Exactly what the title says. I took Toby to the vet (he’s acting normal except for the throwing up thing, he should be fine) and got home around 5:30. I’m starting the actual writing of this list at 7:30. The goal is to finish within three hours or so. (Update: three hours and thirteen minutes. Close enough.)

I am not going to use any of the same actors that The Ringer used on their list, and it will still be better than theirs. (Apologies to Adam Nayman, Mani Lazic, and Brandon Streussnig, who I know are trying their best. But also…Brandon, get real with the Rachel Getting Married stuff.) I am also not going to use any of the actors or performances that they included on their “biggest omissions” list. I haven’t crossed over much with the movies they used, and where I have I don’t feel especially guilty about it. Let’s do it.

101 – Ben Foster, as Charlie Prince in 3:10 to Yuma – A sensuous, erotic secondary performance about being in love with Russell Crowe. More’s to come on that front.

100 – Dominic Cooper, as Dakin in The History Boys – Still a badly underseen movie, and Cooper has the shiniest part as a sexually precocious high schooler who can’t decide what he wants more: being impressive or being awed.

99 – Jessica Chastain as Mrs. O’Brien in The Tree of Life – The sun would shine on her in this movie even if Terrence Malick wasn’t directing. She drops ice down shirts all playfulness and without malice.

98 – Billy Crudup as Jon Osterman/Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen – I like Watchmen without respecting it very much as a movie, and if there’s something about it that really functions well, it’s the firing mind of an ever more distant god. Crudup is far, far away. (You may be wondering how I’m including Crudup here when he’s in the cast of Almost Famous, which Katie Baker put into the Ringer’s honorable mentions list. My retort is that I’m not crushingly nostalgic for a mediocre movie that happened to come out when I was in high school.)

97 – Domnhall Gleeson as Jim Farrell in Brooklyn – There’s more for him to do in Ex Machina, but there is such a tenderness, a hard-eyed but soft-lipped reticence in his performance in Brooklyn.

96 – Keanu Reeves as John Constantine in Constantine – A truly original performance in the sense that Keanu’s take on the character has absolutely nothing with the guy from the DC comics. That bland facade contrasts perfectly with the beings of the L.A. malebolge.

95 – Kurt Russell as Herb Brooks in Miracle – Aggressive accent work, aggressive wig, and pants that are so unhinged they’ll just charge you without any warning. The linchpin of one of the vital American sports movies.

94 – Katharine Isabelle as Ginger Fitzgerald in Ginger Snaps – She’s feral and it’s exactly right.

93 – Ram Charan as Alluri Sitarama Raju in R.R.R. – Could have been N.T. Rama Rao, Jr., here, but Ram Charan is like a perfectly coiffed person in this movie. Totally gorgeous and unbearably smooth.

92 – Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi – I don’t care if Hamill doesn’t like this performance very much, or if he doesn’t like the direction that movie took the franchise in or what have you. It’s emotional and sardonic, but most of all it’s like he never stopped making Star Wars movies. Wonderful balance.

91 – Daniel Bruhl as Alex in Good Bye, Lenin! – Perfects the casual mania you expect from handsome, tousled indie actors in a casually manic film. As likable as they come.

90 – Carey Mulligan as Jeannette Brinson in Wildlife – This movie has a wonderful ensemble cast, and it’s so well made that I’m doing something I rarely do: hoping an actor directs another movie. Mulligan’s disappointment, which translates as frost, is great. There’s something of Audrey Hepburn in the late ’60s with her in this movie, something graceful mixed with a great certainty that the best has passed her by.

89 – Keira Knightley as Cecilia Tallis in Atonement – A taut character held together with glue, like a porcelain doll that’s smashed itself, but there’s no sign of the cracks on her beautiful face.

88 – Josh Hartnett as Cooper in Trap – Two or three drops away from spilling the entire drink throughout the whole movie, Hartnett manages to get that beer to the table without blinking. It’s a fun, fun performance.

87 – Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie in True Grit – For better or worse, this is the role that’s going to go in the first line of Steinfeld’s obituary. Bossy girls around the world, take note.

86 – Natar Ungalaaq as Atanarjuat in Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner – For all of the majesty of the Arctic, this is not a beautiful movie. Ungalaaq carries a true epic on his shoulders, perhaps not like Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, but like Tony Curtis in The Vikings.

85 – Riz Ahmed as Ruben in Sound of Metal – I’m still impressed with how well Ahmed carries a story that is, frankly, canned. He’s so frank here, in word and gesture.

