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The 25 Best Film Performances of 2019

It was an incredible year for acting, as it saw the superstar in ultimate communion with the auteur.

The 25 Best Film Performances of 2019

This year offered a cornucopia of brilliance in film acting, and it seemed in particular to be the year of the communion between auteur and superstar, in which many icons stretched the boundaries of their images to hit new and startling emotional notes. Looking back on many of these performances, two commonalities emerged: stars either going far bigger, far bolder than ever before, or, with equal audaciousness, reigning themselves in and daring the audience to follow. Chuck Bowen


Ana de Armas and Daniel Craig

Ana de Armas and Daniel Craig, Knives Out

In a film brimming with big stars and even bigger personalities, none were more dynamic than Daniel Craig, whose Benoit Blanc offered a hilarious Southern-fried twist on Sherlock Holmes. Craig’s hammy delivery often verges on parody, but one gets the clear sense that Benoit’s excessive gentility barely obscures a cunning mind that’s spinning at all times. Ana de Armas, on the other hand, is tasked with the far less showy role of the earnest, comedic straight woman, but her carefully calibrated performance slyly and poignantly conveys the difficult-to-soothe anxieties that immigrants feel when forced to hide in plain sight in a society ready to dispose of them once their usefulness wears out. Derek Smith


Antonio Banderas

Antonio Banderas, Pain and Glory

There has always been gentleness and vulnerability underneath Antonio Banderas’s playful stylishness, and these qualities rise to the fore in Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory. Playing a stand-in for his greatest director, a middle-aged filmmaker facing the emotional wreckage of past projects and relationships, Banderas turns frailty and heartbreak into a fashion statement. There’s some wish fulfillment at play here: If only midlife crises looked like this for the rest of us. But Banderas isn’t coasting. There’s a hunch to his physicality, a halt to his speech that communicates a terror of being touched. In this context, the character’s deep kiss with an ex-lover is both ennobling and tragic—a brief taste of the irretrievable. Bowen


Emily Beecham

Emily Beecham, Little Joe

Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe is a sci-fi character study that’s fixated on exteriors, with symmetrical images and coordinated outfits that embody a corporate stifling of souls. As Alice, a scientist who breeds a plant that enables complacency, Emily Beecham communicates a wealth of reactions in the rigidity of her stance and the fleeting pain in her eyes, risking obliqueness so as to honor the emotional claustrophobia of Hausner’s environment as well as the innate privacy of her character. We feel as if we’ve never entirely known Alice, and that’s precisely the point: Obsessed with her work, she doesn’t wish to be known. Beecham maintains a mysterious, haunting gap between Alice and the audience. Bowen


Tom Burke

Tom Burke, The Souvenir

As the troubled lover to Julie, the aspiring filmmaker from The Souvenir played by Honor Swinton Byrne, Tom Burke’s Anthony is quietly the most extravagantly costumed character of the year. Beneath his smoking jackets and striped socks, Burke reinvents the “bad boyfriend” with a frumpy, slouched demeanor that belies the acid in his haughtiest proclamations. In a film structured around ellipses, Anthony is the most detailed and complex portrait of an addict in recent cinema. Christopher Gray

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Willem Dafoe

Willem Dafoe, The Lighthouse

Few performers this year went for broke as relentlessly as Willem Dafoe as a surly, salty sailor in Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse. His remarkable command of 19th-century New England vernacular and cadence was as responsible as anything else in the film for setting its strange, mesmerizing tone. Complain about his accent, but don’t say ye don’t like his cooking. Smith


Laura Dern

Laura Dern, Marriage Story

If Adam Driver and Scarlett Johannson are the wounded heart of Noah Baumbach’s pseudo-autobiographical divorce drama, Laura Dern is the film’s vengeful wraith—a dream of women and nightmare of men in an era wracked by redefinitions of gender roles. As Nora Fanshaw, the bulldog attorney representing Johannson’s character, Dern gives a performance of sexy, crackling intensity, suggesting what might’ve happened if a 1930s comedy heroine had been updated to the nihilistic present day. Dern’s ferocity leads to a resonant friction: She often steals scenes out from under Johannson, as Nora’s allowed to have the stature of which her client can so far only dream. This idea is most unforgettably broached by a brilliant monologue about the social differences between struggling fathers and mothers, which Dern delivers as a reckoning, a verbal parting of the seas. Bowen


Leonardo DiCaprio

Leonardo DiCaprio, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood

As Rick Dalton in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, Leonardo DiCaprio has never been so vulnerable and melancholic. It’s as if the actor’s bravado, alongside that of his character’s, were being tempered by the cruel mistresses of time and show business. Whether Dalton is baring his soul to a young, up-and-coming actress or flubbing his lines on set, DiCaprio becomes inexorably tied to the aging actor he plays, eloquently and humorously unearthing the inner torment and insecurities that plague many a Hollywood star as they sense the limelight beginning to fade. Smith


