The 50 Best Movie Performances of the 2000s
This article is part of IndieWire’s 2000s Week celebration. Click here for a whole lot more.
Putting together best-of lists is both a pleasure and a pain — you are always going to “leave something out” or “forget about” one of the all-time greats, and even if you’re able to cull through every possible iteration and entry, ranking and rating the merit of anything in any artistic realm is bound to draw dissent. And, yes, we just keep doing it.
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This summer, we’re all about the aughts. And what a time for on-screen performances, the kind that belong not only on this list, but any list of best-to-ever-do-it. In the early 2000s, we saw all manner of breakthroughs on the big screen, be it Javier Bardem burrowing into our collective nightmares or Adam Sandler continuing to proof his salt as a full-stop Great Dramatic Actor. Heath Ledger became our most chilling supervillain. Michelle Williams established indie film dominance. Daniel Craig re-invented James Bond. Bj?rk proved her capabilities in yet another medium. Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung offered love for all moods. And Daniel Day-Lewis, who only seems capable of incredible work, turned in his (arguably) best performance ever. And, still, this is only a small sampling of the actorly range on display during the decade.
For fans (or just keen-eyed readers) of our previous iterations of this package (including the best performances of the ’80s and the ’90s) will likely notice we’re continuing to scale up to 50 total performances after a very tough cut of just 25 back when we celebrated the ’90s in 2022.
Even with a total of 50 slots in mind for this particular list, choosing among the acting work of an entire decade proved virtually impossible. It always is! Even choosing amongst the performances of a single star was heartbreaking (such was the case with the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose incredible body of work could have populated far more entries on this list; we hope the single entry we’ve chosen is representative enough of his prolific, chameleonic skills in front the camera).
We couldn’t bear to rank our final choices, and so the list below is presented in alphabetical order. Selected from a decade’s worth of indelible performances, here are the 50 that we just couldn’t seem to shake.
This article features contributions from the following writers: Siddhant Adlakha, Carlos Aguilar, Christian Blauvelt, David Ehrlich, Kate Erbland, Ryan Lattanzio, Jourdain Searles, Adam Solomons, Natalia Winkelman, and Christian Zilko.
Gillian Anderson as Lily Bart (“The House of Mirth”)
In the four decades since James Ivory’s “A Room with a View” kicked off the craze, the vast majority of period costume dramas have been escapist fantasies. Then there’s “The House of Mirth,” which uses Gillian Anderson’s initially breezy performance to trick you — those of you not already familiar with Edith Wharton’s devastating tragedy, at least — into thinking it will be a touristic waltz through late 19th century America.
We meet her Lily Bart on a train leafing through a book on Americana, and then again in a tableau vivant for her society friends as the personification of Spring. But director Terence Davies pulls the rug out quickly and shows how fragile and how tenuous a woman’s position can really be. She refuses sex to a predatory Dan Aykroyd in exchange for financial assistance, but her reputation becomes irreparably damaged anyway for having taken his money. From there, Bart plunges into a relentless downward spiral. She tries to get a job as a seamstress, and quickly loses it. She gets addicted to laudanum. And so the spiral continues.
Anderson’s portrayal of promising young insider turned burned-out outsider is beyond bracing; it’s like watching a version of Elizabeth Bennet suddenly face the world-collapsing tsuris that confronted Michael Stuhlbarg’s character in “A Serious Man,” but with added proto-#MeToo implications. Bart captures the greatest fear, one that still has even greater implications for women than for men in a culture that refuses to abandon double standards: That you’ll be blamed for something you didn’t do, all your friends will turn against you, and you’ll be left with nothing. Nothing but your pain and the chance to medicate it. This is what cancellation really looks like. —CB
Amitabh Bachchan as Debraj Sahai (“Black”)
Loosely inspired by Helen Keller’s biography, Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Hindi-language drama “Black” serves as a career landmark for the legendary Indian screen star Amitabh Bachchan. Known for his fiery “angry young man” persona in the ’70s and ’80s, the aughts afforded Bachchan a brand new phase in his filmography, during which he played tragic and complicated patriarchs, though his role as teacher Debraj Sahai in “Black” stands out as one of the actor’s most moving and challenging.
As the unpredictable, alcoholic teacher to a blind and Deaf woman, Michelle (Rani Mukherjee), Debraj remains laser-focused on opening up the world and all its possibilities for her, even if his stern techniques draw skepticism from all corners. Together, Bachchan and Mukherjee create a sense of hope and warmth amid Bhansali’s frigid, snow-capped scenes, in a tale of trying to find and preserve human dignity. However, in a dramatic irony, Debraj gradually loses himself to Alzheimer’s, during which Bachchan puts on a clinic in melding the worlds of Bollywood melodrama and methodical, heavily-researched naturalism.
