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The 20 Best Film Performances of 2014

We hope to shine a little light on brilliant, touching, often funny performances which enrich our understanding of what it means to be human.

Force Majeure
Photo: Magnolia Pictures

Ironically, for an awards program meant to highlight standout performances, the Academy Awards have turned into the 800-pound gorilla of fall and winter entertainment coverage, stomping out other movie news to deposit mounds of hype about a relatively small group of “frontrunners.” Some of our favorite performances of the year were in movies that are being talked up for Oscars, but many were in films too quirky or dark or subtitled for the Academy of Arts and Sciences’s taste, and it would be a shame if that consigned them to the shadows. With this list, we hope to shine a little light on these brilliant, touching, often funny performances, which enrich our understanding of what it means to be human. Elise Nakhnikian


The 20 Best Film Performances of 2014

Marion Cotillard in The Immigrant and Two Days, One Night

A master of realistic acting whose talents would have also flourished in the silent era, Marion Cotillard conveys more in a glance than most actors can with a whole page of dialogue. With eloquent body language and bruised-looking circles beneath her big, blue-gray eyes, the actress infuses a heartbreaking mixture of dignity, vulnerability, and strength into her two latest entries in a gallery of ordinary women under extraordinary pressure. Nakhnikian


The 20 Best Film Performances of 2014

Essie Davis in The Babadook

In Jennifer Kent’s extraordinary The Babadook, Essie Davis makes an art of expressing the exhaustion of single motherhood and the horror of uncertainty almost entirely through her eyes. Sometimes her character’s thousand-yard stare drowsily drifts to the side of the frame, a sign of her wanting to escape the needs of her screaming son. And once she’s metaphorically possessed by the titular demon, her eyes twitch and swell with rage. Wounded and empowered, terrified and terrifying, Davis’s triumph is giving full expression to the dualities of being a mother. Glenn Heath


The 20 Best Film Performances of 2014

Ralph Fiennes in The Grand Budapest Hotel

As the flamboyant, octogenarian-loving M. Gustave in The Grand Budapest Hotel, Ralph Fiennes relishes in the almost cartoonish nature of the character, from the eloquent to the bluntly crude, while at the same time gifting him with disarming displays of empathy. Even through a heavy sheen of Andersonian affectation, Fiennes’s subtle expressiveness conveys a character finally starting to care for someone other than himself. Wes Greene


The 20 Best Film Performances of 2014

Brendan Gleeson in Calvary

As the priest in Calvary who spends his last hours trying to solve the mystery of who is about to kill him, Brendan Gleeson has a part worthy of his bearlike physique, sardonic intelligence, and fine-tuned empathy, which make him seem a little more than the rest of us in every way. Gently nudging his troubled daughter (he became a priest late in life) toward mental health, tenderly caring for his dying dog, or quietly absorbing the angst his parishioners bombard him with, Gleeson’s Father James demonstrates such unshowy but exquisite insight and compassion that even the Christ imagery at the end of the movie feels earned. Nakhnikian

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The 20 Best Film Performances of 2014

Jake Gyllenhaal in Enemy

Jake Gyllenhaal just gets better with age, and in Denis Villeneuve’s oneiric Enemy, he deftly shifts between two characters with dissonant personalities, with both seeking to escape a world of oppressive repetition: There’s Adam, the meek college professor who struggles to even form sentences, and Anthony, the cocky and assured actor who’s all raging id. Whenever they’re on screen together, it’s almost too easy to forget we’re watching the same actor. Greene


The 20 Best Film Performances of 2014

Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig in The Skeleton Twins

Their sibling-like rapport and gift for finding comedy in pathos and vice versa make these former SNL castmates and old friends shine as uncannily close but long-estranged twins. With just a sidelong glance here and a beat of silence there, Bill Hader and Kristin Wiig slowly and surely convey the intelligence and wit that is part of their characters’ shared inheritance, as well as the suffocating depression. The depth of the sadness they stoically plumb makes their two comic improvs—one involving laughing gas and dental tools and the other lip-synching to ’80s pop-rock—as welcome as they are deliciously funny. Nakhnikian


