Our year-end coverage continues with a look at the best performances of 2024. Rather than divide categories into supporting or lead or by gender, we’ve written about our 30 favorites, period. (Well: a few more, if you add some groupings we couldn’t leave out.) Find our countdown below and start watching the ones you’ve missed here and here.
30. Deragh Campbell and Matt Johnson (Matt and Mara)
It isn’t Deragh Campbell or Matt Johnson taken individually that make Kazik Radwanski’s not-quite-romance Matt and Mara so special; it’s what’s between them. Campbell and Johnson spark in their improvised conversations and gaze at each other with sparkling eyes and unfurrowed brows––the comfort of innate feelings, perhaps. They’re believable friends on screen because they are so off-screen, drawing upon their real-life relationships and experiences to capture something present and resonant. What impresses is just how richly they portray emotional truths buried beneath a well-performed surface. In unguarded moments, glimmers shine through the cracks. The longer we stare at Matt and Mara, the more we see our own hearts reflected back at us. – Blake S.
29. Colin Burgess (Free Time and Dad & Step-Dad)
The increasingly bleak landscape for Hollywood’s comedy output yields one positive result: worthy indie talent playing in the genre have less competition to breakthrough. And the year’s two funniest films have one thing in common: a lead performance from Colin Burgess. In Ryan Martin Brown’s feature debut Free Time, he gives a beautifully articulated performance of neurotic self-sabotage while navigating the trials and tribulations of twenty-something waywardness. With Dad & Step-Dad, his self-deprecating, character-driven style of humor shines, playing the title character alongside Anthony Oberbeck. Both are vying for the attention of their son/step-son, hitting each comedic beat perfectly in a hysterical battle of one-upmanship wrapped in ego and fatherhood. – Jordan R.
28. Aaron Pierre (Rebel Ridge)
After a smaller part in Barry Jenkins’ The Underground Railroad, Aaron Pierre broke into the mainstream this year with Jeremy Saulnier’s Rebel Ridge. While Saulnier’s previous films centralized characters ill-equipped to handle the violent situations they are placed in, Pierre’s Terry is the opposite. A former marine caught up in small-town police corruption, Terry has a stoicism initially played up as they attempt to outmaneuver the cops. But as the film progresses, Terry gets closer to the people in the town and starts breaking his own rules, revealing a humanity that’s been lurking under the surface. It’s a performance that, at first glance, feels one note but gradually shades in during the film, revealing a young actor who can subtly convey both confidence and compassion. – Christian G.
27. Mutsuo Yoshioka (Chime)
With his calculated and detached style, performances in the films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa can often go overlooked––even more so when they aren’t feature-length and get a puzzling NFT-esque release. Such is the sad fate for Chime, his 45-minute chiller that premiered at Berlinale earlier this year and was released digitally worldwide soon after. In an unnerving performance, Mutsuo Yoshioka matches the pervasive sense of dread hanging over each frame. As his chef character Matsuoka succumbs to an unshakable terror, Yoshioka’s chilling stillness transforms into something more menacing. It’s masterclass in mood, and Kurosawa found the perfect vessel in Matsuoka to convey the unsettling horror. – Jordan R.
26. Nicholas Hoult (Juror #2, Nosferatu, and The Order)
Widely introduced to audiences at the age of 11 in About a Boy, and impressing in the likes of Mad Max: Fury Road and The Favourite since, Nicholas Hoult’s had arguably his most major year yet. Alongside formidable genre outings with Nosferatu and The Order, Hoult delivers the performance of his career in Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2. Thanks to the legendary director’s laidback style, Hoult is given opportunity to command the camera, letting his anxious guilt flow through every frame, reaching a powerful crescendo in a confrontation by his wife (Zoey Deutch) as his character’s mounting shame is perfectly embodied in a sweaty, silent, and nervous demeanor. It’s a remarkable feat of performance. – Jordan R.
25. Julianne Nicholson (Janet Planet)
When character actors arrive at a certain age, they begin getting cast in thankless parental roles, and it’s to Julianne Nicholson’s eternal credit that no two feel the same. A couple of years back you could have seen her as Marilyn Monroe’s damaged mother (Blonde) or a heightened parody of that same trope (Weird: The Al Yankovic Story) and not immediately recognized she was responsible for both performances. Thankfully, with her turn in Annie Baker’s directorial debut Janet Planet, there’s no need to applaud Nicholson for breathing life into a one-note character, getting the leading showcase she’s long needed, and at an intimate register to which her recent projects haven’t catered. It isn’t just because we’re viewing Janet through the eyes of her 11-year-old daughter, her perception changing over the course of a year, that renders her turn here one of the year’s richest. From any vantage, Nicholson has crafted one of the most intelligent articulations of single motherhood, balancing duties at home with an unfulfilled romantic life without running the risk of making the audience see her within the same idealized light as her screen daughter. – Alistair R.
