10. Willem Dafoe in “The Lighthouse”
Gnarled and wizened, craggy and careworn, looking like he’s been sculpted by saltwater and sea air for at least a hundred decades, if Willem Dafoe just stood stock still, perched on a rock for the entire duration of Robert Eggers “The Lighthouse,” it’s likely he still would have made this list. But we also get to hear him gargle and chew on Eggers’ fabulously baroque sea-dog dialogue like it’s a cheroot, and aim incomprehensible, mythical and scatological insults at his not-as-callow-as-he-seems companion (Robert Pattinson, also excellent in a truly odd, and bravely bean-spilling performance) like he’s hocking into a spittoon. Most impressively, underneath the layers of deliberately oppressive style, and within the confines of a deliberately overpowering, claustrophobic setting, Dafoe makes space for a real performance, that can turn from terrifying to terrorized on a dime and yet is still nuanced enough that we can never be sure if it’s him, or his companion or us that has been driven completely barking mad.
9. Awkwafina in “The Farewell”
Awkwafina’s biggest film roles to date — in “Oceans 8” and “Crazy Rich Asians” — established her capacity for comedic exaggeration. But delightful as they were (and she really is by far the best thing in ‘Asians’ — imagine how anodyne it would be without her) it’s the small details of her far more restrained and real performance as Billi in Lulu Wang‘s terrifically moving and accurately observed “The Farewell” that truly establishes her. All of her choices, from her slouchy posture to her short-fused irritation with her family to her effortless code-switching between young urban American and dutiful Chinese grand/daughter, feel right and honest (and full disclosure: this is coming from a half-Chinese viewer who has lived all her life in the West and did a family reunion thing this year in China). And let us just give an additional shout-out too, to Zhao Shuzhen who somehow manages to play NaiNai — basically the platonic ideal of a grandmother — with real-world spirit and verve, and to make Billi’s paranoiac fear of losing her completely understandable.
8. Joaquin Phoenix in “Joker”
How do you play a character who has no character? Batman’s biggest and best nemesis has long been imagined as a crazy-mirror reflection of our own best instincts for justice and order. But what if you look in the mirror and don’t see an impish, charismatic, chaos-loving agent of evil, because you don’t see anything at all? Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck is truly pathetic, a void without the smallest fleck of grandeur in him, and once the meds that keep him even semi-functioning dry up, all he is, is that terrible emptiness. For the first few scenes of Todd Phillips‘ “Joker” you can even wonder if maybe Phoenix is quite bad because we are attuned to the idea of acting being the creation of a consistent character. But Fleck has no consistency, it’s his defining trait and by playing him as a codeless creature of absolute unpredictability, retreating further and further from a humanity that looks through him as though he’s invisible anyway, Phoenix creates something out of nothing. I don’t think we can ask for more of our actors than actual alchemy.
7. Lupita Nyong’o in “Us”
Aside from “Black Panther,” it feels like Hollywood hasn’t quite known what to do with Lupita Nyong’o since her supporting actress Oscar win for “12 Years a Slave.” Outside a couple of indie performances, she’s been relegated to minor roles (“Non-Stop“), been mo-capped and CG-ed to unrecognizability (in ‘Star Wars‘es 8 and 9) or just been a voice (“The Lion King“). Step up, savior of all things good and holy, Jordan Peele, with “Us,” his scratchy horror follow-up to megahit “Get Out.” It seems built to showcase Nyong’o’s acting chops, which Oscar or no, can get easily overlooked in favor of the celebrity circus of red carpet fashions and gossip-mag lewks (which, don’t get me wrong, Nyong’o always kills). As Adelaide, Nyong’o is a resourceful but relatable final-girl type, though a mother and a wife too. And as Red, Adelaide’s warped underworld alter-ego antagonist, Nyong’o is legitimately terrifying, a lot because of the slivers of resentful, broken humanity that Red’s cracked, hoarse voice and deranged staring eyes sometimes betray.
6. Adam Sandler in “Uncut Gems”
Adam Sandler, and I mean this as a compliment, turns in surely one of the unhealthiest performances of the year, in Josh and Benny Safdie’s hypertensive “Uncut Gems.” A film so splenetically Jewish it can feel like choking to death on a latke during a shouting match (in a good way!) it derives a lot of its energy from Sandler’s appearance — face a little too red, forehead a little too sweaty, smile a little too toothy and desperate. But the external details are only the manifestations of a huckster character that Sandler innately understands as at war with life, doing battle with luck and running — hurtling — out of time, going double or quits on every interaction as if enacting the underlying death wish of every incurable gambler. Even the most Sandler-averse (for such I used to be, remaining unmoved even by his critically lauded performances) may find themselves converted here, by a turn so high-blood-pressure you need to check your cholesterol when you leave.