The loss of self has never seemed quite so terrifying — let alone so tragic, given how deeply humane Debraj comes off in his best and very worst moments. Thanks to Bachchan’s impassioned delivery, and to moments of silent uncertainty he creates, the resultant performance tugs unyieldingly at the heartstrings. —SA
Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh (“No Country for Old Men”)
“Call it.” Bowl-cut haircut. Captive bolt pistol (we gotta get a snappier name for that thing). While the iconography around Javier Bardem’s “No Country for Old Men” character Anton Chigurh is unmistakable and unforgettable, it’s the steady work of the actor that ties it together into one of the most remarkable villain turns of this, or any, decade.
Before the Coen brothers case him in the creepiest role in their Cormac McCarthy adaptation, Bardem as a respected Spanish actor best known for his performances in films like “The Sea Inside” and “Before Night Falls.” His chilling portrayal of Anton Chigurh catapulted him into global prominence and made the case that he’s one of our most profoundly skilled baddies.
His Chigurh is not merely a villain, but a force of nature – with all the actual horror that entails – marked by an unsettling calmness in the face of profound terror. Bardem’s physical presence, accentuated by Chigurh’s questionable hairstyle and unblinking gaze, creates a disquieting figure that lurks and haunts every frame. You don’t need to be told this guy is bad news, you know it on a cellular level.
The horror of Bardem’s performance lies in Chigurh’s lack of empathy and his seemingly arbitrary method of deciding who lives and dies. And the random nature of his violence, dictated by a coin toss or his own cryptic sense of fate, is a perfect manifestation of the existential fear that pulses underneath the Coen brothers’ film. He’s nothing but dread, and he’s coming for you. –KE
Angela Bettis as May Dove Canady (“May”)
A genre flick that opens with a blood-curdling scream, “May,” written and directed by Lucky McKee (and coedited by Rian Johnson in one of his early filmmaking credits), is a rather straightforward slasher exercise that centers on an idiosyncratic young woman driven to the edge. What elevates the movie into something unforgettable is the lead performance by Angela Bettis, who, wearing skinny glasses and girlish, handmade outfits, packs into the titular character’s petite frame a passion so ferocious it’s nearly diabolic.
The film offers a brief origin story: As a kid, May’s lazy eye required an eyepatch that her peers mocked. Friendless, she found company in a grinning alabaster doll that her mother insisted she keep in the box. Flash forward to adulthood and May’s closest confidante is still the doll, who, encased in glass, appears to listen intently as May gushes about the hunky guy she spied on her lunch break.
Things grow sinister once May’s crush balloons into an obsession that leaves her by turns tearful and raging. Her despair is so encompassing that it isn’t long before her penchant for dolls and her profession as a veterinary surgeon converge, inspiring May to patch together the perfect companion out of composite human parts. Embodying this campy Dr. Frankenstein, Bettis seamlessly transitions from moony, mannered quirkiness to cool composure. The performance culminates in one tour-de-force sequence — teased in the opening — that, with gruesome detail, literalizes May’s deep desire to be seen. —NW
Bj?rk as Selma Je?ková (“Dancer in the Dark”)
One of the best performances of the 2000s — if not of all time — wasn’t the work of a career actress. It was delivered by someone unexpected, in an even less expected venue: Bjork, the popular Icelandic singer, in a tragic musical directed by the Danish auteur Lars von Trier. “Dancer in the Dark” was always polarizing, and Bjork’s vulnerable, layered turn as a factory worker with a degenerative eye condition always difficult to watch. Today, it is impossible to do so without being reminded of the repeated sexual advances and unwanted touching by von Trier that Bjork alleged she endured on set. (The actress came forward with the story at the height of the Me Too movement, and von Trier denied the accusations.)
At once exhilarating and horrifying, operatic and affecting, the film follows Selma (Bjork), a Czech emigre largely defined by two qualities: selflessness and willfulness. Living in a trailer she rents from a local policeman, Selma is going blind from a genetic disease, and she spends her days toiling on a factory line in order to scrape away for a sight-saving surgery for her young son, who inherited the condition. “I’ve seen it all, there is no more to see,” Selma croons in the musical’s most famous song, which scored the film’s only Oscar nomination.
