a tang of hard-won grace. In Sean Baker’s film, Dafoe’s Bobby, a manager of a slum motel outside of Disney World, is so transcendently decent that one understands this empathy as having arisen from decades of pain. Bobby is a quiet counterpoint to the chaos of the motel, which is defined by the lives of the poverty-stricken who’re driven to desperate, occasionally joyous measures. Dafoe’s delivery of his lines evinces a languid rage at their exploitation. Bowen

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The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017

Geena Davis, Marjorie Prime

Geena Davis exudes a distinctive mixture of power, intelligence, screwball humor, and vulnerability as an actress, often playing formidable characters who’re stuck in their own heads. In Michael Almereyda’s Marjorie Prime, Davis gives one of the finest performances of her career as Tess, a depressed married woman who’s always felt eclipsed in life by her mother and deceased brother, wrongly suspecting that the former never loved her. The film hinges on a heartbreaking denial of catharsis, as Tess nearly faces her greatest fears only to retreat into the abyss of her longing and feelings of inferiority. In a performance of majestic emotional lucidity, Davis captures the insidious fashions in which depressives gradually run themselves down; resisting melodrama, she renders the minute nuances of despair. Bowen


The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017

Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread

As Reynolds Woodcock, a dressmaker of 1950s-era London, Daniel Day-Lewis expertly manipulates his considerable yet terrifying sex appeal. Throughout Phantom Thread, the actor fashions a weirdly intoxicating portrait of alienation, with an accent that scans as a sly joke on performative shtick and gestures that serve as volcanic extensions of Woodcock’s art. For all of the control on display, there’s still a daring to Day-Lewis’s performance, a sense that the artist might explode out of his character. Bowen


The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017

James Franco, The Disaster Artist

Hollywood loves to promote itself come awards season with statues for committed actors playing important historical figures. However, if voters have a sense of irony they’ll recognize James Franco’s outrageous turn as disasterpiece filmmaker Tommy Wiseau in The Disaster Artist as the ultimate implosion of this trend. Franco’s performance contains the pretense of method acting, with a phony accent and prosthetics to mark the obligatory signifiers of an awards contender. Yet beneath the gag lies Franco’s winking critique of himself as a failed filmmaker. Art imitating life imitating art. Clayton Dillard


The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017

Tiffany Haddish, Girls Trip

Whether her Girls Trip character was spitting fire about taking out a friend’s cheating husband or ziplining over a crowded New Orleans street to save her mortally embarrassed friend who just pissed herself above a group of Mardi Gras revelers, Tiffany Haddish single-handedly elevated an otherwise rote girlfriends-gone-wild narrative with her equally crass and lovable comic brio. From her sense of swagger to breakneck verbal delivery, Haddish transformed shade into an art form. Derek Smith

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The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017

Sally Hawkins, Maudie

Few people filter in and out of the world of Maud (Sally Hawkins) and Everett Lewis’s (Ethan Hawke) dusty shack in Aisling Walsh’s Maudie. It’s a setup that hinges Maudie’s emotional center on the performances. Without making Maud a tragic figure or a symbol for the power of positive thinking, Hawkins gives the woman an indefectible thrust of optimism in the face of emotional hardship she knows she’ll never slough off. Hawkins’s wide smile and warbling but vibrant voice impart an unexpected vitality to Maud’s tiny frame, imbuing the character with a soul-deep strength of resolve. Peter Goldberg


The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017

Shahab Hosseini, The Salesman

In The Salesman, Ashgar Farhadi’s most sophisticated moral tale yet, Shahab Hosseini’s Emad is the character that blurs the film’s juxtapositions between the rehearsed, nightly emotional breakdowns of a stage actor and his woefully misguided domestic performance of masculine rectitude. Hosseini’s slowly dawning recognition of his folly is at once sympathetic and enormously frustrating, a supreme distillation of his director’s knack for depicting fraught, inevitable reckonings. Christopher Gray


