Sidney Poitier once said that “Acting isn’t a game of ‘pretend.’ It’s an exercise in being real.” But how does one be real? This year saw dozens of performers bend the concept of reality to its breaking point. In Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth, Elisabeth Moss’s Catherine descends into a depressive, mentally unstable state as she grapples with her father’s suicide, a failed relationship with her boyfriend, and failing friendship with a bestie played by Katherine Waterston. Of the role, Moss said she was attracted to it because “playing happy characters is very boring.” But there can be reality inside the boredom, as Gérard Depardieu demonstrates in Abel Ferrara’s Welcome to New York, grunting and sliming his way through the portrayal of a Dominique Strauss-Kahn type, a detached and criminal politician whose numbed indulgence of booze, drugs, and women is put on hold when a maid accuses him of rape. In an interview with Sofilm, Depardieu admitted, “When I’m bored, I drink,” going on to say he can “absorb” up to 14 bottles of wine a day and not feel drunk, “just a little pissed.” In each case, performer and performance is simultaneously off in the distance and close by, perhaps difficult to parse with the naked eye, but not beyond the vanishing point where tangible existence meets fantasy. If 2015’s best performances taught us anything, it’s that reality presents itself in many shapes and sizes.
Christopher Abbott and Cynthia Nixon, James White
As James White’s titular character, Christopher Abbott emits impetuous masculine energy, which Cynthia Nixon, as James’s dying mother, actively deflects in a manner bespeaking of her character’s years as a woman living with a troubled, empathetic son. Together, these incredible actors fashion an intimate symbiotic cocoon out of emotional scar tissue and fleeting moments of grace. Chuck Bowen
Emory Cohen, Brooklyn
Though Saoirse Ronan’s Irish immigrant is the protagonist of Brooklyn, it’s Emory Cohen’s charming, beautiful Italian American with whom we, like our heroine, fall hopelessly in love. Channeling young Brando (that saunter! That thick-tongued accent! Those high-waisted pants!), he becomes the foremost emblem of the film’s swooning romance, as alive to the sex appeal of old Hollywood as it is to the pull of the Old World. For Brooklyn’s portrait of a woman torn between two homes (and two men) in the early 1950s to work, Cohen has to become the boy of our dreams. And he does. Matt Brennan
Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling, 45 Years
Though he’s often just beyond the edges of the frame, Tom Courtenay’s stricken encounter with the past is an omnipresent force in writer-director Andrew Haigh’s devastating two-hander 45 Years, rippling across Charlotte Rampling’s face like a stone dropped in still water. As their aging English couple dredges up nearly half a century’s worth of personal history and finds its meaning irrevocably transformed, Courtenay and Rampling’s remarkable performances become a single, seamless entity, measuring each flicker of emotion with the precision of a seismograph. Brennan
Gérard Depardieu, Welcome to New York
Throughout Abel Ferrara’s Welcome to New York, Gérard Depardieu is fearlessly willing to plumb the depths of depravity in his depiction of wealthy sex-fiend Devereaux (a not-even-veiled version of Dominique Strauss-Kahn). The actor contextualizes Devereaux’s long history of philandering by playing his interactions with women as perverse courting rituals, and his blank, emotionless expressions and leisurely physicality shrewdly suggest a man so acclimated to having power that nothing, not even sexual assault charges, fazes him. Wes Greene
Arielle Holmes, Heaven Knows What
First-time actress Arielle Holmes, the star of Josh and Benny Safdie’s harrowing third feature, Heaven Knows What, intimately knows the struggles of drug addiction, as the film was based on her autobiography about living on the streets as a heroin addict. That knowledge comes through in her ferocious line readings and gestures—a performance that burns with the desire to give her experiences the truest possible expression on the screen. Kenji Fujishima
Nina Hoss, Phoenix
A character like Phoenix’s Nelly Lenz runs the risk of never getting beyond a mere concept. Not only is she meant to shoulder the film’s central allegory about the dangers of repressing trauma, but she also spends half the film bending to the perverse schemes of a man trying to model her as a facsimile. To come alive, the character requires an actress as gifted as Nina Hoss, who’s able, with every minor contortion of her facial muscles, to expose the vulnerabilities and complexities churning beneath an evolving display of façades. Carson Lund
Jennifer Jason Leigh, The Hateful Eight
Just as you peg The Hateful Eight for another of Quentin Tarantino’s formally self-conscious sausage fests, along comes Jennifer Jason Leigh in the second half, gripping the film by the reins like a blood-stained wraith born equally from the cultural heritages of Carrie White and the Weird Sisters. Leigh mines her wicked character for comic opera, chewing her lines into rapturous, oddly poignant spittle. Bowen
