Sean Penn, “One Battle After Another”
In theory, the world needs men like Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, as long as they’re able to rouse from their white supremacist stupor and see themselves, and the worldview they adhere to, for what they are; the contributions of people like Adrianne Black toward the cause of antiracism are invaluable. A shame that Lockjaw sticks with his grunts, his yeehaws, and his guns ’til the very end, but at least Penn wrings a singularly terrifying character out of him. In Anderson’s action thriller calculus, he’s the Terminator: a cold, stoic figure following his programming, who absolutely will not stop until his mission is done. But all of that math necessitates Lockjaw’s confusion and inclination toward failure, too. He’s an efficient soldier and a blind fool, and Penn puts his best foot forward for conveying the former while maintaining a glimmer of self-awareness for the latter. – AC
Joel Edgerton, “Train Dreams”
In Clint Bentley’s Old West tone poem, Edgerton embodies reticent frontiersman Robert Granier with muted bewilderment; he seems persistently awestruck by the world around him, and at the same time unable to process the events he witnesses, the sights he sees, or the feelings that leave him rivened at key moments of his life. He’s a reactive force, inquisitive rather than curious. Robert longs for connection and profundity. Edgerton dramatizes his lifelong yearning for both as leg irons that hold him in place, to a place where the understanding he seeks does not so much elude him as simply pass him by. There’s no less for a man like him to learn in the harsh, unforgiving wilderness of the American Northwest, an existential snag that Edgerton plays as conditional–a sad existence, rewarded in the film’s final moments, for a man living at the whims of forces beyond his control. – AC
Timothée Chalamet, “Marty Supreme”
What looks like cocky bravado from the outside becomes the whole point on screen: Timothée Chalamet weaponizes that “destined for greatness” energy into a livewire portrait of a kid who talks like he’s already a legend because he has to believe it first. Set in 1950s New York, he plays Marty Mauser as a “cocksure” shoe-clerk hustler with a woozy head full of moxie and impossible ambition—ping-pong isn’t the point so much as the proving ground, the place where confidence becomes currency and appetite becomes a survival tactic. The performance is all velocity and nerve endings: he moves like he’s always mid-scheme, always mid-pitch, always half a second from either triumph or humiliation, and somehow makes both outcomes feel like fuel. Even when the movie pinballs through cons, tournaments, and escalating near-disasters, Chalamet stays locked into the same manic conviction—Marty isn’t chasing a title, he’s chasing inevitability, trying to will himself into existence with sheer chutzpah (“It’s only a matter of time before I’m staring at you from the cover of a Wheaties box.”). By the time the film hits its ecstatic high, you understand why our review calls it “the performance of the year” and caps it with the blunt mic-drop: “Chalamet rides that velocity with a star-making performance that dares you to deny it.” – RP
Jesse Plemons, “Bugonia”
With sincere apologies to Emma Stone, who is excellent in this film as the tightly-wound alpha exec, there’s a specific kind of modern American mania that doesn’t read as “crazy” anymore so much as familiar background noise—podcast certainty, doomscroll logic, the conviction that you alone can see the wires—and Jesse Plemons turns it into a full-bodied, frighteningly human presence in Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Bugonia.” As Teddy Gatz, the beekeeper/true believer obsessive who kidnaps a pharma CEO because he’s convinced she’s not of this world, Plemons doesn’t play the guy like a punchline; he plays him like a proselyte, which is frightening and hilarious. The performance in this conspiracy-soured nightmare comedy, all coiled purpose and jittery focus—eyes that don’t blink enough, posture that suggests someone bracing for impact, a voice that can swing from wounded sincerity to hard, self-righteous threat without changing volume. You can feel Teddy’s lonely hero fantasy pumping through him, the way paranoia becomes a lifestyle, then a morality, then a mission, and Plemons makes that slide weirdly legible: this is a man who’s decided the world must be corrupt because it’s easier than admitting he’s powerless. As Marshall Shaffer notes in our review, the “furious intensity” of Plemons’ physically committed performances “inhabiting different realities” mirrors the fervency of his beliefs. Plemons turns fanaticism into something intimate, scary and all too familiar. – RP
Teyana Taylor, “One Battle After Another”
In a film full of instantly paradigmatic characters—Col. Steven Lockjaw, Sensei Sergio St. Carlos, and more—Perfidia Beverly Hills is maybe the most iconic imprint of the year. Played with steely intensity by the killer queen Teyana Taylor (“A Thousand and One”), she’s the ferocious revolutionary who lights the fuse that kickstarts Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another.” The wild flex is that Perfidia is primarily a first-act presence, yet her absence hangs over the rest of the movie like the ghost of heartbreak and consequence; you can feel her in the choices everyone makes after she’s gone, like a ache that keeps throbbing. “One Battle After Another” is, in its strange way, about the woman who broke a ton of hearts—Bob Ferguson’s, Lockjaw’s, Willa Ferguson’s, even her own—and Taylor gives that idea a face you can’t shake: anger as conviction, conviction as seduction, seduction as a kind of weaponized clarity. She gets the searing, instant-classic lines—“The message is clear. Free borders, free bodies, free choice and free from fucking fear!”—and sells them not as a slogan but as a lived gospel, a rallying cry that sounds like it’s been carved out of scar tissue. Then comes that final grace note—“Are you happy? Do you have love?”—and Taylor flips the entire myth in one breath, turning the icon into a person capable of regret, self-reckoning, and a sadness she cannot outrun. It’s a performance that doesn’t just pop; it haunts, because Taylor makes Perfidia feel like the movie’s missing limb—gone, but still painfully there.– RP
Kirsten Dunst, “Roofman”
It might technically be Channing Tatum’s movie—and he’s soulful, funny, charming, and quietly bruised in all the right spots—but “Roofman” is the kind of film where Kirsten Dunst becomes the emotional gravity if you’re watching closely. Dunst plays the wounded mom as a whole interior life, not a “supporting role”: every look has history in it, every pause feels like someone doing the exhausting math of keeping a family upright while a teenage daughter tilts the house. The performance is so nuanced and unshowy it almost hides in plain sight—until you realize she’s the one holding the movie’s heart in her hands. Dunst finds the hurt truth of every moment, shaping a portrait of need, caution, and longing that never begs for attention. If Paramount had any appetite for an actual awards push, they’d be riding her work here hard. – RP
Honorable Mention:
Mariam Afshari, “It Was Just an Accident”; Jacob Elordi, “Frankenstein”; Dylan O’Brien, “Twinless”; Tom Blyth, “Plainclothes”; Théodore Pellerin, “Lurker”; Wunmi Mosaku, “Sinners”; Abou Sangare, “Souleymane’s Story”; Frank Dillane, “Urchin”; Stellan Skarsgard, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, and Elle Fanning in “Sentimental Value.”
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
