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The Best Movie Performances Of 2022

Dale Dickey, “A Love Song”
Since making her screen debut in 1995, Dale Dickey has established herself as one of the greatest character actors of her generation. In a rare lead role, Dickey shines in writer-director Max Walker-Silverman’sA Love Song” as lonely widow Faye, who is spending the summer alone in a camper by a lake in the Colorado Mountains. She spends her days setting traps for crawdads, reading books about birds and stars, listening to love songs on the radio, and occasionally speaking to other campers. Dickey is transfixing, bringing a light touch to Faye’s ruminative, almost existential existence, a sharp change from the usually hardened characters for which she’s known. In the final act, Dickey shares the screen with an old flame played in an equally understated manner by Wes Studi. The two exchange memories of days long gone and some of the keenest chemistry of any two leads all year. Dickey achieves a sublime tranquility that lingers on the mind long after the film fades like summer into fall. – Marya E. Gates (Our review of “A Love Song”

Colin Farrell, “After Yang” & “The Banshees Of Inisherin”
Colin Farrell was so damn good in so many 2022 movies we were compelled to honor him twice (and he was terrific in “The Batman” as the Penguin, too). In Kogonada’s sublime “After Yang,” Farrell delivers the most tender and quiet performance of his career; a father trying to understand why their A.I. android family member has essentially shut down and died, leading to an odyssey-like investigation into the robot’s past prompting questions of love, loss, and connection. In “The Banshees Of Inisherin,” the role that will probably give Farrell his first Oscar win, he plays a tragic figure, one-half of a former lifelong friendship that suddenly collapses. Farrell’s Pádraic is a simpleton who cannot understand why his best friend (Brendan Gleeson) would want to break up with him suddenly (to be fair, the genius of the movie is we, the audience, can barely comprehend it too). But not only can he not fathom why, he essentially refuses to abide by his friend’s request to be left alone, which has dire and drastic consequences. Farrell’s empathetic, so brutally sad, and then rage-filled performance at being discarded is filled with anguish, compassion, and layers; it’ll wreck you in the end.- RP

Brendan Fraser, “The Whale” 
Much can be said about the stunning prosthetic work in “The Whale,” both about transforming Brendan Fraser into a man who weighs 600 pounds and also Fraser’s physical inhabitance that makes his character Charlie so compelling—every walk, every extended hand for sympathy is calculated, revealing, and striking. But the most incredible power of “The Whale” comes from Fraser using his welcoming, round eyes and a tempered, soft voice as the last bastion of hope from within his character Charlie, who is suffering heart problems due to his obesity. Charlie wants people to be humane and honest, especially the daughter he is estranged from (played by Sadie Sink). For all of the dark shame Charlie feels about his appearance, Fraser finds a significant deal of light within the character, making Charlie’s final wishes a poignant cause for Darren Aronofsky’s film. – NA (Our review of “The Whale”)

Freddie Gibbs, “Down with the King”
Mercury Maxwell is tired; Freddie Gibbs is tired. If misery loves company, then surely so does weariness, and Gibbs rolls the two conditions into raw emotion, malleable but balled up, for his acting debut in Paris-born, Connecticut-based filmmaker Diego Ongaro’sDown with the King.” Gibbs puts on a hangdog face for most of the movie’s duration, playing Mercury, Merc for short, a rapper who, having seen and done it all while observing the transformation of his art and industry into something unrecognizably shallow, is over it. He’s in the Berkshires ostensibly to record his new album, but he’d rather be farming with a local affable eccentric, Bob (Bob Tarasuk, Ongaro’s apparent muse). Farming’s hard work. It gratifies Merc in ways that rapping doesn’t: Gibbs throws his energy and soul into these moments, matching Merc’s efforts in doing what he does best, but his eyes betray the truth. His heart isn’t in it. At the same time, we see the heart Gibbs invests in his performance, drawing on his experience as a cultivator of persona to cultivate a familiar but entirely new personality. If Gibbs should himself ever grow out of rapping, he’s already sown seeds for what could be a sterling career acting. – Andrew Crump (Our review of “Down with the King”

Rebecca Hall, “Resurrection” 
Before “Resurrection” reaches one of the year’s most gut-ripping endings, much of its tension comes from watching Rebecca Hall as Margaret. From one uneasy scene to the next, she illuminates an intense experience throughout Andrew Semans’ script, that of being a victim of extreme emotional abuse. It’s even in how she runs, her arms and hands pointing straight up, as aerodynamic as possible, as if each jog were an Olympic sprint for her life. When the force of terror returns in her life (played by Tim Roth), Hall’s performance becomes all the more visceral with how one can feel helpless to such a brutal, controlling psychological mainstay. One outlet for all this tension comes from a show-stopping, mid-movie monologue that reveals her traumatic past; she delivers it to a coworker with a focused gaze like a pseudo confession until she has to brush off this terrible story as a joke. Hall’s performance is also about honoring an incredible strength that comes from within, and she beautifully shows in a stunning third act how a fighting spirit can return in full force. – NA (Our review of “Resurrection”)

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