20. Viola Davis – “Widows” [Review]
If Steve McQueen’s sprawling, gritty-yet-glossy, multi-stranded heist movie only existed to give Viola Davis the role of the iron-willed Veronica, the widowed teacher turned ringleader of her own heist crew, it would have been enough. But the film is peppered with standout turns: Elizabeth Debicki and Brian Tyree Henry both feature on this list, and Daniel Kaluuya’s vicious second-in-command is a poisonous treat too. But it’s Davis who holds the whole thing together through sheer magnetism and the force of her uncompromising character’s personality. In a just world, it would be the start of a hardboiled crime-saga franchise, or at least a trilogy with Veronica its stonehearted star.
19. Meinhard Neumann – “Western” [Review]
Of all the names on this list, this is the one you’re least likely to recognize, in the film you’re least likely to have seen, and that’s a great shame. Valeska Grisebach‘s stunning “Western” is a work of almost docu-realist rhythms, tracking the story of a group of German laborers sent to the Bulgarian countryside on some big construction project. But it’s not a documentary; it just has that authenticity because Meinhard Neumann’s epic yet contained performance, as the one worker who breaks out of the macho, worryingly nationalist, tribal clique of Germans and hesitantly befriends some of the locals, is a quiet masterpiece of understated, lyrical naturalism.
18. Sandra Oh – “Killing Eve” TV [Review]
As enjoyably over-the-top as its premise, about a cold-blooded, chameleonic hit-woman psycho called Villanelle (2018 breakout Jodie Comer) becoming mutually obsessed with the cop tracking her down, what makes “Killing Eve” work as more than high-concept escapism, is the wonderfully glitchy, slightly daffy ordinariness that Sandra Oh brings to the role of the cop. Her Eve is excitable, fallible, and not at all slick, which makes her the perfect counterbalance to her quarry’s impermeable air of menace and glamor, yet there’s also something so earthily real about her that it makes Villanelle’s fascination plausible, and the dynamic between them all the richer.
https://youtu.be/834sSnDSUmM
17. Hamilton Morris – “Sweet Country” [Review]
At the very beginning of Warwick Thornton‘s fantastic Australian western “Sweet Country,” we get an image of Sam, played by Aboriginal actor Hamilton Morris in chains in the baking sun. It’s an enraging, horrific picture, for the optics of a shackled black man at the mercy of white tormentors alone. But as the film then progresses, the subtlety, offbeat humor, and steady, quiet defiance of Morris’ performance as Sam, a trusted farmhand who goes on the run after shooting his wife’s rapist in self-defense, gives that image additional power. So by the time we return to it, it’s with sorrow as well as anger, not just for the body they’re restraining but the mischievous, resourceful spirit they’re trying to break.
16. Kathryn Hahn – “Private Life” [Review]
One of the great pleasures of 2018 was the way consistently excellent, but often undervalued actresses like Toni Collette, Regina Hall, Sandra Oh, Regina King, and others, got well-earned showcases that may not win them awards but must surely win them new fans. Kathryn Hahn has never been less than terrific, moving effortlessly from drama to comedy and back again. But Tamara Jenkins’ long-overdue return with “Private Life” gives her a prickly, warmhearted gift of a role, that she expands and explores so thoroughly that it almost feels like neither: after the film ends it’s hard to believe that her Rachel, a fortysomething writer struggling to conceive, is not a real person living in the world right now.
15. Rachel Weisz – “The Favourite” [Review]
The judgment-of-Solomon-style anguish it cost us to choose between Weisz and terrific co-star Emma Stone for this slot should not be understated, but ultimately it was the subtler and perhaps more difficult role that Weisz plays in Yorgos Lanthimos‘ boisterously brokenhearted period romp that edged it. Weisz’ Sarah is as close as this three-hander has to a “straight man,” if the term isn’t too weird given her character’s neither straight nor a man, but it’s her watchful cunning and the tragedy of her relationship with her Queen, that gives “The Favourite” its steely spine and prevents it from being merely frivolous.
14. Melissa McCarthy – “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” [Review]
Melissa McCarthy’s movies are not always up to her talents — witness the painful one-two punch of “Life Of The Party” and “The Happytime Murders” this year. But even in those lesser films, she’s usually great anyway, and when the material is on her level — “The Heat,” “Spy” (which she should have been Oscar-nominated for if you ask us), or “Bridesmaids,” there are few performers we enjoy watching more. And she’s absolutely sublime in a more dramatic register in Marielle Heller’s true-life forgery drama. One of the reasons the film is so good is because it doesn’t sand down the sharper, spikier edges of its story and characters, and particularly so with McCarthy’s performance. It’s almost fearless in the way it dares you to like Lee, and effortless in the way that you ultimately feel for her.
13. Brian Tyree Henry – “Atlanta” [Review] “Widows” [Review]
Ever done that thing where you say a protracted goodbye to someone only to bump into them in the parking lot 15 seconds later? That, only pleasurable, was what 2018 was like for a movie/TV watcher and Brian Tyree Henry. No sooner had we bade farewell to Paper Boi, who got an expanded arc in the very great season 2 of “Atlanta,” than we were running into Henry in “If Beale Street Could Talk“; as a standout in the voice cast of “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse“; or as the venal but pragmatic criminal-turned-politician Jamal Manning in “Widows.” Each one of those titles is terrific, and somehow Henry manages to be one of the very best things about each one of them.
12. Maggie Gyllenhaal – “The Kindergarten Teacher” [Review]
Like watching a contortionist smilingly tuck an ankle under her ear and calmly read the newspaper, the always astonishing Gyllenhaal astonishes again, bringing such sureness and simplicity to the hairpin-bend psychology of Sara Colangelo’s “The Kindergarten Teacher” that its bizarreness feels fully real, almost logical. A deeply discomfiting portrait of a frustrated teacher, wife, and mother who discovers a six-year-old in her care is a poetry prodigy, of all the great female performances this year, there was perhaps none that risked more, in delivering us into sympathy with a personality so warped by suppressed, terrible, yearning dissatisfaction.
11. Regina Hall – “Support the Girls” [Review]
Though ostensibly the lead in 2017 phenomenon “Girls’ Trip,” Regina Hall ended up playing second banana (and grapefruit) to Tiffany Haddish. Her most exceptional role to date instead came in Andrew Bujalski‘s defiantly low-key “Support the Girls” a warm, insightful celebration of the kind of just-getting-by characters who hardly ever get movies made about them. As the hard-working manager of a suburban “breastaurant” Hall effortlessly earns our absolute sympathy with every exasperated sigh, every swallowed retort, every glance sneakily exchanged, right up to one of the most cathartic, satisfying finales of 2018. She was similarly capable, caring and unshowily inspirational in a supporting role in “The Hate U Give” but “Support the Girls” is unassailably her movie — one she has long deserved.
