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The Great Film Performances of 2021

This year proved, as always, that one of the most reliable pleasures of cinema-going is great acting.

The 20 Best Film Performances of 2021
Photo: Netflix

This year proved, as always, that one of the most reliable pleasures of cinema-going is great acting. While it’s probably a mistake to ascribe a theme to a year of acting in movies made under profoundly disparate circumstance, the best performances seemed to reflect our preoccupation with buried longings. From the quartet at the center of Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog to Vincent Lindon in Julia Ducournau’s Titane, actors dug deep down into their characters’ psychologies, utilizing their bodies as emotional divining rods, while others, from Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman in Licorice Pizza to the preternaturally talented Woody Norman in Mike Mills’s C’mon C’mon, utilized their lack of experience to their advantage, rendering themselves, with the help of their directors, into extraordinarily unpredictable found objects. Chuck Bowen



Nicolas Cage

Nicolas Cage, Pig

Pig’s premise sounds like a pretext for a Nicolas Cage revenge vehicle that will have him bellowing “You took the wrong fucking pig!” at a gonzo pitch. Instead, Cage’s Rob travels to Portland and gently reminds the luminaries of the foodie scene of his disenchantment with their world. At one point, we’re overtly primed for and denied Rob’s wrath. The man goes to an underground fight club for industry figures and allows himself to be brutally beaten, as if offering his flesh to the gods for answers. Cage, in full martyr mode here, seems to get off on the perversity of, well, poignantly caging his brand of operatic hysteria. Bowen



Olivia Colman

Olivia Colman, The Lost Daughter

The Lost Daughter’s flashbacks make it a rather redundant film. Or rather, two films inside one: Olivia Colman’s, so full of perplexity and life, and the companion one that’s meant to elucidate all of the ambiguities that made Elena Ferrante’s story so pleasurable in the first place. Indeed, Colman’s performance as Leda carries The Lost Daughter for long stretches, with little narrative distraction or stylistic conspicuousness, when Maggie Gyllenhaal is content to rest the sophistication of Ferrante’s themes (the inconsistencies, ambiguities, and sheer incoherence of love) in the actress’s expressive face. Diego Semerene



Clayne Crawford

Clayne Crawford, The Killing of Two Lovers

The title of Robert Machoian’s The Killing of Two Lovers is practically a promise of explosive violence, but its defining quality is actually the gentle, wounded longing that Clayne Crawford brings to nearly every scene. As David, a small-town father of four reluctantly undergoing a trial separation from his wife (Sepideh Moafi), Crawford suggests the fundamental decency lurking beneath his character’s downtrodden, quietly resentful exterior. Throughout tense arguments with his wife and strained outings with his kids, David is constantly grappling with whether to fight for his family, dolefully accept his fate, or give in to his rage. And through it all, Crawford captures this dense swirl of conflicting emotions with a captivating sensitivity. Keith Watson



Penélope Cruz

Penélope Cruz, Parallel Mothers

Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers is haunted by absences, by how a country informs its citizens’ psyches on a granular level. Penélope Cruz’s character, Janis, is a high-end photographer and adrift control freak who has a forensic anthropologist, Arturo (Israel Elejalde), help her exhume the remains of her grandfather. Cruz, in loving and poignant lockstep with Almodóvar, makes lucid the character’ actions—the way she unwittingly duplicates and carries forth a tradition of male absence that began with her great-grandfather’s killing during the Spanish Civil War—without thuddingly underscoring them for his audience. Bowen

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Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, and Kodi Smit-McPhee

Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, and Kodi Smit-McPhee, The Power of the Dog

The actors at the center of The Power of the Dog forge a highly varied quartet of submerged longing. As Phil, Benedict Cumberbatch paints an indelible portrait of an intelligent, sensitive man actively suppressing his more human qualities out of acute pain, while Jesse Plemons, as Phil’s brother George, often pitilessly uses his stocky build against himself, suggesting a man frozen in flesh as well as complacency. As a mother-son duo, Kirsten Dunst and Kodi Smit-McPhee play the livewires caught in the middle of Phil and George’s rivalry, with Dunst as a painful shrinking violet (her willingness to efface herself is as daring as Plemons’s) and Smit-McPhee as a Phil-in-the-making with shocking resources. Smit-McPhee specifically imbues his role with a haunting paradox: steely vulnerability, which Cumberbatch also understands to have destroyed Phil. Bowen



Jim Cummings

Jim Cummings, The Beta Test

In The Beta Test, Jim Cummings’s Jordan is revealed to be a recovering alcoholic and a reformed smoker, which partially explains the tightly coiled need that constantly radiates from the Hollywood agent’s body—a need that must find expression. Cummings played a similarly neurotic character in his 2020 film The Wolf of Snow Hollow, and his performance here is also impressive, spinning dry-drunk anxiety into intense, highly personal comedy. Jordan is a man who can have nothing that he actually wants, a potential failure fending off multiple temptations for the sake of a stability that he most likely believed, as a drunk, to be unattainable. Bowen



Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman

Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman, Licorice Pizza

Given his resemblance to his late, brilliant father Philip Seymour, it’s almost painful to look at Cooper Hoffman in Licorice Pizza. As a teenage entrepreneur, Cooper brings to mind young Philip Seymour performances such as the trust fund case in Scent of Woman, evincing a similar sense of mischief and grandiosity that’s tinged with loneliness. The subtlety of Cooper’s work here, so early in his life, promises great things. Somehow, despite years of experience as a musician, Haim is quite a bit rawer than her co-star, viscerally giving voice to the desperation of aimlessness, via rage, resignation, and controlled bouts of fury. And Hoffman and Haim are also simply lovely together, suggesting that romance, however disreputable in this case given that we’re talking about a minor and a young adult, is at its heart a series of schemes: us against the world. Bowen