Adam Driver and Scarlettt Johansson

Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, Marriage Story

Together, Adam Driver and Scarlett Johannson’s acutely detailed performances bring a distinct specificity to their characters’ struggles to remain on good terms in the midst of divorce. Relying on subtle shifts of vocal register and minute gestures of agitation to communicate Charlie and Nicole’s chaotic emotional journeys, the actors take great care to stress the underlying desire for empathy and compromise in both spouses even when their long-latent feelings of anger and resentment toward one another erupt in vitriolic yet cathartic outbursts. Smith

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Paul Walter Hauser

Paul Walter Hauser, Richard Jewell

As the security guard Richard Jewell, who minimized the damage of the 1996 bombing of the Atlanta Olympics only to be targeted as its prime suspect, Paul Walter Hauser is bracingly, uncomfortably alive. There’s none of the distance here that one might expect of, say, a movie star who’d innately telegraph his or her personal difference from the role (think of, say, Tim Robbins’s very actor-ly turn as a schnook in Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River). And this unguardedness, when matched against smoothies like Olivia Wilde and Jon Hamm, is terrifying and poignant, viscerally embodying the resentments driving Eastwood’s political stacked deck of a film. Hauser truly suggests an everyman who happens to have wandered into a Hollywood flick, and his discombobulation is also ours. Bowen


Song Kang-ho

Song Kang-ho, Parasite

Song Kang-ho is the MVP of Bong Joon-ho’s cinema, a straight man and wild card for the price of one. Song expertly counterpoints the insanity of Bong’s stories, especially Parasite, with matter-of-factness. In the film’s first and second acts, Song, with his lovely glancing gestures (such as how the protagonist grab his wife’s ass), suggests the weird pleasure that can be found in poverty, when everything’s a scheme and a challenge. Such an understanding dries out Parasite’s potential sentimentality, and, when the film abruptly switches registers, symbolically restaging the genocide of Native Americans, Song rises to the occasion again, becoming a majestic symbol of rage and futility. Song is Bong’s brilliant mood ring. Bowen


Matthew McConaughey

Matthew McConaughey, The Beach Bum

Matthew McConaughey has a made a career out of playing silver-tonged hunks who’re more likable than they should be, but he reaches a zenith of sexy-myopic amorality as the rich, drunk, womanizing beach poet Moondog in The Beach Bum. The brilliance of the performance is that Moondog’s debauchery isn’t editorialized: Spray-tanned, jacked, often half-clothed with blond white-boy dreads, McConaughey doubles down on the character’s erudite stoner entitlement, rhapsodizing on the narcotic pleasure of being hot, charismatic, and powerful enough to do whatever he pleases. Bowen


Elisabeth Moss

Elisabeth Moss, Her Smell

As a drunk, drug-addicted punk singer from the 1990s, Elisabeth Moss annihilates any lingering association you may have had of her introverted Peggy from Mad Men. For much of Her Smell, Moss plays a kind of snarling witch whose madness is inseparable from her brilliance, spinning paranoid riffs of astonishing performative virtuosity. The key to her performance, however, is that you always see the vulnerability underneath, the sense of lost-ness, as if the drugs are an imprisoning labyrinth. In the film’s second half, Moss plays newfound sobriety as it truly is: as if she’s a crustacean shucked of a shell, exposed and raw. Bowen

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Lupita N’yongo

Lupita N’yongo, Us

A heartening number of the year’s best films explore the inhumane class dynamics of the modern economy, but no actor embodies this cruel system as well as Lupita N’yongo in her dual performance in Jordan Peele’s Us. As Adelaide and her shadow Red, N’yongo is alternately graceful and syncopated, elegiac and fierce. Despite the remarkable range of physical and vocal dexterity she deploys to distinguish the characters, N’yongo never loses track of their conflicting but parallel stories of inherited trauma. Gray


Joe Pesci

Joe Pesci and Al Pacino, The Irishman

As a mobster with profound influence over the shape of American history, Joe Pesci is the model of quiet restraint and innuendo, playing a rueful monster who refutes the overt psychosis of earlier Pesci killers. And as Jimmy Hoffa, Al Pacino offers one of his big, musical, cock-swinging bursts of machismo while maintaining the control that marked his classic 1970s performances. Collectively, Pesci and Pacino are the yin and yang of this sprawling gangster requiem, illustrating that true power remains behind the curtain of public awareness. Bowen


