Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: A24, Warner Bros., Paramount, Roadside Attractions/Everett Collection, Logan White/A24
The best films of 2025 are rich with ensembles, with some offering half a dozen performances that feel worthy of year-end superlative consideration. This was the case as far back as April, when Sinners emerged with Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Delroy Lindo, Wunmi Mosaku, and Jack O’Connell giving some of their career-best performances, not to mention Miles Caton in a dazzling debut. Then One Battle After Another put awards season in a chokehold in September, in part because Leonardo DiCaprio, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti, Benicio del Toro, Sean Penn, and Regina Hall all came across as Oscar contenders.
In the process of whittling down my list of the 17 best film performances of the year, I opted to showcase no more than one performance from any movie I saw this year. But I still couldn’t justify space for any individual performance from Sentimental Value, despite being collectively ensorcelled by Stellan Skarsgård, Renate Reinsve, Elle Fanning, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas. Nor did I reserve a spot for Emma Stone or Jesse Plemons, two halves of the paranoid battle of wills in Bugonia. George Clooney, Adam Sandler, and Billy Crudup as Jay Kelly’s trio of reflective, regretful, resentful men were also left to sit on the sidelines and wait for the Academy to come calling instead.
Picking just one cast member from Hamnet meant no room on the list for Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, or my most heartbreaking omission, Noah Jupe, whose final-act turn as the onstage Hamlet is so crucial to that movie landing with the emotional wallop it does. There was one undeniable performance in Weapons, and that meant leaving off Alden Ehrenreich’s overmatched cop and Austin Abrams’s intrepid junkie. Meanwhile, going for a smaller supporting performance in Train Dreams meant I had to leave off Joel Edgerton delivering captivating interiority.
In the end, I owe apologies to Julia Roberts and Jennifer Lawrence, who threw heaters in After the Hunt and Die My Love, respectively, but did not make my final cut. Neither did Tim Robinson, who translated his comedy of discomfort onto the big screen in Friendship, or Tom Blyth, who plays a closeted ’90s Syracusian in the worth-seeking-out Plainclothes. In a less competitive year, my real sicko selection would have been Seymour Hersh, who is so compulsively watchable as he accedes to the documentary treatment in Cover-Up. To cast these performances aside, the following 17 must be pretty damn good, right?
Each member of Jafar Panahi’s ensemble contributes to the film’s careful calibration of gravity and levity, as these ad hoc survivors of the Iranian government’s brutal oppression struggle to summon the certainty to dole out punishment to the man who they think is their long-ago torturer. But it’s Mariam Afshari who provides the film’s most impactful moment. For most of the story, her character, Shiva, is the level-headed one; she’s worked hard to put her life back together after what she suffered in prison, and she’s unwilling to let herself or the others backslide into barbaric revenge. But as Panahi’s film reaches its confessional crescendo, it all becomes too much for Shiva to endure, and Afshari unleashes years of agony and fear. Her ability to make Shiva’s rage feel so legible — all while Panahi has her bathed in red taillights — cracks the movie open.
Ah, the mystique of the theater kid and the fraught space they hold in the imagination of those who have been them and those who’ve only experienced them secondhand. Onscreen, we’ve seen it presented as horrifyingly earnest (Glee), arrested into adulthood (Theater Camp), and projected onto large-format screens (Wicked … what other way to describe Glinda’s whole deal?). The version of a theater kid that Everett Blunck plays in Griffin in Summer is so uncanny for an actor that young. As a tween playwright marooned on an island of his own artistry, Everett Blunck plays Griffin as both liberated by his affinity for the theater but also endlessly frustrated by other people’s dramatic failings. He brushes off his mom and alienates his friends and acting company before a hunky taskrabbit sends his adolescent mind into crisis. Blunck doesn’t attempt to make Griffin falsely sweet or pitiable; he holds fast to Griffin’s fussy, stubborn confidence, creating a character that feels familiar to real life but all too rare in movies.