The 20 Best Film Performances of 2014

Tom Hardy in Locke

A twitch of the eye, a shift of his body weight—that’s all Hardy needs in Locke to showcase the growing anxiety of his eponymous character, whose carefully structured life crumbles overnight. Good thing, too, because the film keeps Hardy trapped in a car for its entire duration, meaning that this year’s most accomplished physical performance is also the one with the least movement. Tomas Hachard


The 20 Best Film Performances of 2014

John Hawkes in Low Down

John Hawkes’s performance as Joe Albany, a jazz pianist who played with the likes of Charlie Parker while battling a heroin addiction and its attending chaos, is an extraordinary feat of physical imagination. Hawkes foregrounds the musician’s sexiness, how his economy of movement informs every element of his life, transforming all gestures into subsumed art. The actor’s empathy contextualizes Albany’s addiction indirectly, truthfully: displaying the energy that requires more, or less, than sobriety to work. Chuck Bowen

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The 20 Best Film Performances of 2014

Pat Healy in Cheap Thrills and Draft Day

Pat Healy has a face for characters that are crushed by working-class disappointments, and his voice is a marvel: high, with a hint of nasal that he often utilizes as stinging shorthand for bitterness. These qualities imbue the astonishingly hard, brutal Cheap Thrills with a pathos that prevents the violence from calcifying over into smugness. In Draft Day, Healy similarly assumes a cameo role with such vivid desperation as to inadvertently embarrass its comatose superstar. Bowen


The 20 Best Film Performances of 2014

Philip Seymour Hoffman in A Most Wanted Man

One of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s gifts was his ability to invest losers with transcendent physical gravity. This was also Richard Burton’s specialty, so perhaps it’s not a coincidence that each actor found one of their best roles in the work of John le Carré, a poet of bureaucratic futility. In A Most Wanted Man, Hoffman communicates the literal and figurative heaviness of his German spook’s life, while also pulling off one the slyest and most stylish performances of his career. Bowen


The 20 Best Film Performances of 2014

Isabelle Huppert in Abuse of Weakness

Showy performances often build from relative repose to extravagant displays of physicality; Isabelle Huppert manages the opposite in Catherine Breillat’s Abuse of Weakness. Huppert’s character begins with a seizure episode that’s alarming in the actress’s all-too-convincing approximation of a bodily convulsion and its frozen-limbed repercussions and cuts down movement until it’s as if her very sentience were at stake. Then, Huppert’s true feat—the creation of a woman simultaneously aware of and oblivious to her actions—is as remarkable as any more quantifiable physical gamble. Carson Lund


The 20 Best Film Performances of 2014

Gene Jones in The Sacrament

The Sacrament sparks to life when Gene Jones ascends the screen as “Father,” the face of a potentially deadly commune. Jones’s most inspired decision is that he simply doesn’t editorialize, reducing the character to an easy caricature of a hick preacher. Father’s a fire-and-brimstoner with a dash of earth-mothering thrown in to confuse the issue, and Jones honors the seductive, evasive verbal force that’s necessary to holding a community in unyielding, terrifyingly focused sway. Bowen

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The 20 Best Film Performances of 2014

Anna Kendrick and Melanie Lynskey in Happy Christmas

Actors frequently make a joke of women struggling with identity, whether they’re etching out a stable life as full-time mother or floundering in career indecision. Anna Kendrick and Melanie Lynskey honored these roles in Happy Christmas, as their graceful gestures come to illustrate the vulnerability that’s nurtured by a society that insidiously encourages us to assume that we’ve never made a correct decision, whether it pertains to valuing a career over adventure or vice versa. Chuck Bowen