Mary Kay Place

Mary Kay Place, Diane

There might be few qualities harder for an established actor to play than ordinariness, and Mary Kay Place imbues the small-town widow Diane with a multifaceted, matter-of-fact sadness that communicates a wide breadth of largely suppressed experience. Place is never better than when having to telegraph the work of maintaining a chipper, empathetic demeanor in spite of Diane’s encroaching despair and panic. And the actor plays Diane’s wailing in a restaurant parking lot as a catharsis that suggests a working-class King Lear wailing into the sky. Bowen


Brad Pitt

Brad Pitt, Ad Astra and Once Upon A Time…in Hollywood

Both of Brad Pitt’s career-best performances concern men who are only good at one thing: their jobs. Though it’s Leonardo DiCaprio’s Cliff Booth who ostentatiously confronts his worth in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, it’s Pitt’s zen-like stuntman who seems fully aware he’s squandered all but one of his relationships. Ad Astra literalizes this desiccated masculinity, juxtaposing Pitt’s jarringly confessional voiceover with a perfectly calibrated physical performance, illuminating a man whose reality is finally catching up to the doubts and regrets that have long haunted him. Gray

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Transit

Franz Rogowski, Transit

Franz Rogowski’s Georg begins Christian Petzold’s melodrama as an introverted, pragmatic man in exile who’s mistaken for a famous writer. As Georg attempts to convert his newfound privilege into a ticket to freedom, Rogowski elevates a complex story of survival and selfhood into something profoundly more intimate, seeming to discover emotions like love and trust in half-steps even as Georg’s circumstances become more hopeless. Gray


Adam Sandler

Adam Sandler, Uncut Gems

More than any of his other “respectable” directors, Josh and Benny Safdie key into the spectacle of aggression that drives Adam Sandler’s work, whether he’s playing around with his SNL alums or going all-in on a role like that of Howard Ratner, gem smuggler, jeweler, gambler, bullshit artist extraordinaire. The first thing you notice about Sandler in Uncut Gems is his voice: a little lower, more nasal, and indicative of the character’s roiling resentments, even in moments of comparative tranquility. Aided by an outfit as iconic as the blue suit that Sandler wore in Punch-Drunk Love—black leather jacket, showy glasses, earring—Sandler offers a ballad of terminal itchiness that’s as true of addiction as Elisabeth Moss’s gestures in Her Smell. To be alive, Howard must be in danger. Resolution and normalcy are death, literally in this case. The ecstatic smile that closes the film, as Howard achieves the one orgasm capable of satisfying him, is the single greatest gesture of Sandler’s career. Oh, and Sandler has never been funnier. Bowen


Mathias Schoenaerts

Matthias Schoenaerts, The Mustang

In The Mustang, Matthias Schoenaerts allows director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre to get away with a conventional and often hoary conceit: the rhyming of misfit humans and animals. As a traumatized prisoner somewhere out in Nevada who’s tasked with breaking in wild mustangs, Schoenaerts redirects the often outward charisma that has powered his other roles, adopting a raspy way of breathing that suggests, yes, a horse. His breath, and heavy, tightly wound physicality, are moving and inherently express the connection between the convict and the mustang. Schoenaerts particularly enriches Clermont-Tonnerre’s finest image, when the wild mustang dips his head into frame, his respect having finally been earned by his new compatriot. Bowen


Wesley Snipes

Wesley Snipes, Dolemite Is My Name

Eddie Murphy is funny and likeable as Rudy Ray Moore, the huckster star and architect of the Dolemite series. Perhaps too likeable, as Murphy shortchanges the hostile amateur intensity that Moore projected in those films. One person who does fulfill the potentials of this narrative is Wesley Snipes. As slumming Dolemite director D’Urville Martin, the actor could be potentially billed as another of this film’s comeback stories, except he’s playing the villain and relieved of the obligation of being adorable. Characterized as a pretentious alcoholic fop who more or less sleeps through his directing duties while Moore puts Dolemite together, D’Urville allows Snipes to radiate the volatile self-absorption that’s lacking in Murphy’s performance. With his snap-crackle timing, Snipes turns D’Urville’s hostility into a fashion statement, conjuring the fuck-you spirit of blaxploitation. Bowen

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Zhao Tao

Zhao Tao, Ash is Purest White

Hurtling into the future on a quest to return to her past, Zhao Tao’s gangster’s moll Qiao is at once indominable and expendable, frightening and tender. Is Qiao’s antihero’s voyage an act of devotion or one of strict adherence to a moral code? Surviving violence, prison, and rejection, Zhao crafts a character who’s as alert and dynamic as she’s heartbreakingly stubborn. Gray

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