As Selma, Bjork is a mesmerizing mix of girlish naivety and nearly feral feeling. Throughout, her eyes and fingers twitch with joyful energy. Her face is perennially open, whether she’s quarreling or singing or laughing or crying. Every so often, Selma’s ear for melody will transform the film’s mechanical soundscape into musical numbers complete with Busby Berkeley-style choreography. Her imagination, we’re meant to see, is a powerful tool — capable of producing beauty in even the direst circumstances. —NW
Maggie Cheung as Su Li-zhen (“In the Mood for Love”)
It’s one of the all-time great movie premises: a pair of lonesome neighbors whose partners are having an affair grow closer as they try to figure out how such a thing can happen, and in doing so begin their own kind of tryst. Newspaper journalist Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) and secretary Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) will never have Paris: they have a smoky narrow staircase where they keep inadvertently meeting between unsocial shifts, where they glance at each other sensually. Cheung has said that Wong Kar-Wai shot from so far away that she wasn’t told when he was shooting in slow-motion. It’s a testament to her remarkable, methodical performance that slow-motion finds no creases in her characterization: it only strengthens it.
“In the Mood for Love” is by design somewhat impenetrable, a portrait of a particularly torturous, impossible passion, expressed through the most fleeting of moments. Leung and Cheung are necessarily distant: their characters aren’t able to properly know each other, and neither do we. This is a theme: we never even see the faces of their spouses. But Cheung turns that withholding into a universal angst that resonates so powerfully that “In the Mood for Love,” for all of its ultra-visceral specificity, achieves a profound timeless.
That it’s nowadays a TikTok stand-in for pretty filmmaking is not just testament to Kar-Wai, but the broadness of Cheung’s downcast, forgotten manner. It’s a “mood” that suits a kind of willfully powerless viewer, someone who never thinks (as Kar-Wai has pointed out) that Chow and Su are engaging in their own kind of dishonesty, too. We may all be victims and perpetrators, but “In the Mood for Love” is the ultimate portrait of victims whose revenge we root for. A baffled neighbor spots Su on her way to get dinner in the middle of the night in one of her memorable, tight-fitting dresses and asks: “She dresses like that to go out for noodles?” Cheung understands the assignment: it’s her world, we’re just living in it. —AS
Fatoumata Coulibaly as Collé Gallo Ardo Sy (“Moolaadé”)
Ousmane Sembene found a supreme collaborator in Fatoumata Coulibaly. For all the irony and form-breaking in his work, the great Senegalese director was incredibly sincere, and his final film is a call to action in cinematic form. Coulibaly, already having worked as an actress and journalist, was also a public opponent of female genital mutilation, a practice known to occur throughout Africa and that she had been subjected to herself. For his final film, Sembene wanted to make a statement against the practice, and the result is urgent and earnest.
Coulibaly plays Colle, the second wife of a prominent patriarch in a Burkina Faso village who takes in four girls who’ve escaped from the ceremony where they would have endured “purification.” Colle is a character, not just a walking symbol, however: Before realizing what the girls were escaping, she threatens to beat them. Then when she gets it, she offers them a magical protection, a “moolaadé,” which none of her fellow villagers are willing to break. Some endorse her view, but many others think she’s a dangerous threat to the way things have always been done. (The deeply misogynist view behind the practice is that girls subjected to it will make for more docile wives.) Coulibaly is clearly invested in presenting Colle as “a force,” but at the same time she does little to manipulate your emotions. A scene where her husband flogs her publicly is remarkable for her restraint and stoicism — she is not trying to bring the waterworks. It’s as if she and Sembene are saying that their message is powerful enough, they didn’t need to resort to manipulation to argue on its behalf at all. —CB
Daniel Craig as James Bond (“Casino Royale”)
It can be hard to remember now, but people were horrified at the news that some bludgeon-faced blond was going to be the new face of British cinema’s biggest spy franchise. The “Layer Cake” guy? Really? Some felt that it was an extreme overreaction to millennial tastes, with their emo and their X Games and their flagrant disregard for history (and by “history” I mean “Roger Moore”). This wasn’t the James Bond that we all knew and had come to love for his diminishing returns!
Well, that proved to be about half right. Daniel Craig’s take on 007 was emo in a way the character had never been before (in that he was unafraid of having emotions), but at the same it returned Bond to a rugged machismo that had long soured into self-parody. By allowing Bond to have a heart, Craig made it possible for Bond to hurt like never before — in both senses of the word. His swooningly romantic scenes with Eva Green raised the stakes on a series that had been bluffing for ages, while the emotional violence he suffered as a result helped ground the physical violence that followed with a bruising sense of reality. This hulking, ice-cold, bruiser of a man was a Bond for the 21st century, but only because he embodied the essence of the character better than anyone had in 50 years. If only the direct sequel(s) demanded by the richness of Craig’s performance didn’t squander it all on the same cheap nostalgia the actor himself continued to transcend. —DE
Penélope Cruz as Raimunda (“Volver”)
In Pedro Almodovar’s most histrionic melodrama, one of his quietest lead performances. “Volver” begins with Raimunda (Penelope Cruz) scrubbing dust off her parents’ graves as a storm gathers. Within 15 minutes her aunt Paula (Chus Lampreave) has died and her husband Paco (Antonio de la Torre) is knifed by her daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) after he tries to assault her, revealing in the process that he isn’t really her father. What’s more, Raimunda is the last to find out that her own mother Irene (Carmen Maura) isn’t dead at all, but has been haunting her surroundings in shame for years after causing the fatal fire in which she was thought to have perished.
