Best Movie Performances of 2024

It’s not like Daniel Craig still needed to step out of the shadow of the most famous spy in movie history — his Southern-accented, Sondheim-singing gumshoe Benoit Blanc in the Knives Out movies had already accomplished that mission. But watching him portray a young William Burroughs, trawling a surreal Mexican border town for sex, drugs and, well, more sex, is an excellent aide-memoire regarding his range and rigor in plumbing a character’s depth. Much has been made of his explicit sex scenes with costar Drew Starkey, who plays the younger man tempting Craig’s lovelorn writer, yet its the scenes of Burroughs’ vulnerability and inability to sync up with his object of desire that truly feel daring. And though he gives you glimpses of the future Beat icon in Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of the author’s transgressive, long-suppressed novel, it’s the way that he gives you the human underneath the hipster persona that cuts to the bone here. For those of who first clocked Craig when he played Francis Bacon’s lover in Love Is the Devil (1998), the experience of him now playing the older artist pining for his elusive muse feels like a full-circle rotation.

Jesse Eisenberg’s sophomore turn behind the camera revolves around a double act, with the writer-director and Kieran Culkin bouncing off each other as formerly close, wildly different cousins on a sight-seeing trip through Poland. But Eisenberg has generously gifted his costar with the sort of raging-id role that most actors could only dream of, and Culkin rewards his director/castmate with the single greatest, funniest, most cringe-comic and heartbreaking performance of his career — and yes, we are counting Roman Roy from Succession. His Zen stoner is like a ball of pure, undiluted charisma, joyfully inquiring about strangers’ lives and leading his fellow tourists on a photo shoot in front of the Warsaw Uprising Monument. That inner sunshine emanating out of him is what makes the occasional storm clouds of anger and flurry of blunt, blurted-out comments forgivable, if not entirely acceptable. The actor plays him as one part unfiltered holy fool, one part adorable puppy dog who pees on the rug. “I love him, I hate him, I want to kill him, I want to be him,” Eisenberg’s character says about his kin at one point, and thanks to Culkin, you completely understand every single one of those impulses.

It’s not like Nicole Kidman has ever been one to exclusively choose safe roles at the expense of risky and/or risque ones — this is the person who dove headfirst into Eyes Wide Shut, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Destroyer and The Paperboy, after all. But there’s being vulnerable onscreen, and then there’s Kidman’s work in Halina Reijn’s story of a sexually unfulfilled CEO who gets her kink taken care of by the new intern Harris Dickinson. This what people mean when they talk about being actors being “brave,” a word that gets thrown around too liberally in terms of describing performances. Kidman earns the descriptive here: She’s giving you a portrait of female desire that feels a thousand times more psychically naked than physically exposed. You can chart her character’s journey from reticence and confusion over her giving in to her needs, her anger at herself for even entertaining the idea, the sense of libidinous liberation once she does, the mix of relief and shame over having done so, and the immediate sense of wanting more. Did we mention this whole thing is communicated without a word in a sequence in which her character reluctantly climaxes? It’s not just that Kidman shows you this woman’s sexual fulfillment. It’s the way she gives you everything happening around it, in the most intimate and telling of ways.

It seem cruel to single out just one performer in writer-director Azazel Jacobs’ pitch-perfect tale of a trio of sisters caring for the dad during his last days — it’s a movie that relies on the delicate between Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne, with each balancing out the family dynamic that makes this drama sing. Yet it’s Lyonne that truly leaves you wounded here, and the one who seems to be taking the biggest chance by muting her go-to-comic voice. Look, we stan a legend who’s turned a sort of wisecracking, brash take on yesteryear’s brassy-dame archetype into a 21st century success story — we’ll binge Poker Face and Russian Doll from now ’til doomsday. (Her banter with an apartment complex’s security guard still gives you a taste of Lyonne’s bada-bing line readings.) But her turn as the youngest daughter, caught up in her grief and caught between her yin and yang siblings, is like a clinic on how to portray a recessive character and still make them compelling. There are moments when you think Lyonne is going to physically draw into herself like a turtle into its shell. There are moments when, having lost her shit, you feel like she must combust into flames. And then there are moments when, having come to a point of mutual understanding, she curls up next to her kin and you remember that she’s not just a comic actor. She’s simply an actor, one of the finest of her generation.

Maybe you already knew Mikey Madison from her work on Better Things, the FX show where she and creator Pamela Adlon played out a complicated, all-too-realistic mother/late-teens daughter relationship over five seasons. Or you might have recognized her as the Manson family member that met a rather extravagant end in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. But after seeing the way in which Madison enlivens, deepens, lifts up and eventually takes the wheel of Sean Baker’s sex-worker screwball comedy, you’ll absolutely never forget her. It’s a breakout role of the highest order, and to say she makes the most of her turn as a stripper who accepts a Russian rich kid’s marriage proposal — only to deal with the ensuing chaos when his dad’s thugs yell nyet — is an understatement. In fact, it’s so easy to be wowed by the fangs, claws and stainless-steel cajones she gifts her battle-hardened survivor that you might miss the subtle work she’s doing underneath all the screaming and fury. We still can’t get that last scene out of our minds, when she and her costar Yura Borisov — who we’re grandfathering into this list right now, don’t @ us — turn what begins as one more transactional deal into something tender and devastating. A star is well and truly born.