Michael B. Jordan and Sylvester Stallone, Creed
No one does old, self-pitying sage like Sylvester Stallone, who knows just where to nip the pathos before going too obvious. In short, he’s a delicious, well-seasoned ham throughout Creed. Michael B. Jordan practices a subtler sort of submersion, allowing us to see only a bit of his character’s pain and uncertainty. Most importantly, these actors work like gangbusters together, acknowledging both the racial and generational tensions of their mutually restorative pairing with the fleet grace of stand-up comedians. Bowen
Brie Larson, Room
Even as Room tells a tale of captivity, rescue, and the unexpectedly difficult aftermath from a young boy’s perspective, it’s a tribute to Brie Larson’s total commitment and emotional transparency that her portrait of a mother under unimaginable pressure makes, if anything, an even more devastating impression—especially in the PTSD-induced survivor’s guilt her character experiences in the film’s second half. Fujishima
Rooney Mara, Carol
The obligation in 1950s America for any social deviators to role-play normalcy is conveyed with studied perfection by Cate Blanchett as Carol’s title character, but it’s Rooney Mara who manages the trickier feat, which is to embody a young woman fumbling awkwardly toward orthodoxy despite not even yet possessing Carol’s fully matured self-understanding. Mara’s expression of this uncomfortable limbo state is at once placid and volatile, her cute-as-a-button appearance masking a brain racing with a million anxious thoughts a minute. Lund
Elisabeth Moss, Queen of Earth
As an enigmatic woman whose psyche deteriorates along with her combative friendship with her friend, Elisabeth Moss oscillates between buoyant and frighteningly resentful personalities with such effortlessness that it only adds to Queen of Earth’s chilly atmosphere. Moss’s pools of crystal-blue eyes are capable of both compassion and icy remove, with every subtle glance or twitch in her expressive face showcasing a battlefield of emotions that becomes infinitely more compelling than any line of dialogue or set piece. Greene
Bernard Pruvost, Li’l Quinquin
As Commandant Van der Weyden, a Clouseauesque buffoon, Bernard Pruvost defies conventional notions of what constitutes “good acting” by being an unforgettable presence, whether he’s curiously cocking his head to the side, raising his bushy eyebrows, or shouting obscenities at unruly kids. He’s the oddest character of the year, a fact even more stunning since Li’l Quinquin is Pruvost’s first film (he’s a gardener by day). The actor’s off-kilter line deliveries and doltish physicality becomes mesmerizing as the anchor for Bruno Dumont’s comedy-cum-horror show. Dillard
Saoirse Ronan, Brooklyn
Saoirse Ronan is a performer of spellbinding tentativeness, allowing you to feel the great wealth of emotions that her Irish immigrant from Brooklyn must suppress so as to navigate the political labyrinths of baffling new microcosms. With the curl of her mouth or the gentle movement of her eyes, Ronan says volumes about the potential prison of life as an aspiring embodiment of ever-shifting notions of perfection. Bowen
Peter Sarsgaard, Experimenter
As exhilaratingly alienating as Michael Almereyda’s Brechtian approach to bringing the life of Stanley Milgram on screen was, it might not have worked quite so well without Peter Sarsgaard’s on-point lead performance, remarkable in portraying a certain breed of emotionally detached intellectual without an inkling of condescension. Fujishima
Michael Shannon, 99 Homes
Michael Shannon is a mojo man. Whatever that indefinable hex is that certain stars can exert on their audiences through their mere presence on screen, he’s got it. And as the rotten-to-the-core real estate broker Rick Carver in 99 Homes, that sort of inborn persuasiveness, that knack for shifting the air in a room, goes a long, terrifying way. He may motor through legal jargon when evicting residents, but it’s the hard stare and the insistent posture that do all the talking. Lund
Kristen Stewart, Clouds of Sils Maria
In Clouds of Sils Maria, Kristen Stewart is surprisingly self-assured as both a punching bag and launching pad for Juliette Binoche’s tour de force. Stewart’s acting strength lies in the way that she doesn’t try to mimic Binoche’s complexity, instead remaining resolutely an American, from the vulgarity of her tattoos to the putative plainness of her insights regarding the play within the film. Diego Costa
Benicio del Toro, Sicario
A movie star’s measured by how little they appear to have to do to command your attention. In any given role, Benicio del Toro is merely required to regard one of his co-stars sideways, mournfully, while uttering pregnant comic nothings about the hopelessness of the world today, squeezing his voice into something between a rasp and a macho whisper. Del Toro reprises this shtick in Sicario, and, as always, it’s eventually revealed as glamourous misdirection: Underneath the style is commanding sadness. Bowen
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