“Volver” is a soap opera, even by Almodovar’s standards, but Cruz keeps it tethered to an identifiable reality. There are few big emotional outbursts: events do the talking. When Raimunda tells her sister Sole (Lola Due?as) about Paco’s “disappearance”, it’s a comic scene. “He’ll come back”, Sole insists. Raimunda replies distantly: “I’m not so sure.” Almodovar’s flippancy here is his tribute to the relentless of his women. In “Volver”, men cheat on their wives and women cheat death.
Cruz is at her least vulnerable: her outfits are a moodboard for a confident independence and she never once worries about bringing up Paola alone (that may say more about Paco than Raimunda). When Irene returns, and insists she’ll be around for as long as she can be, Raimunda must tap into a more fragile and open side. A formidable parent, yes, but her life as daughter isn’t quite over yet. Cruz holds those conflicting burdens brilliantly. —AS
Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview (“There Will Be Blood”)
Many of the greatest film performances of all time are defined by their subtlety, with actors conveying layers upon layers of emotion that only a camera could capture. But few cinematic pleasures are sweeter than seeing a brilliant thespian throw their hard-won subtlety into the sun in pursuit of maximalist insanity. Such is the case with “There Will Be Blood,” which saw Daniel Day-Lewis leave it all on the court as Daniel Plainview, a scenery-chewing, milkshake-drinking oilman whose unrelenting thirst for wealth defines him every bit as much as the country that he represents. His gradual shift from silver mining to fossil fuels and his descent into near-Biblical insanity seem to mirror the trajectory of the United States in Paul Thomas Anderson’s attempt at the Great American Movie, and the contradictions baked into the character speak to the impossible tension between greed and religion that we still have yet to fully parse. Sometimes acting is about crafting a hyper-naturalistic oil painting, and other times it’s about using a thick brush to paint a sprawling mural. After a four decade career as perhaps his generation’s finest actor, Day-Lewis has proved time and time again that he can do both. —CZ
Julie Delpy as Céline (“Before Sunset”)
“Before Sunset” is the only one of the “Before” movies that landed in the 2000s, meaning it’s the only one of Julie Delpy’s performances as Celine that’s eligible here. And yet, even if it weren’t, it’s still perhaps the pinnacle of her work as this character in the trilogy directed by Richard Linklater. In “Before Sunset,” Celine and Jesse, who first meet in 1995’s “Before Sunrise,” reconnect after she shows up at a reading for his book, inspired by their connection. This time, they wander around Paris as they once again ruminate on life and love, now with the addition of some years and the wisdom that comes with it. Delpy has a task at hand: By the end of the film, you should want Jesse to not return to his wife and child, and fall madly back in love with her.
Needless to say, Delpy accomplishes that task in stunning fashion. This, it should be said plainly, is a remarkably sexy performance, culminating in Celine’s two-fold serenade of Jesse at her apartment: First as she strums a guitar and then as she dances to Nina Simone, and declares, “Baby, you’re gonna miss that plane.” But Delpy also allows Celine’s insecurities to shine through, specifically capturing the uncertainty of feeling like you’re just a stop in someone else’s journey. She’s somehow both deeply relatable and magnetically otherworldly all at once. —EZ
Alex Descas as Lionel (“35 Shots of Rum”)
Claire Denis’ “35 Shots of Rum” is a film of seemingly endless depth, using the slightest of events to explore the conflicting emotions that surround aging, watching children leave the nest, the fragility of traditions, and the inevitability of sexual desire. The nucleus around which everything orbits is Lionel, a middle-aged railroad conductor who finds his quiet life disrupted when a handsome new neighbor becomes his first real competition for his daughter’s affection. The film would be a shadow of itself if not for Alex Descas’ performance, the actor speaking volumes with the subtlest of glances as he comes to terms with his own confusing feelings about events over which he has no control. He’s a man whose genuine love for his daughter knows no bounds, but who is nevertheless burdened by the same possessive impulses that rear their head in every human life at one point or another. Descas straddles the contradictory line between selfless familial love and shameful self-interest with a magnetism that makes the film’s knotty questions impossible to answer. While Denis never gives her audience the privilege of a simple explanation, the nuances of Descas’ performance speak to the impossibility of navigating life’s transitional periods with any kind of moral clarity. —CZ
Jeon Do-yeon as Lee Shin-ae (“Secret Sunshine”)
Jeon Do-Yeon’s masterful turn as Lee Shin-ae in “Secret Sunshine” can be conveyed in two sequences. In the earlier scene, the recently widowed Shin-ae returns home to find her young son missing. The phone rings, and Shin-ae answers, desperate for it to be him. Instead, in a prolonged shot without music or voiceover from the caller, we watch as Shin-ae receives what we assume to be very bad news. She wails, trembles and begs, a vision of motherly despair.