There has never, ever been a screen character like Pansy Deacon, not even in a Mike Leigh film (and this is the gentleman who gave us Naked). She has a tendency to spit venom like a cobra at whomever she’s talking to, regardless of whether it’s a shop clerk who isn’t giving her enough attention, a neighbor who dresses their infant in a way she finds distasteful (“What’s a baby need pockets for?!?”), or her cowed husband and shy, introverted son. It’s Pansy vs. the world, and the latter doesn’t stand a chance. In lesser hands, someone like this would simply be a paragon of proactive rage. But Marianne Jean-Baptiste — whose previous work with the British writer-director in 1996’s Secrets & Lies earned her an Oscar nomination — has never been one to stop at the superficial. What’s motivating this woman to strike out is fear, and likely the lingering effects of intergenerational trauma — and that’s the Rosetta stone Jean-Baptiste keeps going back to, even when Pansy is hilariously venting or tragically failing to fight off depression. There’s no sense of judgment in her performance, no pity or moralizing, no distance from this woman who can’t help but be self-sabotage any chance at happiness, or even feel she’s worthy of it. There is simply the presentation of this person lashing out at everything and everyone around her to the point of exhaustion, with Jean-Baptiste allowing you to see the bruised humanity thrumming underneath it all. She deserves every superlative you can think of and more.

Forget, for a second, the masterful meta-stroke of casting Demi Moore as someone Hollywood once put on a pedestal and then alienated to the point of disillusionment. The potent combination of rage, righteousness and buried resentment that the G.I. Jane star brings to Coralie Fargeat’s far-out body-cartoonish showbiz satire makes it feel at times like an exorcism, to be sure. But even when she’s playing things as broad as a story about a younger, hotter version of yourself springing fully formed out of your back requires, Moore makes sure to add a human face to the body horror. It’s a funny, frightfully intense performance, especially when her prematurely-put-out-to-pasture celebrity starts sabotaging her dewy-skinned counterpart (big up to Margaret Qualley as well). And thanks to its star, the most bone-chilling moment in this over-the-top take on society’s youth obsessions is also its saddest: Moore staring at herself in the mirror, violently wiping off her make-up as she abandons plans for a night out. She makes self-loathing feel like the scariest thing in the world.

This was the year that the 34-year-old actor from Cheltenham went from next-gen talent that could steal scenes and make hearts flutter to someone who could carry entire character-driven dramas on his shoulders and add extra, X-factor sparks to ensemble projects with the best of them. A holdover that premiered at Cannes last year, La Chimera suggested that, in his filthy white suit and three-day stubble, O’Connor might be the heir apparent to the sort of mercurial, charismatic antiheroes that Al Pacino played in the early 1970s; his Italian tomb raider is simultaneously magnetic and repulsive. Then came Challengers, Luca Guadagnino’s love-triangle tennis opus, and he gave us a roguish heel of an entirely different sort: A tournament hustler who coulda been a contender, if only he hadn’t fallen in love with both Zendaya and his doubles partner Mike Faist. (It’s not exactly subtext, people.) It was the sort of one-two punch actors dream of, and the fact that they happen to hit American theaters in close proximity only made the argument that O’Connor is the guy to watch that much stronger. Whether you want kiss him or punch him in the face — maybe both? — you can’t take your eyes off the guy when he’s onscreen.

Even if you haven’t seen Ridley Scott’s belated sequel to his 2000 Oscar-winner, you’ve probably heard that Denzel Washington shoplifts the movie the minute he struts into the picture and keeps it snugly tucked away in his caftan pocket for the remainder of the running time. The hype is justified. His character, a former slave turned power broker named Macrinus, strikes a Faustian bargain with Paul Mescal’s prisoner of war: Fight in the arena for me, and you’ll get the chance to avenge the death of a loved one. In Washington’s hands, however, Macrinus quickly becomes the sort of frenemy to this fighter that’s both a wily schemer and a wild card. You truly have no idea what his ambitious conspirator will do next, and that’s before he does he parades around the Rome’s senate chambers with a decapitated head. It’s the sort of go-for-broke take on a bad guy that combines Washington’s streetwise cop in Training Day and his cool, calculating criminal in American Gangster, then tops it all off with a generous helping of camp. Caligula ain’t got shit on this guy!

Fans of Japanese cinema have been crowing about Koji Yakusho’s greatness for decades, and his gallery of dancing salarymen, haunted detectives, blood-stained samurai and noodle-loving yakuza (merely the tip of the iceberg in terms of his 45 years onscreen) have long attested to an actor who has a hell of a range and can tailor a role to his strengths. Even his die-hard admirers were surprised, however, by what he brings to Wim Wenders’ story of a public-restroom custodian named Hirayama. At a glance, there’s nothing special about this modest, middle-aged gent: He wakes up, goes to work, collects classic-rock cassettes, and takes pride in a job well done. But Yakusho lets you see how the routine hide the ripples of emotions underneath the deceptively placid surface. It’s such a carefully considered and exquisitely calibrated performance, sublime in the ways it turns everyday routines into something euphoric and profound in how it elevates small moments into epiphanies. Without the actor, it would still be the single greatest movie about a toilet cleaner ever. With him, this small, unassuming tale turns into the kind of earthshaking character study that reminds us why we go to the movies in the first place.