24. The Cast of Ghostlight
It shouldn’t be surprising that the fictional Muller family at the heart of Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s Ghostlight is played by an actual, real-life family. As a small-town construction worker, a closed-off wife, and a rebellious teenager, Keith Kupferer, Tara Mallen, and Katherine Mallen Kupferer, respectively, convey the kind of interconnected, antagonistic, emotionally charged dynamic that comes from years of living together. That’s not taking anything away from their performances (translating that shared history on screen is an impressive feat in itself), which grapple with trauma and work in hesitant harmony with Dolly De Leon (as a prickly, spirited theater director) and the rest of her diverse theater troupe––cathartic supports for a blue-collar unit coming to terms with a devastating loss. – Jake K.
23. Vera Drew (The People’s Joker)
There are few performances this year more earnest, or more revealing about their creator, than Vera Drew’s lead turn in The People’s Joker. This mix of rawness and deeply uncool sincerity is to be expected from a personal essay that frames Drew’s own trans self-actualization within the context of Joel Schumacher’s Batman efforts, the semi-autobiographical never getting lost beneath her hyper-stylized take on Gotham. In this milieu, Drew’s performance should read as arch––more of a commentary on and deliberate subversion of the Clown Prince of Crime than a fully fleshed-out character in her own right––but instead she literalizes tropes of the queer-coded villain without straying from what has made the Joker resonate for nearly a century. It’s the work of a fan desperate to see herself reflected onscreen, discovering a kinship with the least-likely source. Through this process, Drew has become the first live-action performer since Jack Nicholson to truly understand what makes this character function as a tragi-comic figure. – Alistair R.
22. Juliette Gariépy (Red Rooms)
“Who the fuck is this person” can be uttered in the complimentary or pejorative. It was almost instantaneous that Juliette Gariépy engendered the question, her affect perfectly matching Red Rooms’ ominous hum. A great turn of physical force––the severity of modeling and violence of a workout conveyed with aplomb––just as it’s pure-blooded face acting. – Nick N.
21. Jason Schwartzman (Between the Temples, Queer, Megalopolis)
When I was lucky enough to interview Schwartzman this summer I offered the suggestion he’s America’s Jean-Pierre Léaud, a compliment the actor, ever humble, kindly refuted. It’s nevertheless impossible not to consider time’s march watching this former youthful avatar morph into credibly defeated middle age in Between the Temples, a role so suited to his strengths you wonder what lead performances we’ve missed. If a role as Jason Zanderz in his uncle’s Megalopolis is smaller, every moment he’s onscreen provokes a smile. And disparate though these performances may seem, consider that, whether teaching Hebrew or announcing the imminent destruction of New Rome, Schwartzman holds hands to hips the exact same way. In Queer he becomes an unlikely pitter-patter partner for Daniel Craig’s William S. Burroughs incarnation, his tight clothes and bushy beard suggesting a life lived outside that film’s margins of psychedelic romance. – Nick N.
20. Fernanda Torres (I’m Still Here)
As strong as Nicole Kidman’s turn might’ve been in Babygirl, the real Volpi Cup standout in Venice’s 2024 competition was I’m Still Here’s Fernanda Torres. The Brazilian veteran––best known for her Best Actress win at Cannes in 1986 for Arnaldo Jabor’s Love Me Forever or Never––carries the weight of the world on her shoulders in the rare matriarchal lead role, this one fashioned for the strongest of heart. In Walter Salles’ true story, we witness Torres’s Eunice Pava hold her family together through decades of family trauma, all stemming from a cruel inciting incident of political violence wrought in 1971 Brazil. It’s a remarkable enough performance to spring Torres into a whole new chapter of an already vivacious career. – Luke H.
19. Kieran Culkin (A Real Pain)
Casting Kieran Culkin as an abrasive, wayward family member straight after his Emmy-winning run on Succession sounds like typecasting at its most uninspired. Fortunately, Jesse Eisenberg––the writer / director / co-lead of A Real Pain––had never seen the HBO hit, allowing Culkin the chance to frequently disarm his fellow star in how he could mine outrageous laughs and pathos, often in the space of one scene, via an emotional volatility not a million miles from Roman Roy. However, despite some similarities on the page, this doesn’t feel like a cinematic retread of an accomplished small-screen performance; his turn as Benji Kaplan is more devastating when suppressed trauma is far more visible on the surface to everyone in orbit. – Alistair R.
18. Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore (The Room Next Door)
Over the last decade, Pedro Almodóvar has been ruminating on mortality through characters facing artistic and personal reinvention (Antonio Banderas famously played a version of the filmmaker in the mournful Pain and Glory). In The Room Next Door, Almodóvar explores the dichotomy between fiction and non-fiction by having Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton play writer friends facing an imminent finale, as one is dying of cancer. Like cells split from the same melancholy core, the earthy Moore and ethereal Swinton allow Almodóvar to deliver his own Persona as women reflecting back what the other can’t see. – Jose S.
17. Isabelle Huppert (A Traveler’s Needs)
Isabelle Huppert has one of the most diverse filmographies of any actress in history and her three collaborations with Hong Sangsoo, including this year’s A Traveler’s Needs, see her in three different modes that compliment the settings of the stories. Her adapting to both the pared-down style of Hong as well as the language barrier of conversation that sits at the center of nearly every scene works in creating a subtle feelings of frustration and longing that fill the film’s core. – Soham G.
16. Lily Rose-Depp and Bill Skarsgard (Nosferatu)
Exuding both tenderness and fierceness, Lily Rose-Depp’s performance is the beating, bruised heart of Nosferatu. Fueled by a morbid fascination with death as Ellen telepathically connects with Orlok, Depp’s physicality in portraying these fits and spasms––eyes rolling into the back of her head, limbs contorting, and Orlok’s menacing voice pouring through her mouth––is otherworldly in execution. In a film meant to exude a cold, chilling effect, Depp brings the most entrancing sensations of doom across the impressive ensemble. The less revealed about Bill Skarsgård’s performance the better, but his heavy-breathing take on the lucifugous legend is so imposing and unrecognizable that I’d watch an entire documentary about how it came into being. – Jordan R.
15. Glen Powell and Adria Arjona (Hit Man)
Glen Powell’s defining, star-cementing performance came through a film that risked invisibility as the year went on due to the odd nature of global Netflix accessibility, where new content is instantly pushed down its feed. As many have said, Powell and his co-lead Adria Arjona’s turns register even better seen with an audience; at my festival screening last year, you could feel the crowd giddy sharing the space with their magnetic onscreen charisma, and aware of how other Hollywood stars lack it. – David K.
14. Lily Collias (Good One)
One of this year’s definitive “star is born” performances comes from Lily Collias in India Donaldson’s debut feature. Not quite a “coming-of-age” story, Good One is more a “coming-to-terms”, as Collias’ Sam learns on a hiking trip with her father (James Le Gros) and his longtime friend (Danny McCarthy) the kinds of misbehavior men with allow their pals to get away with. Collias and Donaldson are a remarkable pairing, both understanding the power in silence, the star’s face holding more complex feeling than any monologue could express. Through sheer performance, we experience how her fondness and empathy towards these two men develops through awkward moments and deeper conversations, and the quiet devastation when that growing trust is betrayed. – Mitchell B.
13. Colman Domingo and Clarence Maclin (Sing Sing)
In one of many memorable moments in Sing Sing, John Whitfield (Colman Domingo) finally swallows his pride and concedes the sole dramatic role in the prison theater program’s new play to Divine Eye (Clarence Maclin), trying to downplay any form of rivalry. It’s an act free of ego which best reflects Domingo’s own approach, allowing the wider ensemble––most of whom are unprofessional actors playing lightly fictionalized versions of themselves––the chance to seize the limelight from him wherever possible. Sing Sing may be attuned to the harsh administrative realities of prison, but it functions most powerfully as an exploration of artistic collaboration, with this metatextual framing only adding to its richness. – Alistair R.
12. Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, and Elizabeth Olsen (His Three Daughters)
Held almost entirely to one humdrum apartment amidst mundane, deeply relatable family turmoil, Azazel Jacobs’ New York-set sibling dramedy has all the makings of a forgettable star-studded indie. It’s anything but: His Three Daughters will sit with you longer than most films from 2024 thanks to Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, and Elizabeth Olsen, who refuse to let a single minute of the film fall into archetypal dullness. As their father lives out his final days on his deathbed in the backroom, Katie, Rachel, and Christina navigate their complex sisterhood with equal-parts hilarity, heart, and searing trauma, each a wildly different character than the other, all somehow impossibly suggesting real biological sisters. – Luke H.