The second scene occurs some months later, after Shin-ae has become a pious Christian. Here, she sits across from a certain person who has committed the gravest of sins (that’s all we’ll say in the interest of avoiding spoilers). Shin-ae initiated the meeting with the notion that she would forgive the man, thereby fulfilling the Lord’s commandment to love one’s enemies. But once the man returns Shin-ae’s smile and shares that he too has found God, Shin-ae’s expression changes. No longer does she believe in the power of absolution; instead, in just a few moments, we watch as she loses faith in religion altogether.
A deceptively simple movie about a single mother suffering the worst sort of pain, “Secret Sunshine” hinges on its lead, who won the award for best female performance at Cannes. And deservedly so: With so much going on under Shin-ae’s surface, the audience relies on Do-Yeon’s shifting mien to show us that even in the wake of unbearable tragedy, a range of feeling and human experience endures. —NW
Hossein Emadeddin as Hossein (“Crimson Gold”)
Hossain Emadeddin (“Crimson Gold”)
“If you want to arrest a thief, you’ll have to arrest the world,” an experienced con artist explains to the taciturn, impassive Hossain (Hossain Emadeddin) in Jafar Panahi’s “Crimson Gold.” Hossain isn’t a thief by nature, but rather a working man suffering from the indignity of Iranian class stratification. He spends his evenings delivering pizzas to the wealthy sect in Tehran, catching glimpses of lavish and comfortable lives, and his days being humiliated by the upper classes who can smell the relative poverty on him. Though Hossain eventually snaps and ineptly commits a robbery, Panahi implicitly argues that this action hardly makes him a criminal. He’s merely an extension of an unfair world.
The success of Panahi’s fourth feature and its class indictment almost entirely hinges on Emadeddin’s performance, which conveys internalized anger and shame through unique, near-silent deadpan. A non-professional actor, Emadeddin was a real-life pizza delivery man and a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war at the time of filming. He also suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, which apparently made filming very difficult and contributed to certain elements of his performance. His complete lack of self-consciousness—or really any sort of calculated mannerisms that could be attributed to “acting”—not only astonishes on its own merits, but it also engenders necessary projection on the part of the audience and a hinted interiority on the part of Emadeddin.
By design, the reactions his hulking, initially gentle presence inspires from Tehran bureaucratic authorities, elite fail-sons, and snotty business owners speak volumes more than any of his actual dialogue. The film’s best sequence features Hossain curiously snooping around a lavish apartment, trying on a life he’ll never have the way a kid wears a costume. Emadeddin doesn’t do much other than tentatively absorb the “crimson gold” (blood money) that surrounds him, but the way he moves through the environment communicates how a lifetime of casual disrespect will shrink one’s spirit until almost nothing remains. —VM
Olivier Gourmet as Olivier (“The Son”)
Reactive performances naturally tend to be overlooked by audiences and award bodies alike; simply put, neither restraint nor understatement is as sexy as capital-A Acting. But the 2002 Cannes jury, headed by David Lynch, couldn’t ignore Olivier Gourmet’s heartbreaking performance in “The Son” and rightly awarded him the year’s Best Actor award. From its first enigmatic minutes to a stirring final confrontation, “The Son” lives and dies with Gourmet’s burdened gaze as he stalks a young man who wishes to join his carpentry trade center after being recently released from prison. Olivier initially keeps his distance from Francis (Morgan Marinne) even as he tracks his movements, but he eventually takes him under his wing and even tentatively warms up to him when he exhibits an aptitude for woodwork. Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne eventually reveal Olivier and Francis’ shared history, but they never explicate a motive for Olivier’s hesitant mentorship. When asked point blank why he’s counseling Francis, he responds with almost mystical reserve, “I don’t know.”