Kathryn Hunter

Kathryn Hunter, The Tragedy of Macbeth

In a brilliant stroke, The Tragey of Macbeth’s trio of prophetic witches are all played by Kathryn Hunter, who contorts her body and distorts her voice in terrifying fashion, and initially seems to be a lone madwoman wandering a former battlefield. Only when our antiheroic lead, Macbeth (Denzel Washington), saunters in from the foggy edges of the frame with the doomed Banquo (Bertie Carvel) by his side does she become three—via a striking image in which shadowy reflections in a pool of water materialize into the other two sisters. It’s a through-the-looking-glass moment that meets its equal later when Hunter, with an at once searing and sobering conviction, delivers the play’s famous witches’ chant. Keith Uhlich

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Oscar Isaac

Oscar Isaac, The Card Counter

Oscar Isaac specializes in chilly stoicism and self-possession, qualities that practically make him a tailor-made instrument for Paul Schrader’s sagas of coiled masculinity. In The Card Counter, he brings this poised style of acting—all burning eye contact and upper body control—to a nerve-shredded, trauma-wracked character whose tether to sanity relies on maintaining a posture of unflappability. Carson Lund



Vincent Lindon

Vincent Lindon, Titane

As a hunky middle-aged firefighter mourning the disappearance of his son, Vincent Lindon lends human gravity to a potential catalogue of self-consciously outrageous art-film stunts. That’s the greatest conceit of Julia Ducournau’s Titane: that a story of serial killing, car fucking, and gender reassignment gradually morphs into a character study of two people who, despite vastly differing planes of experience, feel similarly displaced. Lindon gives this concept material physical weight, utilizing his buff body as a totem of self-loathing, coiling it up so that it feels as if the character can barely stand. This is why the firefighter’s unexpected, awkward dancing to a Future Islands song is so gratifying, as one feels this body’s urge to express itself, unwinding years of emotional detritus. It’s this agony that unites a firefighter, often an icon of traditional masculinity, with a symbolic trans man who’s eaten up with socially taboo hungers. Bowen



Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson

Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson, Passing

Armed with the dangerous secret that her friend, Clare (Ruth Negga), is passing as white, Irene (Tessa Thompson) is plagued by the contradictory impulses of envy and outright disgust. It’s the clash between these two emotions that heightens the tension, as well as the bond, between the women—a knotty, precarious friendship so delicately yet forcefully depicted by Negga and Thompson, who communicate more in a glance or a subtle gesture than a lengthy monologue ever could. Through their sophisticated and carefully calibrated performances, Passing grants the audience intimate access to the fears and anxieties of seeing and being seen when tacitly walking the tightrope between two very different worlds. Derek Smith



Nishijima Hidetoshi

Nishijima Hidetoshi, Drive My Car

As Kafuku, a theater actor and director mounting a production of Uncle Vanya while mourning his wife’s death, Nishijima Hidetoshi offers a study of anguish that might even throw the repressed cowboy at the center of The Power of the Dog for a loop. Nishijima’s supreme accomplishment, apropos of Drive My Car’s Chekovian milieu, is the impression he gives us of everlasting physical tension without ever appearing to do much of anything. Nishijima writs Kafuku’s rattled mental state across the screen without dampening the character’s mystery. Kafuku’s misery, and empathy, are visible in the distant yet compassionate way that he directs actors, and his resentment evident in the fury of his pauses as he drinks with an egocentric romantic rival. Nishijima’s very face, somehow tranquil and turbulent at once, embodies the film’s myriad ironies. Bowen

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Woody Norman and Joaquin Phoenix

Woody Norman and Joaquin Phoenix, C’mon C’mon

The deepest pleasures of C’mon C’mon come from the complex, deeply naturalistic interplay between Joaquin Phoenix as radio journalist Johnny and 12-year-old Woody Norman as his motormouthed nephew, Jesse. Phoenix, with his paunchy build and lumbering gait, is less affected than he’s ever been—coming off more like a Ruffalo-esque average joe than the tortured loner of, say, Joker—while Norman strikes a perfect balance between the endearingly precocious and the irritatingly quirky. Together, they share an authentically loving, if at times prickly, chemistry that lends the film an almost documentary-like realism. Watson



Renate Reinsve

Renate Reinsve, The Worst Person in the World

Renate Reinsve conveys a sense of full, nuanced subjectivity in a story whose sardonic narrational style might seem indulgent and shallow without her performance’s intimation of depth. The perpetually lost Julie may be a stereotype well explored by many a Noah Baumbach film, but Reinsve breathes life into familiar scenarios, through a character whose uncertainty is a product of uncertain times. Even the near-obligatory scene where Julie momentarily forgets her cares and sprints through the street has a buoyancy that makes one forgive its familiarity. Reinsve roots Julie’s lack of concrete direction in a thoughtful openness, a youthful attitude of both excitement and skepticism at the plenitude of experiences life offers that is utterly bewitching. Pat Brown



Simon Rex

Simon Rex, Red Rocket

Given Sean Baker’s penchant for recruiting unknown actors in order to deepen the reality of his environments, an approach that’s very much on display in Red Rocket, one might expect some awkwardness on the part of Simon Rex, whose never had an acting platform like the one he’s offered here. Instead, what Rex offers is the best of several worlds: the confidence of a professional actor without the guardedness that comes with experience. As an ex-porn star, weed dealer, and teen exploiter, Rex gives a hilarious, staggeringly unhinged, vanity-free performance that turns his character’s loathsomeness into a kind of state of grace. Bowen

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