84 – Harry Melling as Artist in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs – You will believe that you can be enraptured by a multiple amputee reciting Lincoln.

83 – Jessie Buckley as Rose-Lynn Harlan in Wild Rose – Working on a similar principle to Riz Ahmed (“would-be singer stubborn and down on her luck, oh boy), but Jessie Buckley gets to sing some terrific stuff in this movie and brings that character back down to earth.

82 – Jason Isaacs as Grigori Zhukov in The Death of Stalin – Not the most important actor in that movie, and by including him I gave up on including Steve Buscemi and Simon Russell Beale. Oh well. No one in that movie has a ratio of screentime to guffaws like Isaacs.

81 – Michael Shannon as Curtis LaForche in Take Shelter – Michael Shannon is as specific an actor as I think you’ll find, which is why he makes no sense whenever he’s not playing some Midwesterner staving off doom. Fortunately, there’s Take Shelter. No one else could play Curtis.

80 – Yalitza Aparicio as Cleo Gutierrez in Roma – Everything that we all said about her in 2018 still stands, as far as I’m concerned.

79 – Charlotte Gainsbourg as She in Antichrist – ewwwwww

78 – Tom Burke as Anthony in The Souvenir – A Byronic figure in Thatcher’s world. Basically Satan, down to the fact that you’d rather listen to his arch orations than sing a hymn.

77 – Q’orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas in The New World – No one has ever clarified the fascination with Pocahontas for me as well as Kilcher has. In her hands, Pocahontas is America.

76 – Laura Linney as Caroline Gund in The City of Your Final Destination – There’s always room in our hearts for a middle-aged bitch, but no matter how she’s set up in this movie, that’s not where Linney lands with her. The film needs her flint, and it changes when her flint dampens.

75 – Angeliki Papoulia as Older Daughter in Dogtooth – ewwwwww (in Greek). Seriously, though, a spectacular scream queen performance.

74 – Mark Ruffalo as Rob Bilott in Dark Waters – We used to pump out two or three of these a year when we were a proper country, and then when Todd Haynes does one the moviegoing public said they were bored. No matter. Mark Ruffalo keeps going after these tryhard roles where he’s unwatchable (Poor Things, Mickey 17), when really what he’s best at is playing a bourgeois lawyer with a bad case of belief in the legal system.

73 – Frances McDormand as Linda Litzke in Burn After Reading – I want to put this higher, but McDormand is a little too in on the joke for me. Even so, what a pleasingly nutty performance this is.

72 – Elsie Fisher as Kayla in Eighth Grade – I’ve said it once, I’ll say it a thousand times. No one this century has done a better job at playing a real-life teenager than Fisher did in that movie.

71 – Sean Penn as Harvey Milk in Milk – He’d never get to play the guy now, which like, I’m definitely fine with, but this performance is near and dear to my heart because it’s one of the last biopics where they didn’t break out CIA prosthetics to make the actor look like the person. Penn just…acted instead. Who would have guessed that would work?

70 – We Nien-jen as N.J. in Yi Yi – A John Updike character in Taiwan. Yi Yi is wonderful in large part because it has this vastness of vision, but We is the one who we can stay centered with.

69 – Jack Nicholson as Harry Sanborn in Something’s Gotta Give – The last really fine Nicholson performance, one where he’s clearly working off of the public image of the hedonist Lakers fan, but of course there’s vulnerability and even shyness there.

68 – Thomas Haden Church as Jack in Sideways – “Don’t you just want to feel that cozy little box grip down on your johnson,” but without a hint of irony.

67 – Tom Cruise as Ray Ferrier in The War of the Worlds – I’m not going to make any friends saying this, but this is probably the last really good Tom Cruise performance. He’s reacting to the apocalypse more or less like Jimmy Stewart would have in 1952. There are no holes in it anywhere.

66 – Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Dido Elizabeth Belle in Belle – What amazes me most about this performance is the way that Mbatha-Raw makes both sides of this person believable, a Black woman in 1780s England who is more comfortable than any other Black person in Britain, while at the same time someone who fears to raise her voice for fear that she’ll be slapped down for good. Show your kids this movie.

65 – Julia Roberts as Erin Brockovich in Erin Brockovich – Of all the actors I can’t believe the people at the Ringer left for me, this is the one where I’m just stumped. Roberts is slumming as a normie like Mary Pickford or Joan Crawford used to, and that’s high praise indeed.