Gourmet’s performance provides all the necessary answers for his character’s actions, which run the gamut from sinister to distressed without ever tipping into histrionics suggested by the material. “The Son” meditates on the nature of penance through labor, and Gourmet appropriately filters this theme through an emphasis on tactility and craft. He communicates Olivier’s relationship to his trade—specifically, the pride he takes in working with his hands and sharing his specialized knowledge—through an assured poise and a reserved expression, two elements that hint at a wealth of pain that can’t easily be put into words. Whenever Olivier interacts with Francis, Gourmet conveys his character’s reluctance to animate that hurt, either with violence or forgiveness, but also illustrates the need for it to be purged. The high degree of difficulty required to make these emotions legible largely through physical expression cannot be overstated. That Gourmet accomplishes this with a measure of grace is a feat unto itself. —VM
Sally Hawkins as Pauline “Poppy” Cross (“Happy-Go-Lucky”)
The best performances are the ones we can’t possibly be imagined in the hands – and hearts and brains and bodies – of anyone else. Such is the magic of Sally Hawkins’ performance in Mike Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Lucky” as Poppy Cross, the kind of role that could only be made full and fresh by the perfect actress. Poppy’s unyielding optimism and buoyant personality is easy enough on paper, incredibly hard in practice. In short, nearly anyone else might have rendered Poppy grating, shrill, and annoying. Hawkins? Never.
What makes Hawkins’ portrayal so remarkable is her ability to embody Poppy’s infectious enthusiasm with a genuine and nuanced approach. She balances Poppy’s unrelenting cheerfulness with moments of introspection, allowing the character to feel deeply human, rather than one-dimensional, someone who is just “happy!” and that’s it. This duality is most evident in Hawkins’ facial expressions and body language, which convey Poppy’s emotional depth without the need for over-the-top dialogue.
Hawkins’ work in “Happy-Go-Lucky” also stands out for its subtlety and restraint (other facets of the performance we doubt less skilled performers would tap into). Her depiction of Poppy’s interactions with other characters, including her hard-nosed driving instructor (Eddie Marsan) and her eclectic circle of friends, demonstrates her ability to create chemistry and evoke empathy with anyone. Hawkins imbues Poppy with a sense of spontaneity and warmth, which ultimately turns her journey into one of real introspection and discovery – what is it like to be happy all the time? – rather than a simple study of someone uncannily able to smile through the pain. –KE
Werner Herzog as Werner Herzog (“Grizzly Man”)
Werner Herzog has a reputation for being a stone-faced showman, but his gravitas has a more wistful edge than usual in “Grizzly Man.” Herzog only appears briefly on screen in his 2005 documentary portrait of doomed amateur conservationist Timothy Treadwell; the majority of the film is made up of home-video footage shot by its subject. And when we do finally see him, nearly an hour into the film, he has his back to the camera.
We don’t see his expression as he listens to audio of Treadwell being mauled to death by a bear, audio Herzog later described as “the most terrifying thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” What we do see is Treadwell’s friend and ex-partner Jewel Palovak, expectantly scanning Herzog’s face searching for his reaction. He’s taking on the burden of bearing witness for her, an act that’s done both out of human compassion and his instinct towards self-flagellation.
Herzog must pay penance because he identifies with Treadwell. Treadwell was an adventurer, an obsessive who ignored expert advice and followed inspiration wherever it took him. In this way, Treadwell is Herzog’s shadow, an example of what could have happened if he was just a little bit unluckier and didn’t have the institutional support that comes with being a famous filmmaker. Staying out of sight is Herzog’s way of not making it all about him, but his charged absence finds him grappling with the implications of Treadwell’s story as it relates to his own recklessness. Herzog wasn’t martyred for his art, and he should be relieved by that. Strangely, though, it just makes the burden heavier. —KR
Philip Seymour Hoffman as Caden Cotard (“Synecdoche, New York”)
Philip Seymour Hoffman’s gift for playing flawed men recklessly searching for answers reaches its pinnacle in Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, “Synecdoche, New York.” Here, he plays the gloom-laden, hypochondriac, almost pathologically misanthropic playwright Caden Cotard, staring at the wreckage of his own life — failed relationships, a daughter who hates him, a career driven to ruin by his fear of mortality — and trying to make sense (and art) out of it all.
Caden Cotard gets lost in the realism he attempts to project inside a massive warehouse in Manhattan’s Theater District, one whose insides start to meld with its outsides. But Caden remains consistently pathetic, debased, degraded, and deteriorated throughout, which makes the brief flashes of happiness (like a finally consummated affair with his assistant Hazel) all the more worrying. A character as neurotic and miserable as Caden would be an insufferable watch in less capable hands, but Hoffman seems to have found something of himself in the role — someone restless in his own skin and trying to mitigate that discomfort through art. He may have given more cinematic performances, but none go deeper into the muck and marrow of a character. He’s so good it can be painful to watch, as it is when Caden screams at his daughter, now an exotic dancer behind a trick window. “Olive, it’s daddy!” A daughter he lost long ago and will never be able to get back; another thing that slips out of his grasp. But it’s Hoffman’s compassion for the character that keeps you from pitying him, and instead opens the door to an infinite universe of feeling. —RL
Isabelle Huppert as Erika Kohut (“The Piano Teacher”)
Isabelle Huppert has eyes of glass and almost translucent skin as classical music professor Erika Kohut in Michael Haneke’s perverse love story “The Piano Teacher.” Her gaze is implacable, her mouth ever a grim, thin line, but it’s all on the precipice of being shattered by the arrival of a handsome pupil, Walter (Beno?t Magimel), who shows her what love could be — in one form or another — for perhaps the first time.