The 20 Best Film Performances of 2014

Johannes Bah Kuhnke and Lisa Loven Kongsli in Force Majeure

In Force Majeure, a man (Johannes Bah Kuhnke) abandons his wife (Lisa Loven Kongsli) and kids at their time of greatest need. Eventually this leads to crisis, to denunciations and sobbing breakdowns, but for most of the film, Kuhnke and Kongsli’s performances are models of restraint and bottled-up emotion. Their tools are suspicious stares and cautious glances, through which the film gains much of its foreboding mood. And it’s because Kuhnke and Kongsli convey their characters’ growing shame and anger, their deliberations about the possibility of forgiveness, as internal processes, hidden for as long as possible behind superficially calm exteriors, that the film’s descent into histrionics feels not like a contrived emotional outburst, but a powerful catharsis. Hachard


The 20 Best Film Performances of 2014

Elisabeth Moss in Listen Up Philip

If it stuck just to the story of the self-important young novelist at its center, this tartly comic takedown of the common misconception that being an artist gives you permission to be a jerk would still be immensely satisfying. But by switching its focus midway through to Ashley, Philip’s badly neglected girlfriend, Listen Up Philip graduates from clever to profound, thanks to Elizabeth Moss’s vivid, multi-layered performance. A kaleidoscope of emotions ranging from sweetly silly to immensely sad, Moss’s Ashley is as open to life as Philip is closed off. Nakhnikian


The 20 Best Film Performances of 2014

Jack O’Connell in Starred Up

O’Connell’s high-octane turn as Eric, an inmate recently moved from a juvenile institution to adult prison, anchors the tense Starred Up. His tirades and violent outbursts keep the movie teetering on the edge of chaos. But amid that, particularly in Eric’s relationship with his father and fellow-inmate, Neville (Ben Mendelsohn), O’Connell allows us glimpses of Eric’s vulnerability and youthful posturing, elements that others might have obscured or dismissed while giving such a frenzied performance. Hachard

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The 20 Best Film Performances of 2014

Kate Lyn Sheil in The Heart Machine

Kate Lyn Sheil’s habit of making a lot from a little continues with her role in Zachary Wigon’s underappreciated The Heart Machine, more than half of which is performed from a Skype screen. The film’s structural gambit—slowly modulating from a male-centric romance to a modern tragedy—requires that Sheil’s character project a sense of charm and desirability through the MacBook without also hinting at a repressed core of vulnerability that only comes to the fore in the home stretch. Wandering eyes, slurred vowels, and trailing-off sentences subtly give her character’s ruse away, but Sheil achieves just as elegantly the eventual shift to motionless humiliation. Lund


The 20 Best Film Performances of 2014

Timothy Spall in Mr. Turner

As quick with a grunt as with flowery verbosity, Timothy Spall invests such exhausting attention into the minutiae of J.M.W. Turner’s wide-ranging reactions to the film’s various personalities that he never seems to behave the same way twice. Through colorful physicality and an array of vivid expressions, the actor depicts a man teeming with contradictions: Bogged down by the ugliness of human nature yet still held in rapture by the beauty the world still offers, with he himself representing both in the process. Greene


The 20 Best Film Performances of 2014

Tessa Thompson in Dear White People

As Dear White People’s complicated rabble-rouser Sam White, Tessa Thompson evinces astonishing range between moments of cool confidence and immense vulnerability once the act of keeping up appearances takes its toll. Fearless and honest, Thompson breathes ferocious life into the physical embodiment of the film’s focus on identity struggle: a person who will gladly speak her mind, but, through flashes of telling gestures and expressions, briefly lets slip an insecurity into how society will view her. Greene


The 20 Best Film Performances of 2014

Agata Trzebuchowska and Agata Kulesza in Ida

The quietly devastating Ida, which limns one family’s losses in the Holocaust and the burdens produced by that loss for generations to come, owes much of its power to these two penetrating performances. In the title role, open-faced Agata Trzebuchowska reveals her thinking largely without words, unveiling the strength of character, quiet intelligence, and clear moral compass of a sheltered young novitiate. As Ida’s gallant, cynical aunt, her tongue as sharp as the planes of her face, Agata Kulesza is a latter-day Barbara Stanwyck, playing a party girl who wins your heart and breaks it at the same time. Nakhnikian

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