64 – Seth Rogen as Ben Stone in Knocked Up – Plays this like he’s Baby in Bringing Up Baby. He’s so good in this movie that I still remember the “how sexist is Knocked Up, anyway?” discourse from my youth, when of course the point of the movie is that this guy is as undeserving of pregnant Katherine Heigl as we humans are of the redemption offered to us by Christ.

63 – Yosuke Kubozuka as Kichijiro in Silence – Speaking of salvation, here’s the most infuriating character put on screen this century. That’s who we are to God, after all.

62 – Matt Damon as Carroll Shelby in Ford vs. Ferrari – It’s just good old-fashioned movie star acting. Impossible to dislike, and more importantly, impossible to disengage from.

61 – Jon Hamm as “Fletch” in Confess, Fletch – The thing about Jon Hamm is that he’s a lot funnier than Chevy Chase ever was. They should be pumping one of these out a year.

60 – Alan Kim as David in Minari – If it was as easy as it looks to be an adorable kid in a movie, there’d be more adorable kids in movies. Alan Kim hits that one absolutely out of the park, and to his credit, he’s doing more than just being roly-poly.

59 – Iko Uwais as Rama in The Raid 2 – Hi-keeba! But for 150 minutes! Watch this movie once a week with your eyes on Uwais, and you’ll look like Billy Blanks before the year is out.

58 – Rachel Weisz as Hester Collyer in The Deep Blue Sea – The truest, most heartbroken British housewife since Laura Jesson. Celia Johnson would have been proud.

57 – Daniel Craig as James Bond in Casino Royale – If you’re like me and you believe that the rangy unpredictable Bond that Craig plays here is the best version of the character, you kind of have to include him on a list like this.

56 – Ryland Brickson Cole Tews as Jean Kayak in Hundreds of Beavers – I am less confident that this guy will get another good role than I am with anyone else on the list, but that’s because there are only so many 3-D roles for people with 2-D hearts.

55 – Ben Whishaw as a lot of people but especially Robert Frobisher in Cloud Atlas – An engaging, endearing romantic hero, oozing tragedy from his pores and smiling at you underneath that floppy hair.

54 – Jim Broadbent as Boss Tweed in Gangs of New York – There were a lot of potential choices for Broadbent, who’s been wonderful this century, but I’m personally fond of his Boss Tweed. He’s a caricature just like everyone else wandering around Gangs of New York, but he’s a caricature who really believes he can be a real boy.

53 – Suraj Sharma as Pi Patel in Life of Pi – There’s a good case to be made that Sharma’s performance against the invisible visual effects in Life of Pi is, from a technical point of view, the most underappreciated in this era of VFX.

52 – Ruth Negga as Mildred Loving in Loving – Had a hard time deciding whether she should be here for this movie or for her other gerund picture, Passing, and went with this one. Short of Denzel Washington in Malcolm X, I don’t think there’s another performance of a civil rights era hero that rings as powerfully as hers.

51 – Maggie Gyllenhaal as Lee Holloway in Secretary – Inside you there are two sexy wolves. One of them is Ram Charan in R.R.R., and one of them is Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary. Which one do you feed? Or, more to the point, which one will come when you call?

50 – Sid Haig as Captain Spaulding in House of 1,000 Corpses – One of those performances which is basically ancillary to the actual story, but which is so memorable that it blurs out everything else. Almost everyone is really good in this movie, but Haig is on such a heater.

49 – Hugh Jackman as Robert Angier in The Prestige – There’s this line from Follies where the aging tycoon confesses to his wife (while she’s prodding him about his inclination to have an affair with her former best friend) that “I see lovers on the streets. It’s real, it’s going on out there, and I just – can’t – reach – it!” That’s Hugh Jackman in this movie.

48 – Glen Powell as Finnegan in Everybody Wants Some!! – Glen Powell plays this role like he’s auditioning to play the lead on a sitcom in 1988 that’s going to put out 28 episodes a year until 1996. It is something to behold. There are other more refined versions of the lethal charisma the man has, but this uncut one is such a joy.

47 – Sidney Flanigan as Autumn in Never Rarely Sometimes Always – A movie about fear just as much as any Batman movie, but Autumn doesn’t have the Caped Crusader’s gadgets or, more importantly, his money. Watch her eyes throughout this movie.