The peculiarities of this year’s Oscar race have it so that Jessie Buckley’s heartwrenching turn in Hamnet already feels too obvious to talk about, and the movie is only in limited release. That’s annoying for a million reasons, but it’s particularly unfair to Buckley, whose performance transcends any pedestrian “Oscar bait” epithets that might get thrown its way. As Agnes Shakespeare, in the fictionalized narrative based on Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, Buckley is sketching out an enchanting creature even before the tragedy at the center of the story befalls her. Her Agnes is an iconoclastic, witchy woman of the woods, drawn passionately to Paul Mescal’s William Shakespeare but reluctant to give herself over to be a wife and mother. Buckley taps into this tension within Agnes so that when her children come along, the bonds she shares with them feel primordial. In the film’s latter half, when grief takes hold, Buckley is able to pull from a near-unbelievable emotional depth and make outsize pain feel real and earned.
For an actress who got her start in serious epic and sci-fi fare like Troy and Sunshine, Rose Byrne has made her most significant mark as a comedic actress in films like Bridesmaids, Neighbors, and Spy. And as a result, she’s been quite under-rewarded for her efforts. What’s great about If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is that while Byrne tackles some heavy psychological drama involving motherhood and guilt and depression and anger, there’s a heightened lunacy at the periphery that plays into Byrne’s best comedic instincts. It also requires Byrne to walk a tonal tightrope throughout as her Linda tries to calm a sympathetic but panicky daughter, wrangle help from her off-site husband, and bulldoze her way through both sides of the medical establishment as a psychologist, a patient, and the mother of a sick kid. Mary Bronstein’s camera never lets up on Linda, so Byrne can’t either.
To hear Marty Mauser tell it, he’s about to be the most celebrated sports figure in the whole world — if he can just find a way to get his hands on some money and fly to Japan and beat his Ping-Pong rival and strike a deal with the ink magnate and seduce the movie star and market his line of orange Ping-Pong balls. Making the most of his spindly body and LaGuardia High School–bred smirk, Chalamet uses his inescapable boyishness completely to his advantage, bringing an immature audacity to the classic in-over-his-head operator. There’s always been a hint of “he can’t keep getting away with this” doubt to Chalamet’s success, as if critics were perpetually expecting some sort of backlash to take him out. But like Marty, Timmy can’t fall off that cliff if he never looks down. Chalamet’s energy is inexhaustible, a quality that comes in handy when you’re at the center of a Josh Safdie film. It also comes in handy when you’re trying to win an Oscar, which Chalamet just might do with his showiest work to date. It’s a performance that overpowers you, not with emotional heft or even charm — though Chalamet calls upon both at crucial moments — but a grinding, sometimes-infuriating persistence.
The most pleasant surprise in Bradley Cooper’s latest film is how much it gives Laura Dern to do. Her character’s breakup is a two-sided affair that lets Dern play Tess’s frustration and anger but also her doubt and ambition and sexuality. Over the last decade, Dern slipped into a comfortable space in pop culture, playing rich-white-lady extremity on Big Little Lies and in Marriage Story. I’d started to worry that Hollywood had forgotten how good Dern is at playing a real person, but she’s got both feet on the ground in Is This Thing On?, trying to navigate a separation with as little collateral damage as possible while also trying to get the better end of the deal. Dern is intelligent enough as an actor to know that this movie doesn’t work if it’s about winners and losers, and she allows Tess to give and take within scenes in a way that felt genuinely unexpected.
Watching what Jacob Elordi pulls off in Frankenstein is like watching a reality-show challenge where the contestant is prepared for one significant task (play one of the most famous characters in literary and film history) and then is suddenly confronted with an additional task (your character will be operating from underneath a shroud, a mask, a bunch of stringy hair, and superfluous wounds), all the while being saddled with a partner who can’t carry their weight (apologies to Oscar Isaac, who’s been much better in other things), and he prevails anyway. For a guy who played aloof so well in Saltburn, Elordi is remarkably emotive and accessible here. The film feels untethered until he shows up, and his commanding wrath in the film’s Arctic scenes give the film its necessary moments of magnitude.
