The best cinematic performances don’t share some standard of craft or technique; what they have in common is a feeling of invention and discovery, of emotional depth and power, and a sense of self-consciousness regarding the idea and the art of performance itself. They also reflect broader transformations in the art of cinema during their times. Such actors as Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, and Jimmy Stewart were already stars in the high studio era of the nineteen-thirties, but their work became more freely expressive, more galvanic, in the postwar years, when the studios lost their tight grip on production—and when a new generation of directors made their mark in that freer environment. The French New Wave, developing new techniques with a new generation of actors (and crew), lifted layers of varnish from the art of acting to fill the screen with performances of jolting immediacy, spontaneity, and vulnerability.
The film performances of the beginning of the twenty-first century are a product of the drastic transformations that have taken place in moviemaking in recent decades, as a new generation of directors, both in Hollywood and outside of it, has managed to invent modes of moviemaking capable of adapting to unprecedented crises in the industry. The competition from television (“prestige” or otherwise), the top-heavy expansion of blockbuster franchises, and the rise of streaming platforms have led to a decline in studio movie production. As a result, independent producers have grown significantly in prominence and power, and their financing has had a liberating effect on directors, and, by extension, on actors: working largely with modest budgets (yet occasionally with larger ones than studios would provide), filmmakers have been able to take greater risks and make more unusual films—and to develop new methods of performance with actors whose artistry closely fits their own.
Equally relevant is the ready availability of inexpensive yet (relatively) high-definition video, which has helped to democratize filmmaking, putting the power of image-making into the hands both of young directors starting out and of experienced ones changing course. The ultra-low-budget filmmakers lumped together as mumblecore rebuilt acting from the ground up, working with locals and friends, borrowing the manner and tone of personal documentaries, home videos, and YouTubers—and developing new styles on the basis of the people whose personalities they revealed and spotlighted, such as Greta Gerwig, Helena Howard, and Adam Driver, all of whom displayed astonishing new emotional range and realms. (The rapidity of changes in American film production, and of independents’ response to them, is part of why my list features predominantly actors in American movies.)
Too often, actors are praised for their “craft,” a virtuosic perfection that suggests study, displays effort, and fits roles appropriately and plausibly. The great performances are distinguished by a frame-breaking emotional immediacy (whether explosive or implosive)—and, moreover, by the ways that they express not only emotions but personal and original ideas. For that reason, it’s no surprise that the new century’s best performances are, for the most part, found in films directed by the most original directors of the time. Of course, directors don’t literally create actors any more than they create the streets or the skies that they film. But they do create the conditions that inspire actors to do their most audacious work—and my No. 1 pick on this list is a prime example.
That’s why, despite my unmitigated enthusiasm for all of the performances cited here, this list is tinged with mourning for all of the films that never got made and roles that never got played. Many of the most original filmmakers of the eighties and nineties—often female and nonwhite filmmakers, including Julie Dash, Zeinabu irene Davis, Wendell B. Harris, Jr., Jan Oxenberg, Rachel Amodeo, and Leslie Harris, as well as ones from earlier years, such as Juleen Compton, Fronza Woods, and, yes, Elaine May—might have thrived in this new setting, but instead had their careers stifled or truncated. As a result, generations of actors had fewer opportunities to develop their art and their careers. The cinema is poorer and weaker for it. But the rise of a new, diverse, active, and daringly original generation of directors—with the backing of independent producers and even of streaming services—holds promise for generations of actors to come.
30. Shakib Ben Omar, “You All Are Captains”
Oliver Laxe’s first feature, about a French film teacher in a school in Tangiers, is graced with a presence—a man in the town (played by Ben Omar, a nonprofessional actor whom Laxe met there and recruited for the shoot) whose voice and manner suffuse the film and seemingly illuminate even when he’s offscreen. The role is a supporting one (though very prominent in the action, involving the students’ effort to make a film), but Omar’s assertive charisma, a kind of secular sainthood, a holy innocence that comes with an extreme and uncompromising knowingness, is both memorable in itself and exemplary of an age of cinema that discovers people rather than performance and approaches the art without preconception.
29. Samantha Robinson, “The Love Witch”
The aesthetic ideas that Anna Biller conveys in this outrageously decorative, tonally ambiguous horror film about a glamorous and murderous witch who preys on men she desires—the truth that comes from artifice, the authentic experience embodied in style—would have been unrealizable without Robinson’s channeling of the tones, moods, manners, and mannerisms of nineteen-sixties movies. In her first major movie role, she plays the image of an image and—with a blend of fierce intention, thoughtful control, and natural energy—gives it solidity and strength, physical command and ethereal wonder.