The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017

Doug Jones, The Shape of Water

As the Amphibian Man, Doug Jones achieves a suggestive delicacy that otherwise eludes The Shape of Water. Jones renders tentative reaches for hard-boiled eggs indicative of a past governed by abuse. Hauntingly complementing these actions are the creature’s breathing rhythms when he’s sitting in a bathtub, which communicate a sense of hard-won repose. Assisted by the work of gifted FX artists, Jones knows what Guillermo del Toro’s after in this film—a poetry of a universal need for connection—and understands that such universality is derived from behavioral specificity. Bowen


The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017

Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out

The gravitational force around which Jordan Peele’s comedy of horrors revolves, Daniel Kaluuya’s performance as Chris runs the gamut of tenderness, trepidation, and tremulousness with absolute surety, making each plot twist of Get Out all the more startling for the potential detriment caused to its wholly human protagonist. Perhaps Kaluuya’s subtlest gesture is the barely concealed sense of betrayal Chris displays when Rose (Allison Williams) refuses to aid in his escape. A relationship, a future, trust—all are lost in the teary, squinting recognition of his lover’s hatred. Dillard

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The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017

Tracy Letts, The Lovers and Lady Bird

There’s a sense in many of Tracy Letts’s performances of power being squandered—of a male essence going to seed via professional failure. In The Lovers and Lady Bird, Letts plays fathers who’re capable of great love and kindness but who must constantly resist the temptation to retreat into their own heads, leaving their families adrift. Letts lends this internal civil war a physical tactility in both these films, with gracefully slumped body language and a mighty voice that often appears to be on the verge of cracking. Bowen


The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017

Lesley Manville, Phantom Thread

Paul Thomas Anderson clearly adores Leslie Manville—he dwells at length on the lines of her forehead meeting the wrinkles of her eyes in the light of a fire—and with good reason: In much the same way that her Cyril maintains order and perfection at the House of Woodcock, Manville’s performance is the linchpin of Phantom Thread’s ravishing love triangle. Manville subverts the expectations of her Mrs. Danvers-esque enforcer with a formidability that’s at once imperious and endlessly surprising. Cyril could be a steely and calculating emotional martyr, but with astounding subtlety Manville assures us that she too sees the value in a world built on care and passion. Gray


The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017

Elizabeth Marvel, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)

As Jean, the perpetually neglected daughter of patriarch Harold Meyerowitz (Dustin Hoffman) in Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), Elizabeth Marvel embodies the quiet, forgotten child who feels that her presence still registers even as an adult as little more than a footnote to noisily pontificating men. Marvel finds Jean’s humanity in ways both funny and heartbreaking: Jean delivers the film’s funniest one-liner (“Wow, that was a hard-R”) and reveals herself to be a childhood victim of sexual misconduct, concealed by Harold for decades. Marvel’s performance gives the film both its levity and its decency. Dillard


The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017

Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

The divisive craziness of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri thrives on characters who serve the tempo of any given moment rather than of a grand structure. The miracle of Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell’s performances, then, is that their work isn’t only coherent but consistently heartbreaking. McDormand tempers her vengeful mother with a lucid steadiness that transcends the narrative’s lurid hugger-mugger, while Rockwell goes in the other direction, riffing wildly and viscerally on the cruelty and self-pity of a madman who randomly assigns himself a purpose. Bowen

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The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017

Cynthia Nixon and Jennifer Ehle, A Quiet Passion

It’s natural to think of Jennifer Ehle’s Vinnie Dickinson as a necessary audience surrogate: the responsible, beloved sibling whose nearly boundless sympathy for her sister, Emily (Cynthia Nixon), helps the audience to accept the poet’s bracing social mores and deep self-loathing. The thrill of Terence Davies’s A Quiet Passion, though, lies in how the sisters seem constantly to be pushing one another to be smarter, sharper, and more forthright. Few biopics have ever been so devoted to the life of the mind, and few actors convey the mind at work with as much gravity and mischief as Ehle and Nixon. Gray