46 – William Shimell as James Miller in Certified Copy – The Journey to Italy movie always extends a fine part to the men (George Sanders in the original, George O’Brien in Sunrise, Albert Finney in Two for the Road), and Certified Copy is not exception. Cast more opera singers.

45 – Lesley Manville as Mary in Another Year – The polar opposite of Cyril in Phantom Thread, which I imagine she will remain best known for. British Kichijiro.

44 – Billy Bob Thornton as Ed Crane in The Man Who Wasn’t There – He probably would have had to go by something besides “Billy Bob” if you’d sent him back to the early ’40s, but hoo boy would he have become a noir legend by any other name. There’s skinny Mitchum in this performance.

43 – Anya Taylor-Joy as Emma Woodhouse in Emma. – The superlative version of an Austen heroine. You can sign up to fight me at your local rec center.

42 – Gillian Anderson as Lily Bart in The House of Mirth – Merchant and Ivory trained us to expect waifs with poofy hair in movies like this, and Anderson is no waif even if she is helpless against rumor-mongering and bad faith. A number of high-profile actresses tackled the Gilded Age between 1990 and 2000, and Anderson is second to none, not even Michelle Pfeiffer in The Age of Innocence.

41 – Michael Keaton as Ray Kroc in The Founder – I think if anyone understood what kind of movie this was going to be when it came out, including the people who run McDonald’s, I don’t think it could ever have been made. Keaton plays Kroc like Ida B. Wells or Theodore Dreiser would have written him.

40 – Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat Sagdiyev in Borat, etc. – This may not be a truly great performance so much as it is a complete performance. There’s value in that. The irony is in Borat’s American friends, not in Cohen’s performance.

39 – Haley Joel Osment as David in A.I. Artificial Intelligence – I’d like to make it clear that I am not one of the Spielberg apologists who go wild over his films of the aughts. I’d also like to make it clear that the Ringer has a number of those apologists but none of them appear to have seen fit to include Tom Cruise or Osment in A.I., which, if it’s as good as the fanboys say it is, surely has one of the finest performances of the decade at its heart.

38 – Anais Reboux as Anais Pingot in Fat Girl – Another one of those complete performances, down to the bitter, bloody end. Reboux looks the shock of the picture in the eyes, and her gaze back is totally glazed.

37 – August Diehl as Fritz Jagerstatter in A Hidden Life – Blows everyone who ever played Jesus in one of those life of Christ movies straight out of the water. Works as the opposite side of the coin in many ways to Christian Friedel’s performance in The Zone of Interest, down to the way that Diehl’s is warm and potent where Friedel’s is alienating and flaccid.

36 – Amber Midthunder as Naru in Prey – We’ve learned from Predator movies that you can either have Arnold Schwarzenegger at the peak of his powers, or you can have a virtually unknown actress making us believe in her and pull for her like we rarely hope for anyone in movies. Midthunder really has something compelling; one hopes for a Michelle Rodriguez-style path in the next few years.

35 – Shu Qi as Vicky in Millennium Mambo – After I watched this, I went on Letterboxd and wrote what I felt after watching Shu: “I don’t have anything to live for either, except maybe I do?” It should be impossible to hold both of those ideas at once as an actor. It’s simply too difficult to make both work without making one or the other trite. But Shu Qi’s performance in Millennium Mambo is here, and it stands by itself.

34 – Nicholas Hoult as Nux in Mad Max: Fury Road – (starting a slow clap) Not all men! Not all men! NOT ALL MEN! NOT ALL MEN! Hoult realizes Nux in a way that so few characters in action movies are ever really understood.

33 – Jason Schwartzman as Augie Steenbeck in Asteroid City – There’s a real poetry in the way that Schwartzman was there for Wes Anderson when he was young and a little silly, and now he’s there for Anderson now that both have seen more, learned more, felt more. Asteroid City is a very good movie on its own merits even if you don’t highlight Schwartzman, but any movie with a performance as true as Schwartzman’s is worth seeing.

32 – Barry Keoghan as Martin Lang in The Killing of a Sacred Deer – Keoghan has etched out a place for himself by being a little freak, whether it’s for Emerald Fennell’s stupid movies or for Sabrina Carpenter’s lighthearted music videos. Neither one of them really rings true for me the same way that Martin does in Sacred Deer, for Keoghan’s performance believes that the truest little freak has no explanation.

31 – Paul Giamatti as Miles in Sideways – A performance so good that two things happened. One, Paul Giamatti got absolutely stuck in his career. Two, every actor trying to gasp their way to an Oscar via a Sundance movie aped Giamatti’s work here and looked like a big doofus doing it.