There’s a version of Blue Moon that takes place on a stage and is more or less a one-man show, with Lorenz Hart monologuing about his various grudges, faux-reluctantly tallying his achievements, making bitchy asides about his contemporaries, and protesting far too much when it comes to his thoughts on his former partner Richard Rodgers’s Oklahoma! I’d pay non-discounted prices to see that show. And while Ethan Hawke doesn’t perform Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon solo, he engages in a series of duets with Bobby Canavale’s bartender, Jonah Lees’s pianist, Patrick Kennedy’s E.B. White, and eventually Andrew Scott as Rodgers himself. Hawke’s Hart holds serve in all of these scenes, motormouthing, pestering, insisting, utterly unable to help himself, sometimes in the most literal interpretation of the phrase.
So much of Train Dreams has to do with seeking out the soul of the American nation in the land and the forests and the hills but also in the pioneering human impulse that tramples and levels those same forests and hills. Director Clint Bentley and his collaborators spend the length of the movie articulating that in variously quiet ways, but it’s in William H. Macy’s brief performance where it all gets spoken aloud. It’s a big task for a man whose success has afforded him leading-man opportunities but who remains a character actor at heart. In Train Dreams, he plays Arn Peeples, a rueful demolitions expert whose reflectiveness is at odds with his assignment helping the railroad company blast a path across the continent. He’s a philosopher in an old coot’s clothing, and Macy is one of the few actors who can thread that needle with enough warmth and quirk to resonate long past the point where the film has moved on without him.
My favorite performances to champion in these year-end roundups are the ones that make you spend an hour after the movie enthusing about some actor whose role is too small, grotesque, or silly to ever be properly recognized with an award in the real world, so instead you stick your tongue in your cheek, declare them worthy of a Nobel Prize, and assume nothing will come of it. What’s so great about Madigan in Weapons is how easily she could have rested on the clownery of Aunt Gladys and allowed the makeup and the tracksuits and suburban kitsch to carry her through it. But this is a seasoned actress, and Zach Cregger’s frightfully intimate film gets the most out of the way her voice flattens as she calmly threatens to make little Alex’s parents stab and eat each other, or the way she exposes her vulnerability when she’s bald and secluded in the attic. This isn’t a junk-food performance — there’s something real here.
Wunmi Mosaku stands out in Sinners despite delivering the film’s least bombastic performance. As Annie, the wife whom Smoke (Michael B. Jordan) left at home to go be a gangster in Chicago, she presents as someone who will tie Smoke back to his grief over his lost child. That’s a character who could easily get lost in one-dimensionality, but Mosaku gives Annie so much spark and complexity that she’s able to compete with bigger characters like her husband and his brother, Stack, and Hailee Steinfeld’s Mary. Mosaku and Jordan communicate with just their physicality, telling you volumes of backstory without fuss from the script. And when the vampires descend, Mosaku squares her shoulders in a way that had me hoping we’d get 45 more minutes of her defending her juke joint from the devils who would harm her brethren.
There’s a flashback scene in The Secret Agent where Armando (Wagner Moura) and his wife, Fatima (Alice Carvalho), dine with a vile and corrupt oligarch, a man who not only wants to get his capitalist paws all over Armando’s academic research but also shame Armando for his resistance, which he does by denigrating Fatima to her face. Moura’s coiled but ferocious tirade in her defense is the core from which The Secret Agent summons its life force. Moura spends the film’s major timeline grappling with the fallout from that moment — it’s why he’s hiding out in a house full of political refugees while the corrupt Brazilian regime presses its thumb down on dissidents. It’s such an internal performance, with Armando’s frustration at having to endure this temperamental exile playing out on his face in endlessly compelling reaction shots. That flashback shows us the fire that is simmering underneath, turning a performance of diminished spirit into something more like barely constrained fury.