The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017

Josh O’Connor, God’s Own Country

Josh O’Connor’s performance in God’s Own Country stands in great contrast to Timothée Chalamet’s in Call Me by Your Name, as O’Connor’s Johnny has trained his face and body to inhibit any and all expression of feelings, let alone queerness. Here lies O’Connor’s virtuosity: his capacity for conveying repression and lack, despair and its disavowal, the ebullience of love and the rigidity of belonging, at the same time in a perennial state of hetero-masculine exhaustion. O’Connor embodies the British everyman whose survival relies on alcohol-induced suppression of everything that could come out of the human body for fear that such thing would denounce the fact that we actually have one. Whereas desire is the very home of Chalamet’s Elio, giving into desire seems to be the most agonizing, and exceptional, of heroic acts for O’Connor’s Johnny. Semerene


The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017

Robert Pattinson and Benny Safdie, Good Time

As Good Time’s bank-robbing brothers on the lam, Robert Pattinson and Benny Safdie forge an affecting and commanding musicality that’s true to sibling relationships. Pattinson has a light, comically desperate intensity that’s reminiscent of Vincent Gallo, while Safdie embraces slower rhythms, playing a mentally limited man with a sense of majesty and respect that’s unusual in American cinema. The actors understand brotherhood as a series of negotiations between self and family, which are often tempered with love as well as chaos. Bowen


The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017

Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, BPM (Beats Per Minute)

Writer-director Robin Campillo’s BPM (Beats Per Minute) finds in Nahuel Pérez Biscayart a face and voice to communicate the by turns ecstatic and wrenching role of being an activist for ACT UP Paris during the early 1990s. As Sean Dalmazo, Biscayart conveys the passion necessary when seeking justice in the face of oppression. Though AIDS gradually depletes Sean’s livelihood, Biscayart’s performance helps the film to retain an unwavering and finally mournful certainty that to be alive means to fight for body, community, and sex. Dillard

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The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017

Haley Lu Richardson, Columbus

Kogonada’s Columbus is a work of clean lines and compositional symmetry, and its earnest sensibility might have seemed superficial and square were it not for Haley Lu Richardson’s searching lead performance. Quietly anguished about her future prospects in the latter days of her teenage years, Richardson’s Casey reckons with her duties to both her family and her ambitions, and few actors outside of a Linklater film have captured how vital conversation and open thought are to our everyday well-being. Gray


The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017

Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird

In one masterful blink of a cut, both Saoirse Ronan’s petulant Christine and Laurie Metcalf’s flinty Marion are shown driving the tree-lined curves of Sacramento. For Marion, it’s a moment of calm and security in a life full of nagging emotional and financial hardships, and for Christine it’s both a taste of freedom and power and perhaps the first time she’s seen her home through her mother’s eyes. Ronan and Metcalf forge a mother-daughter relationship of uncommon texture in Lady Bird, and these moments when they’re alone and so quietly open and vulnerable consecrate their bond. Gray


The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017

Kristen Stewart, Personal Shopper

Kristen Stewart masterfully conveys thought through action, and Personal Shopper is a catalogue of physical incident. As Maureen, Stewart informs the drinking of coffee with mysterious and poignant grandeur, while handling a cellphone with a tentativeness that speaks of Maureen’s restless intelligence. The film’s centerpiece is the slipping on of a dress, which Stewart equates to the assumption of a second skin, indicative of a life that Maureen can only vicariously experience. Bowen


The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017

Emma Stone, Battle of the Sexes

Battle of the Sexes is a fashionably cartoonish transplant of woke values onto a past setting, telling the story of how tennis champion Billie Jean King faced hustler Bobby Riggs in a match that was interpreted as a symbol of gender tensions. As Riggs, Steve Carell is broad and shrill as always. But Stone’s performance as King is so intense and emotionally multi-faceted that it nearly salvages the film. Stone brings to life a woman whose confidence resounds with anger and profound self-loathing and loneliness; she regards King not as a symbol, but as a human being. Bowen

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The 30 Best Film Performances of 2017

Michael Stuhlbarg, Call Me by Your Name

Even from the fringes of Call Me by Your Name’s narrative, Michael Stuhlbarg’s Mr. Pearlman exudes a quiet intensity from beneath his reserved exterior, subtly imparting a sense of still-lingering regret of possibilities left unexplored in his youth. In an immensely moving monologue near the film’s end, Stuhlbarg’s measured tone belies a vulnerability which helps him to convey a compassion, generosity, and support that stands as a prime example of fatherhood at its very best. Smith

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