For a person who loves movies, there are few things more satisfying than a performance that really takes you by surprise. Maybe it’s an actor or actress you’d previously dismissed, surpassing what had once seemed like their limitations. Maybe it’s a veteran movie star rediscovering their fastball. Maybe it’s someone completely new to you announcing their presence in spectacular fashion. The movie industry spent this year shaking off the dust of the 2023 strikes, grappling with existential threats like AI, and trying to figure out just what audiences even want out of movies anymore. But there’s still no substitute for the experience of watching an actor crawl into the skin of another person and take them out for a spin.
If you buy into the idea that the best movies reflect our world back to us, then the best film performances of 2024 showed us how deep our anger runs, how scarred we are by grief, and how resilient we can be. They were alternately eager and scared to peek behind the curtain at what might be forbidden: sex, money, a new face, a wizard. Some brought their star power to bear on grandiose characters, letting audiences delight in their unrestrained peacocking. Others played people retreating into themselves to escape pain or rejection. Others had their sights on a fat diamond ring.
The following 17 performances represent a fascinating year for the movies. They come from big, brassy blockbusters, as well as smaller festival acquisitions, and range from political histories to body horror to family dramedies. Every one of them is liable to give you goose bumps or knock your shoulders back.
Presented in alphabetical order
Adrien Brody, The Brutalist
The 20-plus years between Brody’s Best Actor win for The Pianist and what may well be his second crack at an Oscar have only enhanced his ability to carry the weight of history and struggle on his shoulders. As László Tóth, a visionary architect who flees Hungary during the Nazi occupation and settles in Philadelphia, Brody plays a genuine talent besieged by anti-immigrant hatred and internal torment over everything from his marriage to his eventual drug addiction. In an industry often dazzled by jacked-up superhero bodies, Brody has always had one of cinema’s most fascinating faces, all haunted recesses and pleading eyes. Through László’s swift rise and fall, director Brady Corbet weaponizes that face to slash through America’s “land of opportunity†myths. All the while, Brody’s gaze and posture hold intensely on to every last drop of hope in his character’s body.
Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain
In my seasons-long struggle not to become overly sympathetic to Succession’s Roman Roy, it was always Kieran Culkin’s inner core of vulnerability that threatened my resolve. With Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, Culkin pivots to a character who’s repressing his pain just as desperately but masks it with a life-of-the-tour-group energy that is both endearing and exhausting. There’s nothing more thrilling than seeing a talented actor get the film role he’s been waiting for, and this one fits Culkin like a glove. He pulls out an array of small gestures and inflections that make us lean in ever so slightly, anticipating the moment when all that grief catches up with him. Eisenberg hands Culkin a scene of Big Emotion toward the film’s end, and while it ends up feeling unnecessary, Culkin knocks that one out too.
Danielle Deadwyler, The Piano Lesson
There are many ghosts in Malcolm Washington’s adaptation of this August Wilson play. Ghosts in the walls, in the intricately crafted upright piano that is the birthright of siblings Berniece and Boy Willie Charles, in the stories of family lore they tell. Deadwyler’s Berniece is particularly attuned to these ghosts, but they’re not the only specters taking up space in her house. Deadwyler has spent the past several years playing an androgynous gunslinger in The Harder They Fall, a remainder at the end of the world in Station Eleven, a grieving but resolute mother in Till. In The Piano Lesson, she gathers up all that grit, sorrow, and regret into something bigger than her body somehow. Her eyes widen, her spine stiffens. Deadwyler’s Berniece takes on the maternal legacy of her family and ends up being the only person who can shelter them all from the past.
Ariana Grande, Wicked
With very few exceptions, I’ve never gotten the whole Ariana Grande thing (“Into You†rules — I’m a hater, I’m not dead), and everything leading up to the Wicked movie, from the fan-art-esque first-look imagery to the garish trailers, felt chintzy and ill-conceived. What a delightful surprise to find out that I was especially wrong about Grande’s performance as Galinda, one of the most aggressively upbeat triumphs of theater-kid pep this side of Harold Hill’s 76 trombones. With a chirping vocal register that pays just the right amount of homage to Kristin Chenoweth, who originated the role on Broadway, and hair-flips deployed like Sideshow Bob rake gags, Grande approaches her character’s obliviousness as intelligently as anyone in Barbie did last year. She whisks us away in a little pink tornado of pure comedy.