As Erika, Huppert watches a concert pianist’s performance with the same dour determination she watches a porno in the video store she retreats to in her off hours – a mix of fascination and calculation. There’s always an unthawing block of ice around her, which finally starts to crack in the film’s devastating second half, whenshe finally tells Walter “Je t’aime” but is unable to control the outcome in the same ways she is the rest of her life.
Huppert’s exploration of the inner landscape of Erika’s damaged psyche, sadomasochistic tendencies, and total psychosexual dysfunction holds nothing back — it’s a fearless performance even by the standards of a Haneke film. But the real pièce de resistance of Huppert’s turn here is how she can make such a twisted woman so heartbreaking, and make you actually feel emotion in the face of a hermetically sealed existence. “The Piano Teacher” is remembered for being a primally fucked-up movie, and it’s certainly that, but it packs an entire concerto’s worth of feeling. —RL
Song Kang-ho as Park Doo-man (“Memories of Murder”)
One of the many extraordinary things about Bong Joon Ho’s filmmaking is the director’s ability to blend disparate tones. And in Bong’s breakout 2003 feature “Memories of Murder,” the responsibility for these shifting moods falls on Song Kang-ho. On the whole, “Memories” is one of Bong’s more sedate efforts, weighed down by the grim reality that the serial murders dramatized in the film were never really “solved.” (The killer confessed in 2019, but that was way after the fact.) Part of the reason for that was the sloppy work of provincial cops like Detective Park Doo-man, Song’s character in the film.
When we first meet the boorish Park, he’s all unearned confidence and bad table manners. He’s a fool, but he’s not an idiot — he’ll consult a shaman about a murder case, but his wallet stays shut. Mostly, he’s just lazy, and doesn’t care if the wrong guy goes to prison if it means he gets to leave work and go get drunk. Like all small-town bullies, he’s insecure, which manifests both in his one-sided rivalry with big-city investigator Seo Tae-yoon (Kim Sang-kyung) and his quickness to smack a suspect on the side of the head (or worse).
With an assist from Bong’s mischievous editing, Song provides nearly all of the comedy in the first half of the film. One funny scene sees Detective Park soaking in a sauna, his eyes darting around after he becomes convinced the killer has no pubic hair. Another is the improvised flying dropkick with which Park greets his new colleague from Seoul.
Then the dynamic shifts as the case gets more hopeless. Goofy bits from the first half return in poignant fashion, and Song’s posture changes, becoming tighter and more withdrawn. He starts staring off into space, overwhelmed by his helplessness in the face of evil. A final irony in the denouement breaks this once-cocky man completely, and the horror of the realization crosses Song’s face like a shadow from a passing cloud. A guy who thought he knew everything has come face to face with the unknowable, and left him with nothing but regret. —KR
Q’orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas (“The New World”)
Be moved by it or alienated by it, but the performance style that entirely dominates all of Terrence Malick’s recent films begins with this then-14-year-old Indigenous actress in her first lead role. That’s right: The deep staring into another actor’s eyes to convey connection and sensitivity, the running of one’s hand over a field during harvest time, laying on the grass and staring up at the sky, the twirling. Things you’ll see in “The Tree of Life,” “To the Wonder,” “Knight of Cups,” “Song to Song,” and “A Hidden Life” after it. But here’s the deal: No one’s done those things better than Kilcher — because they are the kind of things a 14-year-old playing a 14-year-old character might really do.
Kilcher portrays Pocahontas with exceptional guilelessness and curiosity, which perfectly suits this foundational story of Indigenous-colonial conflict and connection (and even carries the film’s voiceover narration). Since dialogue itself is rather minimal throughout, much of the film’s emotion needs to be written on Kilcher’s face, and she handles that task magnificently, conveying the anxiety of being caught between two worlds with both the skill of a far more seasoned professional and the unstudied naturalism of a newcomer.