28. Jesse Eisenberg, “The Social Network”
In the role of Mark Zuckerberg as a Harvard man-boy bringing Facebook to fruition, Eisenberg was so good and so apt at playing an “asshole”—the script’s word, not mine—that he became, instantly, the John Wayne of assholishness. (Reminder: Wayne wasn’t a real-life cowboy.) Eisenberg conveys the wonder of the emotionally stunted genius’s mental power and blank determination, pulling the movie out of the realm of satire and suggesting something strange and true about the vision behind the blind course of history. Whether Eisenberg has another kind of character in him is irrelevant; what matters is whether he has the filmmakers to pursue the kinds of subjects that make use of his distinctive art.
27. Jafar Panahi, “Taxi”
When the Iranian director Jafar Panahi, a supporter of the country’s political opposition, was given the draconian sentence, in 2010, of a twenty-year ban on filmmaking and placed under house arrest, he nonetheless continued to make films, now clandestinely and in isolation. In the most accomplished and complex of them, “Taxi,” from 2015, he isolates himself within the confines of a car and portrays himself as a cab driver in Tehran (though his fares are staged meetings with friends, associates, and family), with his camera fixed to the dashboard in the guise of a security measure. In his calmly passionate skepticism, wide-ranging curiosity, and cinema-centric imagination, he both plays and embodies the principled defiance of a reasonable and practical artist thrust by circumstances into radical action. With a definitive existential daring, as he reveals, in his urban journeys, the ambient pressure and open threats that the regime poses to its subjects’ freedom and safety. His presence—his performance as himself in a guise that he’d never sought—plays like a fusion of Hitchcock and Solzhenitsyn.
26. Kristen Wiig, “Welcome to Me”
The spirit of Jerry Lewis hovers over the modern cinema—his guileless good will that veers ineluctably into catastrophe offers a model of surprisingly tragic complexity for an era that values innocence. Wiig’s comedic art captures that spirit, joining a tone of lightness and purity to raging psychological turmoil. In “Welcome to Me,” the story of a woman who’s obsessed with infomercials—with one in particular—and manages to become the star of her own public-access program, Wiig blithely reveals and dramatizes her lifetime of pain and frustration as well as her fantasies of redemption.
25. Kim Min-hee, “On the Beach at Night Alone”
A new kind of acting for a new kind of movie: in the carefully composed yet conspicuously spontaneous dramas of the South Korean director Hong Sang-soo, Kim is both forceful and breezy, lyrical and emotionally scourging. In this film—which is inspired by a real-life public scandal resulting from Kim and Hong’s romantic relationship—Kim presents the painful tangle of love, friendship, and professional relationships with pugnacious and confrontational assertions that seem wrenched from deep within; it’s a performance of compact power and terrifying vulnerability.
24. Tiffany Haddish, “Girls Trip”
The comedic revolution launched by Judd Apatow unleashed a generation of great improvisers (and pushed lesser ones to the fore as well). Among the greatest of them is Tiffany Haddish, who in “Girls Trip” virtually bursts through the screen. Her performance gives the impression that she’s speaking her mind with a candor that seems continuous with life offscreen. That’s why she’s even more of an intrinsic dramatic actor than most comedians (and they all are—see “The Kitchen”): where most comedians, even improvising, appear to create a persona, Haddish imbues her work with the force of her own experience. If the seventeen-minute speech that she gave at the New York Film Critics Circle banquet in 2018 had been released as a film, it would have made my list, too. Both it and her performance in “Girls Trip,” as great as they are, only hint at the power of her inventive imagination.
23. Sandi Tan, “Shirkers”
One of the lost treasures of film history came back like a phantom in “Shirkers,” Tan’s documentary about the making and vanishing of an independent feature that she’d co-conceived, co-written, co-produced, and starred in, in her native Singapore, during the summer she turned nineteen. The film-within-a-film is a science-fiction fantasy of inspired whimsy that’s also, in itself, a personal documentary about the Singapore of Tan’s own experience and passion—and the teen-age Tan’s performance in it, quizzical and puckish, fearless and tender, is matched by the investigative, reminiscent, searching and self-searching presence of Tan today, who, more than twenty years after that shoot, pursues the mystery of her film’s disappearance, and the man—the original film’s director—who stole it.