Chris Hemsworth, Furiosa
If Ariana Grande’s girliness in Wicked is on one end of a spectrum, then Chris Hemsworth’s burlesque of postapocalyptic macho showmanship in Furiosa is on the other. Sporting a prosthetic nose and teeth, a mountain-man beard, and enough powdered dye to sponsor a charity fun run, Hemsworth peacocks around the wastelands, giving Furiosa the kind of over-the-top pageantry and aggression it needed more of to live up to its predecessor, Fury Road. We’ve seen Hemsworth set Thor aside to play against type before (he’s a scream in Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters), but the thrill of his performance in George Miller’s sequel is how hard he steers Dementus into high-concept action comedy. It’s so satisfying.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Hard Truths
Plenty of 2024 movies were of the mind that the only way to respond to a world gone mad is with more madness. But in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, we’re presented with a woman who responds to a world gone mad with preemptive rage. Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy as a woman at war, who every day wakes up and battles the rude, stupid, inconsiderate, lazy, overly helpful, insufficiently helpful, condescending, and just plain irksome people who are unlucky enough to cross her path. This includes — and is perhaps particularly targeted at — her own family. Jean-Baptiste, who earned an Oscar nomination for Leigh’s Secrets and Lies 28 years ago, is relentlessly funny and ferociously mean before she and Leigh finally give the audience a window into her character’s pain. It’s in these moments that you realize that no performance this year has hit a raw societal nerve as effectively as Marianne’s has.
Nicole Kidman, Babygirl
Just when you thought that Nicole Kidman had downshifted into AMC pre-roll ads and TV miniseries set in enviable coastal enclaves, she roars back with a reminder that there are few actresses as fearless or as eager to take on a challenge. In Babygirl, the 57-year-old Oscar winner plays Romy, a CEO who’s grown bored of the hollow demands of girlbossing, and finds her spark by playing the submissive to her dominant young intern. In a film that keeps impishly poking at our various dogmas about sex and power, Kidman’s reckless, raw, and often disarmingly funny performance keeps the story from spinning off into something more lurid or absurd. Kidman’s work in Babygirl recalls the confrontational verve she brought to Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, the compelling interiority she showed in Jonathan Glazer’s Birth, and the vulnerability of her earliest roles in movies like Dead Calm and Malice. As unlikely as it seems, Babygirl often feels like the movie Kidman’s been building toward for nearly 40 years.
Mikey Madison, Anora
For those who mostly knew Mikey Madison as the Better Things daughter who went on to play murderers who get lit on fire in two consecutive films, Anora was quite the splash of cold water. She plays the film’s title character, a stripper who finds herself in an ersatz romance with a Russian oligarch fuckboy. Ani is hard as nails, and her combativeness provides much of the film’s comedy, but she’s also unable to resist the fantasy of a rich boy who worships her and who comes to rescue her from her lowly circumstances. Madison is able to sell this contradiction by doubling down on Ani’s pugnaciousness, creating a character who is all razorblades and heartbreak.
Demi Moore, The Substance
Perhaps the least predictable development of 2024 was Demi Moore roaring back with one of the year’s most talked-about performances. The role of Elisabeth Sparkle, a faded Hollywood star who turns to an experimental injectable in order to recapture her youth and beauty, would have resonated with a lot of actresses, but watching Moore tear into it in a way she hasn’t for decades was one of the great pleasures of the year in movies. Moore gets at Elisabeth’s rage, but she also never puts out the glimmer of hope that keeps her character chasing impossible ideals of beauty down ever darker hallways. It’s that inextinguishable flicker in her eyes — when her eyes are the only recognizable part of her we can still see — that keeps the movie emotionally legible through its goopy, bonkers finale.