The funny thing about Malick’s film is how decisively he decided not to reinvent the wheel of Disney’s own animated “Pocahontas” from a decade earlier — it practically is just a live-action version of that and its direct-to-video sequel “Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World,” down to casting those films’ Pocahontas voice actress Irene Bedard as Pocahontas’s mother here. Kilcher’s performance, quiet and imagining a deep internal life to this historical figure on whom so much has been symbolically placed, is a crucial part of what justifies the movie’s existence.—CB
Sanaa Lathan as Monica Wright (“Love & Basketball”)
In one of the most beloved performances of the 2000s, Sanaa Lathan plays Monica Wright in Love & Basketball as a realistic romantic heroine. She follows her two great loves with passion and focus, rarely wavering. She wants to have it all and sees no reason why it can’t happen for her, a determination made all the more powerful on a meta-textual level by the fact that there were so few starring roles for Black women at the time. With “Love & Basketball,” writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood put Lathan directly into the spotlight, allowing her to upstage her love interest — Quincy, played by Omar Epps — at every turn. We only care about Quincy because Monica does, and whenever he lets her down, the film is squarely on her side. It’s a star-making performance for Lathan, whose rawness and beauty overtakes the screen every time she’s on it. —JS
Heath Ledger as Joker (“The Dark Knight”)
Few decade roundups would be complete without acknowledging Heath Ledger’s Joker, an iconic epitaph to a tremendous performer taken far too soon. The actor’s final completed role would help tilt-shift the fledgling superhero genre towards a short-lived mode of ultra-realism, even though Ledger had been cast in the role of one of comics’ goofiest and most carnivalesque figures.
In “The Dark Knight,” Ledger’s take on the Joker becomes a demonic centerpiece, though he still maintains the supervillain’s errant mischief. In the process, he becomes the face of a world gone mad with fears of modern terror and militarized urban warfare. He draws attention to his self-inflicted scars with licks and tics, as if to enhance the sensation that the contemporary political villainy is something entirely inexplicable, and — through the character’s conflicting exposition — wholly paradoxical.
The more time we spend with Ledger’s Joker, the more it becomes clear that he’s buoyed by a mysterious sense of anguish, which he slowly but surely transforms into prankish perversion. He is an enigma, in a way too few pop performances are afforded the chance to be. But above all else: he’s alluring, in a grimy sort of way that makes your skin crawl in one moment, but makes you lean forward in your seat in the very next, eager to listen to each precise yet unpredictable enunciation, relayed through the menacing rasp of a mobster hell-bent on setting the world — and the screen — on fire. —SA
Tony Leung Chiu-wai as Chow Mo-wan (“In the Mood for Love”)
It’s hard to think of another film that’s as sexy — yet-sexless — as Wong Kar Wai’s “In the Mood for Love.” The story of two isolated spouses who come agonizingly close to consummating their lust for each other after learning their partners engaged in an affair together, the film is some of the most eloquently shot foreplay in the history of cinema.
Wong is only able to toy with his audiences so blatantly because his actors are so magnetic. Maggie Cheung is a vision of repressed glamour in her rainbow of different colored qipaos, but Tony Leung more than matches her elegance as the spitting image of a middle-aged boy-next door. With his slim ties, perfectly parted hair, and endless supply of cigarettes, Leung embodies the role of Chow with an Old Hollywood charm. His eyes feature the pain of a man who has been hurt by the person who is supposed to care the most about him, but they never fully hide the lust and energy of a man who still has a lot of living left in him. Even if he never comes to terms with his own neuroses and desires before it’s too late to do anything about him, Leung achieves cinematic immortality because of how brilliantly he captures the feeling of finding someone who lights a fire under you at the wrong moment in life. —CZ
Anamaria Marinca as Otilia Mihartescu (“4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days”)
Set in a nightmare-hued vision of Communist Romania circa 1987, Cristian Mungiu’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” is a film in which every frame seems to contain a bomb about to go off. As Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) crosses a road to make arrangements for an illegal abortion for her friend, even the sound of a car speeding by feels fraught with the possibility of death and doom.
A television actress Mungiu discovered in the lead-up to production, Anamaria Marinca was only a child during the dictatorial reign of Nicolae Ceau?escu. But in Mungiu’s film, she seems to understand the repressions of the time in her bones, and in a courageous performance often as stoic and taciturn as Mungiu’s camera.
There’s a scene, an almost 14-minute long take, that centers on Otilia at her boyfriend’s birthday party, saying next to nothing, as the elders around her lambaste her generation for the ruination of traditional values. In other words, the values dictated by Ceau?escu. Otilia is on another plane, already having mentally left the stifling atmosphere created by Ceau?escu long ago, with her mind also still back in a hotel room where her friend is undergoing the abortion she helped arrange. Mungiu’s observational approach and Marinca’s understated performance make for the sort of unforgettable cinematic match that compels you to question why she didn’t continue to be the star of all his movies. —RL
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