30 – Paul Walter Hauser as Richard Jewell in Richard Jewell – Clint Eastwood is not society’s most salient maker of good points, but Hauser cleans up after him in this movie. Just because someone is earnest does not mean they are stupid. It doesn’t even mean they are simple. Hauser knows it, and our reward is one of the most moving performances in any recent biopic.

29 – Sean Bean as Boromir in Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring – Boromir has an eye on history, a worshipful belief in the kings of old, the glorious past of a better Gondor. If he lived on Earth rather than Middle-earth, he would know that he is every bit as tragic a figure as Creon. Bean plays him that way.

28 – Chris Cooper as Mr. Laurence in Little Women – The way Cooper sits down on the stairs and listens to Eliza Scanlen play the piano in that one scene puts a lump in my throat every time. The camera is far away from him and yet we know exactly what’s going through his mind, his slumping shoulders and bowed head a paean.

27 – Meg Ryan as Frannie Avery in In the Cut – The most successful against-type performance of the century so far, so of course it killed Meg Ryan’s career. This is the movie that Barbara Stanwyck or Ida Lupino would have made if they’d come up when Ryan did.

26 – Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit – A performance that gets better each time for me. A mumbling son of a gun massacring the King’s English with enough gusto to inflame Tom Hardy’s jealousy. Meanwhile, Bridges brings a quality to the western which is missing even in the high days of the genre. Many of the men back in the ’50s were wizened or worldly or wise, but few of them were as canny as Bridges is here.

25 – Kim Hye-ja as Mother in Mother – The ruthlessness of motherhood, and it’s a ruthlessness and determination that dominates the screen. If this were given the “obsession” tagline that so often falls on movies about men out to prove themselves right, Kim’s performance would be more rightly recognized as superior to anyone’s in, say, David Fincher movies.

24 – Adrien Brody as Laszlo Toth in The Brutalist – The outlines of Toth are inspirational. A survivor, an artist, a genius, even, a man making the world new where it was stultified. Brody scribbles that outline out, finding a pitiful and grieving man inside who cannot accept that things may just be going right for him.

23 – Zhao Tao as Tao in The World – It’s a real task to decide which of Zhao’s performances is her best, and in the end I just went with the one I like the most. No one has been so good as a woman buffeted by fate since Susan Hayward.

22 – Peter Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker in In the Loop – There’s not much more to the performance than swear words and insults, but by jingo what a collection of them there are. What Capaldi doesn’t get as much credit for amidst this foul-mouthed performance is the chemistry he has with the various people he’s yelling at. It’s like The Honeymooners backing into nuclear armageddon.

21 – Payman Maadi as Nader in A Separation – One of the great villains of this century’s cinema. Maadi’s handsome, bourgeois devil believes himself in control until he doesn’t know his own strength. It’s a revolting, intrusive performance.

20 – Paul Bettany as Stephen Maturin in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World – Don’t worry what Aubrey tells you, Stephen, we have time for your damned hobbies. Jack Aubrey and James Kirk share a number of qualities, which means that Paul Bettany has to play Spock and McCoy at the same time. He’s adorable.

19 – Julia Garner as Jane in The Assistant – Every single scene focuses on Garner with the kind of obsession the directors of Gone with the Wind paid to Vivian Leigh. It is not a terribly expressive performance, but neither is Kathy H, the narrator of Never Let Me Go. We watch her screw up every inch of her character’s courage only to see it deflate in mere minutes. Disillusionment.

18 – Paul Dano as Burt Fabelman in The Fabelmans – A charismatic performance which is so gripping because it is so, so sad. How hard we can see that Burt Fabelman tries, and how clear it is that he will always come second. Or third, or somewhere back in the pack.

17 – Edgar Ramirez as Carlos the Jackal in Carlos – One of the titanic performances not just of the 21st Century, but of all movie history. How often we watch brilliant men sink into self-love or self-obsession or just plain masturbation, but Ramirez brings this weedy, jaundiced grandeur to Carlos that makes that downfall feel much more essential.

16 – Franz Rogowski as Hans Hoffmann in Great Freedom – Probably not the Rogowski one would expect, certainly not after his lisping masterpiece in Passages, but in some ways this is the supreme acting performance. Hans is little more than a sketch, just a few whispers of a type of man dragging through the prisons of Cold War Germany, but Rogowski makes him a man who feels far more real than I feel myself.

