Ethan Hawke, “Blue Moon”
A Linklater talky pressure-cooker lives or dies on the face at its center, and Ethan Hawke makes “Blue Moon” feel like watching a man realize—minute by minute—that charm can outrun time. As lyricist Lorenz Hart, insecurity and short man’s diseases personified, literally, he’s all jittery bravado and soft devastation, performing “life of the party” like it’s a job he can’t quit, even as the room keeps reminding him he’s becoming yesterday’s news. As Savina Petkova wrote in her Playlist review, “With a deep, soft timbre, Hawke delivers a performance of poignancy and poeticism,” and that’s exactly the trick: the words can be funny, even acidic, but the voice is quietly grieving as it speaks. In a single night—set against the premiere glow of “Oklahoma!”—he lets ego curdle into loneliness, and turns the itch for attention into something bruisingly human: the fear that you’ve already peaked and nobody had the decency to tell you. – RP
Jessie Buckley, “Hamnet”
If “Hamnet” is an expressionistic fever-dream of love and loss, Jessie Buckley is the film’s weather system—mystical, feral, tender, and sometimes terrifying in how completely she commits to emotion as a physical force. Her Agnes isn’t played as a period-wife footnote; she’s a woman with an otherworldly intelligence, rooted in the woods, in bodies, in intuition—someone who carries joy like sunlight and grief like a possession. Gregory Ellwood wrote in his Playlist review that “what Buckley pulls off in both of Agnes’ birth scenes is so soul-breaking it’s almost undescribable,” and the line lands because you can feel her pushing past “acting” into something rawer: breath, panic, rapture, anguish, survival. It’s a performance that refuses to be polite about suffering, yet it’s never misery porn. Buckley makes pain feel sacred, and then dares you to keep looking. – RP
Janel Tsai, “Left-Handed Girl”
Shih-Ching Tsou’s solo directorial debut presents Tsai with a daunting challenge: hiding everything while still communicating enough to throw off suspicion about whatever she’s hiding. “Left-Handed Girl” keeps a couple of stunning family secrets, although the film isn’t built around climactic, shocking reveals as much as it builds up to them. Up to that point, Tsai plays her cards close to the vest, letting slip only the barest implication that, perhaps, her character, Shu-Fen, isn’t being totally truthful with everyone about her family life–a terribly difficult tightrope to walk. Tsai opts for a relaxed approach, presenting as composed even in Shu-Fen’s moments of surrender, and even as the truth is squeezed closer and closer to egress. A lesser parent would erupt well before she does; Tsai builds Shu-Fen of sterner stuff, but even she can’t avoid cracking forever. – AC
Amy Madigan, “Weapons”
Zach Cregger reportedly whipped up two backgrounds for Gladys, the leering villain in his superb sophomore movie “Weapons,” and allowed Madigan to pick one: either an eldritch entity disguised as a human, or a human using black magic to keep herself alive. We still don’t “know,” per se, which option she went with, but Gladys is selfish, narcissistic, conniving, and, ultimately, weak, so one can intuit Madigan’s choice through her astonishing work. She’s having a ball eating up the screen here as pure, simpering evil, like Pennywise the Dancing Clown with a cheap tangerine wig and a layered ensemble of purple and burgundy. You probably have an aunt like Gladys, setting aside such matters as witchcraft and possession, and Madigan seems to be tapping into that maternal archetype while borrowing from horror’s rich cabal of child-preying monsters. – AC
Paul Mescal, “Hamnet”
You can practically watch Paul Mescal’s William Shakespeare split into two people: the man in love and the man sprinting toward legacy, already choosing absence as the price of becoming “important.” Mescal doesn’t romanticize that ambition; he plays it as compulsion, a restless hunger that leaves wreckage behind even when it’s “for the family.” He’s quiet where other actors would announce their tragedy, letting shame and longing leak out in glances and unfinished thoughts, until the character’s successes start to feel like a kind of cowardice. Ellwood wrote in his Playlist review that Zhao gets Buckley and Mescal to “pull their performances from the utter depths of their bones” and that “their scenes together are often breathtaking,” and Mescal’s half of that alchemy is how fully he allows William to be small next to Agnes’ power—awed by her, dependent on her, and finally haunted by the life he didn’t choose when it mattered. – RP