Cillian Murphy, Small Things Like These
Who’d have expected that just a year after winning the Best Actor Oscar, Cillian Murphy would deliver a performance that supersedes his Oppenheimer turn as the best work in his accomplished career? Murphy plays a coal merchant in 1980s Ireland who finds himself in too-close proximity to one of the infamous Magdalene laundries, where desperate (often pregnant) young women and girls were sent to be “reformed.†What follows is a study in guilt, responsibility, and anguish, all told in ashamed interiority on Murphy’s face. In that way, it’s a performance in concert with his guilt-stricken version of Oppenheimer. He couldn’t have picked a more opportune time to become cinema’s elite bearer of the weight of the world.
Hunter Schafer, Cuckoo
It was a good year for performances in horror movies. Nicolas Cage went for a high-concept ghoul in Longlegs; Hugh Grant reveled in professorial malevolence in Heretic; Naomi Scott unraveled in the face of grinning death in Smile 2. But nothing bested Hunter Schafer’s work as Gretchen, a final girl trying to make it out of a Bavarian resort town alive in Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo. It’s an incredibly demanding performance, both physically (there’s a wiry grit to the way Schafer carries herself) and emotionally. There’s a lot of inventive, terrifying fun in Cuckoo’s avian conceit, but it wouldn’t amount to much without Schafer knocking out scene after heartbreaking scene in which Gretchen grapples with her mother’s death and the displacement she feels with her surviving family. Schafer does the emotional work of connecting the movie’s horror elements with Gretchen’s deeply human story, ultimately doing what all great horror protagonists do — she pulls you right into her nightmare, then fights like hell to survive.
Léa Seydoux, The Beast
In Bertrand Bonello’s softly devastating sci-fi romance, Léa Seydoux plays a futuristic lab employee in a world where AI overlords urge humans to purge their DNA of all imperfections by revisiting their past lives and eliminating strong emotions. (Just go with it and try not to think of Scientology.) As Gabrielle, Seydoux puts her soft features and observant gaze to great use as she revisits a recurring romance with George MacKay’s Louis, with whom she has an easy chemistry that carries the audience through the film’s sometimes heady conceit. In the movie’s final scenes, Bonello hands Seydoux the reins. As her character breaks down in the face of a shattering decision, you finally feel the accumulated weight of all her lives and experiences — an unexpected punch to the gut. There’s nothing like a performance that sneaks up on you, and this one does.
Justice Smith, I Saw the TV Glow
Justice Smith until now has mostly starred in blockbuster fare at the movies (the Jurassic World movies, Detective Pikachu, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves). Good for him (and good for his bank account), but it’s gratifying to see a movie finally make use of his delicate frame and easily abashed face, as I Saw the TV Glow did this year. Director Jane Schoenbrun cast Smith as Owen, a timid young superfan of teen drama The Pink Opaque who is faced with the possibility that both his reality and his identity are not what they seem. So much of this movie depends on Owen opening himself up to the idea of a different way to exist, only to close himself off again. Smith dials into his character’s hope and fear and the desperate war they’re waging inside him. Exploring the vast emotional terrain beneath a surface of timidity is a massive challenge, but Smith is more than up for it.
Sebastian Stan, A Different ManÂ
It’s a bit strange to think that in less than a year’s time, Sebastian Stan will once again don the chrome arm of the Winter Soldier in Marvel’s Thunderbirds, considering how much 2024 felt like the year he emerged from his MCU cocoon and started taking big chances. (How else to describe his turn as Donald Trump in The Apprentice?) Stan spends the first half of A Different Man under a significant amount of prosthetic makeup as a man with neurofibromatosis. The gambit could feel regressive in a less assured film and in the hands of a lesser actor, especially when the plot leads Stan’s character, Edward, to a miracle cure. But by the film’s second half, when Edward encounters a maddeningly well-adjusted mirror version of himself, Stan really starts to cook. As things escalate into a kind of Kafka–by–way–of–Charlie Kaufman comedy, he leans into his character’s frustrations, doubling down on self-destruction again and again. Stan is incredibly funny playing this downward spiral, even as he holds on to Edward’s essential pathos.