15 – Al Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa in The Irishman – The old guy’s still got it, rumbling and grandstanding his way to a crucifixion he doesn’t see coming. One of the things that I love about this performance is that you can see the Serpico or the Sonny Wortzik in Hoffa, but his voice is cracking and low. He shouted too much in his youth, and now he doesn’t have much more than this gruff smoker’s baritone.

14 – Imelda Staunton as Vera Drake in Vera Drake – Would make a great double feature with Richard Jewell, now that I think of it. Staunton is playing a similar character, but oh, how her features contort into one of the saddest faces I’ve ever seen.

13 – Joe Pesci as Russell Bufalino in The Irishman – Perhaps the most menacing character of Pesci’s career, and marvelously, one of his wiriest and most understated. Not so much a case of “the old guy’s still got it” as it is a case of “oh man, the old guy found something new and tremendous.”

12 – Doug Jones as the Faun and the Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth – As long as Guillermo del Toro needs a flexible skinny guy who doesn’t mind being glued into full-body suits, there will always be a home for Doug Jones. The Pale Man is the reason he’s here, clearly. He is as indelible a character as any other from a horror movie of the century.

11 – Joanna Kulig as Zula in Cold War – One woman, many voices, many faces, one despair. The kind of woman one falls in love with, sucking her into the veins and arteries, and always one heartbreak from the fatal heart attack. If she dies, you die too.

10 – Tommy Lee Jones as Ed Tom Bell – Now that I am older and wiser, I know that this is the truly great performance in No Country for Old Men. It’s not as quotable or as marketable as what Javier Bardem is doing, but Jones understands that Ed Tom is a blinking firefly caught in a jar, suffocating, only so many blinks away from the last one.

9 – Bernard Hill as King Theoden in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers – This feels high to me as well, but to my mind it is an undeniable performance, the one that makes a potentially unruly picture cohere. Hill is truly kingly in this role, though, and his position as Middle-earth’s Churchill is inspirational. He makes the viewer believe in greatness.

8 – Alana Haim as Alana Kane in Licorice Pizza – Funny and geeky, a Nancy Drew with no mystery to solve but with a similar belief in her own wisdom countermanded by the foolishness of her day-to-day life. Like Rogowski, Haim doesn’t have much more than a picture to work from, but she finds the slouching and abnegating girl with dim highlights of pride in her anyway.

7 – Jack Haven as Maddy in I Saw the TV Glow – Jack Haven takes my breath away in I Saw the TV Glow. It’s that simple. They are a phantom, but I swear that they are real and that I could reach out and feel their breath on my hand. The monologue about Maddy’s entrance into the Pink Opaque chilled me and thrilled me all at once.

6 – Marion Cotillard as Sandra in Two Days, One Night – Two Days, One Night runs a little more than ninety minutes, and it’s a good thing it isn’t a second longer or I think I’d die watching Cotillard beg for her life again, and again, and again.

5 – Gary Oldman as George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – No, I haven’t seen the Alec Guinness version, and no, it wouldn’t diminish what Oldman does one bit. The driest lips in the British Empire belong to this man, whose mind is quick and whose movements are slow. The contradictions of spywork in the late Cold War are filtered into the contradictions Oldman finds for Smiley.

4 – Nina Hoss as Barbara in Barbara – This could just as easily be for Phoenix and it would rate around the same place. Where Hoss’s performance in Phoenix is about a facade made of gauzy paper, what she’s doing in Barbara is about wearing a mask made of papier-mache, obviously false, dangerously fragile. This is a brittle performance which, in its own way, anticipates the morality of Diehl’s work in A Hidden Life.

3 – Timothy Spall as J.M.W. Turner in Mr. Turner – What the Blankies would proudly refer to as a putters and murmurs champion, although I think that sells Spall short. Spall is playing an artist, damn it, and for as incomprehensible as his speech is, what makes an artist shine, and ultimately what makes an artist mortal, is as clear as received pronunciation.

2 – Emmanuelle Riva as Anne in Amour – You believe every bit of what happens to Anne. You feel each iota of her confusion, her pain, her weakness. We’re all going to die, and some of us are going to go just like that.

1 – Juliette Binoche as Elle in Certified Copy – Mysterious, playful, unknowable, and totally transparent all at once. I love the slipperiness of this performance, the knowing smiles that are played off against rue and vexation. This, even more than Three Colors: Blue, is the foremost evidence that Binoche is the greatest actress of her generation.