11. Léa Drucker (Last Summer)
When I saw Catherine Breillat’s return to form at Cannes 2023, I thought the shock would fade, as so many cinematic experiences do. I thought the film was more of a provocation spectacle than anything else, albeit a juicy one. 18 months later, Léa Drucker’s contrite orgasmic gaze is still branded on my brain. The French veteran’s electrifying, shame-ridden turn as a woman who develops an affair with her underage, repulsive bad boy stepson marks, quite simply, one of the decade’s finest performances. As if that isn’t enough, Drucker’s Anne works as a successful lawyer who represents child victims of sexual assault, the layers between the character’s work, existential motivations, and guiding ethics––a rich mélange of deliciously fucked-up drama––never fully excavated the way they might be in a Hollywood version of the same story, Breillat having always understood the cinematic strength in dwelling on inexplicable ambiguity and human depravity. – Luke H.
10. Ilinca Manolache (Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World)
Workers across the world are seeing no real-term pay increases, if they’re lucky enough to have stable work at all, so it’s little surprise that “quiet quitting”––doing nothing beyond the bare minimum required by your superiors––has become the buzzword for a generation unlikely to ever get a raise alongside their promotions. Angela, Ilinca Manolache’s motor-mouthed protagonist in Radu Jude’s late-capitalism satire, is cinema’s poster-girl for the Quiet Quitting movement, and despite her own dreadful gig-economy working conditions, the actress manages to make the character feel more aspirational than tragic. Unburdened by the idea of ever having secure employment, she fights off sleep deprivation via crude, Andrew Tate-parodying TikTok videos, all of which are a middle finger to the LinkedIn-era idea of boasting about workplace accomplishments. Her lack of decorum is the only respectable way to behave in an inhumane capitalist system. When the world is burning, why should we care about making the right impression to climb the career ladder? – Alistair R.
9. Kani Kusruti (All We Imagine as Light and Girls Will Be Girls)
Kani Kusruti’s performances this year have both exhibited quiet foreboding. The soft, weary eyes of Prabha in All We Imagine as Light and Anila in Girls Will Be Girls accentuate their troubled, worn-down nature. Kusruti’s voice is so perfectly suited to represent the state of the modern middle-class Indian woman––in both films she finds herself in the crosshairs of a traditionalist society that’s confronted with the vulnerabilities of passion and sex, which women are discouraged from expressing. Through her characters, she effectively bears the burden of these conflicts. – Soham G.
8. The Cast of Nickel Boys
If they gave an Oscar for Best Ensemble, this would be your front runner. RaMell Ross’ stylistically daring Nickel Boys tells the story of a group of Black boys wrongly imprisoned in a juvenile correctional institution where they’re regularly abused by a racist staff. In first-person we see most of the film from the lead Elwood’s perspective, played wonderfully in three phases by Ethan Cole Sharp, Ethan Herisse, and Daveed Diggs. Brandon Wilson is terrific as Turner, Elwood’s best friend at the facility. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor plays Elwood’s endlessly worried and doting grandmother with courage. Hamish Linklater is rage-inducing as one of the institution’s strictest enforcers. Even Fred Hechinger, who’s had an explosive past year, sneaks in a soft, sinister performance worth remembering. – Luke H.
7. Sebastian Stan and Adam Pearson (A Different Man)
Let 2024 be the defining statement on Sebastian Stan as the greatest success story to emerge from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Accolades came as well for his portrayal of Donald Trump in The Apprentice, but his coup de grace is undoubtedly A Different Man. Channeling Rock Hudson in John Frankenheimer’s Seconds, Stan subverts the chilly plastique of his conventionally good looks in capturing Edward, a man whose tortured inside can’t be fixed by a facelift. He’s paired brilliantly with Adam Pearson, playing a man whose disfigurement resembles Edward’s former self, yet is filled with a verve for life and infectious, almost maddening confidence that Edward could never achieve. – Mitchell B.
6. Adrien Brody (The Brutalist)
The impact of Adrien Brody’s performance as László Tóth centers on the surprise and novelty of him being the focal point of an ensemble again, two decades after he gained an early-career Oscar for The Pianist, no guaranteed road to comfortable endurance in the industry. Still, the key to his acting as the Hungarian emigré architect combines immersion––believing uncannily, from the finely tuned accent down, that he was “that guy”––and emotional weight: his striving to be a fitting brick in the towering wall of his new home. – David K.
5. Mikey Madison and Yura Borisov (Anora)
The ways in which Mikey Madison and Yura Borisov elevate familiar character archetypes has gone under-discussed in conversations about Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner. The “hooker with a heart of gold” and stern, silent, Russian mafioso are clichés bordering upon the offensive, and both actors reinvent them for the age of the gig economy in ways that complement––and complicate––each other perfectly, the younger fighting for a life which doesn’t require living paycheck to paycheck, the older resigned to a way of living where nobody even remembers when it’s your birthday. Madison and Borisov are perfectly paired as a comic odd couple, but placing them within a merciless capitalist ecosystem elevates their contrasting comedic temperaments to another level entirely. – Alistair R.
4. Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine (I Saw the TV Glow)
Impenetrable for some, soul-searingly identifiable for others, Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine’s performances in Jane Schoenbrun’s distressing dysphoria mixtape are atypical and affected with a purpose. Smith’s flat, cracking cadence aches with a strain that can’t quite break through. Lundy-Paine is simultaneously startlingly present and ghostlike, outside of themselves. Schoenbrun’s fiction features have been guided by remarkably controlled, restrained, atmospheric performances, especially in the spoken word. Both actors here ensure that I Saw The TV Glow maintains its tightened chest and held breath, such that the few bursts of catharsis provided in physical contact with the self and with each other are enough to crack you wide open. – Blake S.
3. Léa Seydoux and George MacKay (The Beast)
Writing in anticipation of The Beast some two years ago, I anticipated Léa Seydoux would equip herself just fine with three different characters but suggested the presence of George MacKay, lesser-tested than the French icon, “raises questions.” While not too doubtful, just the implication of doubt has, I am happy to say, aged terribly. Each constitutes a performance to define the last couple years, yet only improves the other. The Beast’s final moments strongly suggest timelines, romances, and tragedies the film will otherwise leave to our imagination; Seydoux and MacKay make them fun to imagine, impossible to capture. – Nick N.
2. Josh Hartnett (Trap)
Hard-edged, cold-toned, unnervingly funny, Trap couches emotional detail in its return-of-sorts for Josh Hartnett, an actor onto whom nearly anybody born between 1980 and 1995 can project endearing memories. Such are the associations he and Shyamalan twist like a corkscrew: his genial good looks playing a credible mask, his characteristically stiff onscreen comportment enlivening this character’s sociopathy and nefarious masterminding, and Hartnett folding a Shake Shack napkin as assuredly as Cooper plunges his thumbs into a victim’s eyes. – Nick N.
1. Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Hard Truths)
It’s mind-numbing to imagine how Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s performance fell flat on programmers for Cannes, Venice, and Telluride, from which Hard Truths was rejected. As if the Mike Leigh of the film wasn’t enough to get it top festival competition consideration, Jean-Baptiste’s performance as Pansy––a suburban-locked modern mother whose extreme agoraphobia, germaphobia, and anthrophobia has rendered her a communal antagonizer overflowing with (self-)righteous indignation who can’t help bursting into tirades from sun-up to sun-down––should’ve made the film a shoo-in. In no uncertain terms, Jean-Baptiste is Hard Truths, the fire that burns at its core that you can’t stop staring at, a transfixing realist contradiction of a character that, as unbecoming and easy for us to condemn as she is, reflects a bitter inner self that rages inside many and can sink any of us if we let it. – Luke H.
Honorable Mentions
- Pierrette Aboheu (Mambar Pierrette)
- Joanna Arnow (The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed)
- Pamela Anderson and Dave Bautista (The Last Showgirl)
- Jason Bateman (Carry-On)
- Autumn Best (Woman of the Hour)
- Paul Bettany (Here)
- Esteban Bigliardi (The Practice)
- Tom Burke (Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga)
- Daniel Craig (Queer)
- The Cast of Conclave
- John Early (Stress Positions)
- André Holland (Exhibiting Forgiveness)
- Moses Ingram (The End)
- Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn (Daddio)
- Carol Kane (Between the Temples)
- Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson (Babygirl)
- Lily Gladstone (Fancy Dance)
- Stefan Gota and Liyo Gong (Here)
- Ariana Grande (Wicked: Part I)
- Hugh Grant (Heretic)
- Anne Hathaway (The Idea of You)
- Gabriel LaBelle (Snack Shack)
- Jude Law (The Order)
- James Madio (The Featherweight)
- Mia McKenna-Bruce (How to Have Sex)
- Cillian Murphy (Small Things Like These)
- Atibon Nazaire (Mountains)
- Josh O’Connor (Challengers)
- Katy O’Brian (Love Lies Bleeding)
- Hitoshi Omika (Evil Does Not Exist)
- Guy Pearce (The Brutalist)
- Aubrey Plaza (Megalopolis and My Old Ass)
- Charlie Plummer and Eve Lindley (National Anthem)
- Saoirse Ronan (The Outrun and Blitz)
- Manolo Solo and Jose Coronado (Close Your Eyes)
- June Squibb (Thelma)
- Maisy Stella (My Old Ass)
- Denzel Washington and Fred Hechinger (Gladiator II)