Fernanda Torres, I’m Still Here
Walter Salles’s film about a politically involved family enduring Brazil’s descent into military dictatorship in the 1970s feels disquietingly urgent for many reasons, but it wouldn’t hit nearly as hard without the rock-steady performance of Fernanda Torres. Playing real-life activist Eunice Paiva, Torres shows the emotional grind required to stay strong in the face of a government intent on terrorizing her family. She fights back the panic threatening to overtake her character and brings both Eunice and the film to a place of defiant resilience.
Denzel Washington, Gladiator II
“Now Do a Silly Oneâ€: The Movie. Ridley Scott’s long-awaited sequel to his Oscar-winning 2004 epic turned out to be kind of … well, dumb. Gleaming like a diamond in the middle of all the brain-dead rubble was Washington, perhaps the greatest American actor, letting loose in a way we’ve never seen before. As Macrinus, a slave turned power broker in a rapidly devolving Rome, Washington gives a performance on top of a performance. Macrinus cloaks his pre-Machiavellian maneuverings in the pageantry of a fight promoter, and ostentatiously hisses out lines like “That’s politicssssssss.†It is a hoot of a performance — an icon using his unrivaled star power to spin straw into gold.
Daniel Zovatto, Woman of the Hour
Anna Kendrick’s directorial-debut film takes an ambitiously structured approach to telling the story of real-life serial killer Rodney Alcala. The bifurcated story puts Kendrick’s character, a struggling actress who on a whim takes a gig on The Dating Game, on a collision course with Alcala, played with a deeply unsettling affect by Daniel Zovatto. The actor, who’s appeared in films like It Follows and TV shows like Station Eleven, can evince an affable sweetness, then flip a switch into dead-eyed horror. We watch all the humanity drain out of his face like an un-stoppered sink. Kendrick works in some second-level themes (sisterhood, self-reliance) to the story that elevate the film past true-crime grimness, but none of that works without Zovatto’s crouching malevolence.
The Honorable Mentions
The Runners-Up
Don’t ever believe anyone who tells you it’s been a “weak†year for movies or acting. That’s only true if you didn’t seek out movies like A24’s prison drama Sing Sing for deeply soulful performances from Colman Domingo and Clarence Maclin. Or Julianne Nicholson and Zoe Ziegler as a mother and daughter constantly sizing each other up in Janet Planet. Or Austin Butler giving alabaster psychopath in Dune: Part Two.Â
The New (and Old) Movie Stars
It’s easy to say that Hollywood doesn’t produce movie stars anymore, but 2024’s movies helped to redefine what a star turn is. It’s Julio Torres making peculiar sense of the bureaucratic hell of America in Problemista. It’s June Squibb taking on the scammers at age 94 in Thelma. It’s Glen Powell coaching his girlfriend through a Notes-app improv to fool the cops in Hit Man (it’s the Notes app that’s the novel part there).
The Pertinent Ones
The political mood of the nation may be elusive at the moment, but it’s hard not to read urgent political subtext into Amy Adams’s sense of feral rebellion in Nightbitch, Julianne Moore’s determined solidarity in The Room Next Door, and Carolyn Bracken’s righteous vengeance in Oddity. There were more overtly political performances, too, vividly brought to life by Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci as cardinals fighting to see past their own ambition in Conclave, and John Magaro and Peter Sarsgaard as newsmen on the front lines of terrible history in September 5.
The Unbreakable Trios
Here’s to the year’s great cinematic triptychs: Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen, and Natasha Lyonne, individually and collectively exquisite as grieving sisters whose resentments can no longer be restrained in His Three Daughters. Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O’Connor, who embodied the year’s sexual ideal both on the tennis court and in dingy hotel rooms in Challengers. And Mark Eydelshteyn, Karren Karagulian, and Yura Borisov as three pillars of the Russian oligarchy/patriarchy lining up to crush Mikey Madison’s titular protagonist in Anora.
And, of Course, Tilda
The only reason Tilda Swinton isn’t mentioned in the list above is because I couldn’t single out just one of her performances. There were three to choose from: She is a nightmare of learned helplessness in Problemista, she is pure stubbornness in the face of unstoppable demise in The Room Next Door, and her delusional (if tuneful!) hoarding after the fall of civilization in The End was a handy sneak preview of the next few years of American life.