No fewer than five or six times during the rebooted Naked Gun movie did I stop and think, Liam Neeson has an Academy Award nomination for playing Oskar Schindler. It’s a strange thought to have considering that Neeson’s career has taken him far away from the black-and-white prestige of Schindler’s List. And yet even after the Taken era of all-purpose vengeance-seekers in possession of a certain set of skills, I wasn’t prepared for how absolutely perfect he was stepping into the role of police lieutenant Frank Drebin. It’s amazing how perfect Neeson’s American accent is delivering Drebin’s deadpan: gruff but stripped of the higher intellectual register. Neeson also uses his size and his vigilante-movie reputation to incredible effect, adapting more of a bull-in-a-china-shop energy than Leslie Nielsen’s previous cluelessness. However Neeson summoned it, it’s the comedic performance of the year, something blessedly silly and dumb.
In James Sweeney’s indie comedy about loneliness and queer obsession, Dylan O’Brien is astounding in a pair of roles: twin brothers of polar-opposite personality types. We first meet the grieving Roman, having just buried his twin brother, Rocky, hollowed out by heartache, bereft of his lifeline partner, forming a tentative bond with timid, gay Dennis (Sweeney) from his support group. But at the film’s spectacular turn, we get O’Brien as Rocky, seductively confident and funny, effortlessly sexy, heedlessly throwing himself into a one-night stand. Sweeney’s film needs Rocky to be desirous enough that you lose your mind a little bit in his presence, and O’Brien delivers. In either of these roles, O’Brien would have delivered the performance of his young career.
Rian Johnson’s Benoit Blanc films have succeeded as satisfying murder mysteries that double as unabashed comedies. Wake Up, Dead Man hasn’t lost the series’ sense of humor entirely, but there’s a surprising amount of sincerity, and it’s coming not from Craig’s Blanc but from Josh O’Connor as Reverend Jud Duplenticy. Having come to the priesthood as a refuge from a disreputable, pugilistic past, O’Connor’s Jud holds tightly to his faith in the Catholic institution, even as Josh Brolin’s odious Monsignor Wicks reveals himself to have built a cult of domination and cruelty in his small town. O’Connor plays Jud’s disillusionment for plenty of laughs, but he never backs away from his character’s earnest need to use his ministry for good. That might all sound like it’s verging on smarm, but O’Connor doesn’t take a single false step on this tightrope walk between silly and soulful. The movie bets so much on his character — Blanc takes a backseat here, far more than in the previous two films — that it seems on the verge of falling apart when he’s not around. Thank God the gamble pays off.
After Twinless, Alex Russell’s Lurker was the year’s other great movie about curdled queer obsession. Théodore Pellerin — a French Canadian actor best known for playing the Port Authority hookup in Never Rarely Sometimes Always and as a drag queen in last year’s Solo — plays Matthew, a record-store employee and obsessive fan of Archie Madekwe’s emergent pop star Oliver. Keeping his fanboy origins a secret, Matthew manipulates his way into Oliver’s inner circle using little more than flattery and an understanding of social-media-age mores. There’s a terrifying vacancy at Matthew’s core, a shamelessness which Pellerin weaponizes as Russell’s film blurs the lines between Matthew’s devotion, predation, and genuine desire. Pellerin locks onto Madekwe as both an ideal and his prey, inhabiting more and more of his physical space until the audience is as complicit in his twisted dance as Matthew is.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie doesn’t achieve escape velocity without Teyana Taylor. For her Perfidia Beverly Hills, the revolution has come, and it’s only too bad it’s not being televised because she has that inimitable star power. Taylor’s been bouncing around the entertainment industry as a singer, actress, model, and choreographer since she was a teenager, and it’s still a wonder watching her own a screen otherwise occupied by the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn. Taylor is simultaneously hard and soft (just as she was in 2023’s A Thousand and One) seducing a white supremacist and using a pregnant belly as armor. One Battle After Another is able to explore themes of generational morality, communal self-defense, and military-industrial villainy so thoroughly because she pulls an otherwise heavy story off the floor in its first half-hour and levitates it even after she’s gone.
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