5. Antonio Banderas in “Pain and Glory”
Pedro Almodóvar’s nakedly autobiographical “Pain & Glory,” a kind of passionate paean to regret and deliverance through art, is simply sublime. But the instrument the Spanish maestro is playing in his empathetic drama about an emotionally struggling filmmaker, grappling with physical decline, is the Stradivarius that is Antonio Banderas. Banderas gets a bad rap — with his English accent still slightly off to most North American ears, he’s never appeared quite comfortable in American films. But in his native tongue, he’s of the greats, and he proves that resoundingly in Almodóvar’s late-period masterwork. Banderas’ Salvador Mallo is painfully anguished, suffering from physical maladies, emotional scars and psychic traumas — many of these self-inflicted wounds — and by the time he finds salvation in heroin, you can’t help but feel a sense of relief in his spiritual escape. It’s a lacerating examination of the self that isn’t always kind, but ultimately, “Pain & Glory” gushes with a human sense of tenderness and compassion, and it all flows gloriously through Banderas’ soulful and melancholy concerto of control, precision, and passionate dolor. — RP
4. Tom Mercier in “Synonyms”
It’s a bit incredible that Yoav in Nadav Lapid‘s infuriatingly brilliant “Synonyms” is Tom Mercier’s first film role. But then again, if he had even a mote more experience, would he have been able to deliver such an astonishingly brand-new performance? It feels a little like he was summoned into being — naked in a bathtub perhaps — purely to embody this impossibly contradictory character, and to do so with a dancer’s physical grace, a hooligan’s brash self-confidence and a linguist’s facility with words. Mercier’s Yoav, a volatile recent arrival to Paris contending with a very fraught relationship to his Israeli heritage, is a riveting creation because he’s so consistently himself yet so utterly unknowable to others, with undiagnosed, unacknowledged trauma creating an invisible aura of volatility that electrifies the air around him, like just before a storm. You probably haven’t seen “Synonyms”: if for nothing else than Mercier’s bottle-rocket turn, hurry/hustle/hasten/dash/scoot/zip/scurry to see it now.
3. Alfre Woodard in “Clemency”
There is the simpler, straightforwardly stirring, admirable version of prison warden Bernadine that Alfre Woodard, finally given a lead role worthy of her, could have played in Chinonye Chukwu‘s “Clemency.” She’s flinty, tough-minded but fair, and though humane and occasionally conscience-stricken, she is essentially infallible. And then there’s the version that Alfre Woodard actually delivers, and with such persuasive, forceful vulnerability. Her Bernadine is very much not infallible, and in every one of Woodard’s remarkable close-ups with their flickers of doubt and momentary micro-expressions, in the way she walks down a prison hallway briskly, aware of the cracks in her brittle armor of professional detachment, we sense her fear. It imbues the film with a sense of peril even outside the literal life-or-death stakes of the plot (in which Aldis Hodge is also quite extraordinary as the next prisoner scheduled for execution) and of the terrible toll it takes on the soul to be a party to so much death.
=1. Scarlett Johansson in “Marriage Story”
What I love about Scarlett Johansson as Nicole: Scarlett has been a fixture for so long, it is easy to take her for granted, to not see how far she’s come because we’ve watched the incremental growth. But she has matured into — I’m not afraid to say it — a great actress and her turn here matches Adam Driver’s oddly more celebrated one in every moment, beat for beat. Yet it does not feel like some bloodless actorly exercise between scene partners, even during the biggest, most ostensibly theatrical moments. It’s a performance that has real skin in the game, and that brings to their electrifying scenes together — be they angry, regretful, resentful, forgiving or all four at once, or in quick succession — the same complete person, the same totally inhabited character, that she is when they’re apart. And when they are apart, she gets to deliver perhaps the greatest single scene of her career to date, when she basically just implodes like a dying star in response to the question “how are you doing?” before flinging out all her pent up hurt like debris, in a supernova of tears, snot, and tissues. To disparage the film’s shift in focus in the second half from her to him misses the point: These performances are so strong that both are onscreen even when one of them is not, the way a broken plate — or a punched-in wall, or an untied shoe — contains the memory of what it once was when it was whole.
=1. Adam Driver in “Marriage Story”
What I love about Adam Driver as Charlie: Adam is tall. Adam is attractive. Adam is ubiquitous. Adam should be overexposed, but somehow he is not (though perhaps he’d disagree — the minor NPR-walkout brouhaha is surely less about him being a diva and more him being, to his credit, the rare human being who does not constantly want to be looking at or listening to Adam Driver). In Noah Baumbach‘s wonderful film, Adam is, like Scarlett, believable in every moment, and not just an everyman, but an everyperson — perhaps never more so than when saying something unforgivable and unretractable that he instantaneously regrets. And finally, yes, Adam can sing (as can Scarlett, but her singing scene is one of togetherness and support; his is about isolation and aloneness) and the layers in that scene alone are mesmerizing — an actor playing a man singing a song that is itself an act, but that contains in its pre-written words some essence of a truth that he maybe could never have accessed by himself. It’s a microcosm of “Marriage Story’s” meta-project in which autobiography and fiction, performance and reality, script and spontaneity combine into a beautifully acted whole in which we understand that whether or not these things actually happened, they are true.
And hey, if the joint number one strikes you as a cop-out, just consider it our mute protest at the silly debate that sprang up over which of the two leads was the more demonized or the more victimized, the more sympathetically played or the better understood: so much of that discourse seemed to be fuelled by people who had maybe never experienced the end of love, which, well, bully for them. But reducing “Marriage Story,” and these two perfectly matched performances to who wins and who loses (as Charlie and Nicole do, in the heat of their most paint-blistering argument) is to absolutely fail to comprehend the real meaning of the film. It’s a divorce — everybody loses. But on our list, both can win.
Honorable Mentions: This feature could have been, and nearly was, twice as long. Here are just a few of the year’s great performances that got benched at the very last minute because life is short and this role call of greatness is already too long: Ashton Sanders in “Native Son“; George McKay in “1917“; Jonathan Pryce in “The Two Popes“; Sofia Boutella in “Climax“; Robert Pattinson in “High Life” and “The Lighthouse“; Franz Rogowski in “Transit“; Noah Jupe in “Honey Boy“; Jonathan Majors in “The Last Black Man in San Francisco“; Aisling Franciosi in “The Nightingale“; Marianne Jean-Baptiste in “In Fabric“; August Diehl in “A Hidden Life“; and Gugu Mbatha Raw in “Fast Color.” Apologies to all of the above for the outrageous, undeserved snub, and thanks for some of the most moving and excellent performances of the year.