The Hollywood Reporter’s Critics Pick the Best Movie Performances of 2024

DAVID ROONEY Almost invariably when we start digging into our annual chat about the most memorable performances of the year, I look at my notes and find the women far outnumber the men. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t outstanding work from male actors, but several women pulled off astonishing high-wire acts that I’m still thinking about, in some cases many months after seeing the films.

At the top of the heap, I’d have to put Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s snarling turn in Hard Truths, her reunion with Secrets & Lies director Mike Leigh. Her Pansy is on constant alert in early scenes, ready to flare up with rage at the slightest annoyance, and Jean-Baptiste pushes her sourness to frequently comic heights. But almost imperceptibly, with only the subtlest softening, the actress starts to engage our empathy. She forces us to reckon with Pansy’s bone-deep weariness, her pain and disappointment and history of trauma.

Our investment is fostered especially through Pansy’s scenes with her younger sister, Chantelle, the only person neither scared off nor antagonized by her spikiness. Played with warmth and infinite compassion by Michele Austin, Chantelle weathers every brittle remark and scornful huff, making it clear that her bond is unbreakable, and compelling the begrudging Pansy to reciprocate.

Lovia, do you have a favorite performance of the year?

LOVIA GYARKYE Jean-Baptiste in Hard Truths also ranks highly for me. She imbues Pansy’s woundedness with a grace that allows us, as you pointed out, to see beyond her abrasive exterior. I’m fascinated by Leigh’s extended rehearsal process, in which he works closely with each performer to shape their character. Here, that effort manifests in understated moments that clue us in to how race, class and gender have shaped Pansy’s life as a Black British woman. Her lacerating words and actions seem like calluses, the collateral damage on a sensitive soul exposed to a harsh world.

I felt a similar sense of trust between Halina Reijn and Nicole Kidman in Babygirl. Reijn’s third directorial outing, about a tightly wound CEO who embarks on a steamy entanglement with a much younger intern, is billed as an erotic thriller. But it’s also a comedy. There’s humor in fulfilling sexual fantasies, which are inherently silly and playful. Kidman’s performance — especially in scenes with Harris Dickinson, who does excellent work as her affair partner — acknowledges the relationship between the explicit and the comic without mocking it.

Another instance of this actor-director symbiosis is Denzel Washington and Ridley Scott in Gladiator II. Washington is one of our greatest gifts, and in this muscular Roman epic, he plays a reptilian figure with shifty motives. The fluidity in his physicality — audaciously brandishing his ring-adorned fingers, haughtily sweeping his toga upon entering or leaving a space — coupled with his confident delivery is so much fun to watch. He’s working on a different plane from the rest of the cast.

ROONEY Yes, a thousand times to your Denzel appreciation. Just the way he works those dazzling gold-trimmed robes speaks to a regal showmanship that could be merely flamboyant in lesser hands. Here, it reads as the effortless authority of a man who delights in the puppet-master position afforded him by unscrupulous wheeling and dealing. Those bejeweled fingers express so much; even the salt-and-pepper hair becomes part of his ornamentation. But the fabulous look would be nothing without the devious sense of purpose with which he inhabits it.

As for Kidman, I’m impressed that four decades into her career, she keeps seeking out adventurous projects and pushing herself in daring new ways. Babygirl is juicy and perverse in its exploration of the pleasure to be found in relinquishing control, and Kidman is incandescent in it.

GYARKYE Pivoting to some newer faces, the teen-show-to-prestige-film pipeline remains strong, with Grown-ish‘s Ryan Destiny and Outer Banks‘ Drew Starkey in lead turns every bit as energizing as Riverdale alum Charles Melton’s in 2023’s May December.

In the unconventional boxing biopic The Fire Inside, Destiny manages the difficult task of honoring the tenacity of Olympic athlete Claressa “T-Rex” Shields without resorting to caricature. She nails the tenderness that reminds us that Claressa is still a teenager negotiating her place in the world. In one scene, set shortly after she’s told she needs to appear more feminine in order to secure sponsorships, Destiny applies lip gloss and smiles to herself in the mirror, before hastily removing all traces of makeup. The moment highlights the tensions she (like many women athletes) faces in her career, and her mourning for a compromised girlhood.

And although there surely will be a lot of talk about Daniel Craig as Lee in Queer, Starkey deserves credit too for his challenging work as Eugene, the object of Lee’s desire. The dashing American expat is an enigma to Lee, to the audience, maybe even to himself — but Starkey signals his character’s complexity even as he channels his mystery.

ROONEY I’m so glad you mentioned Starkey. What you’re saying about Eugene remaining an enigma even to himself is so true: He’s still figuring out who he is, which makes him both unknowable and malleable. It’s easy to accept Eugene slipping into the lopsided love affair because Lee removes the burden of his identity uncertainties by creating a persona for him, at least until he stumbles into deeper self-knowledge.

We’re not going to talk about the reasons a gay man d’un certain âge like me might have responded so strongly to Craig’s performance, but he captures a feeling of surrender, both to twink intoxication and opioid addiction, that gives the movie its sad, dreamy sensuality. You could almost read Craig’s work here as his exorcism of James Bond, so completely does he give himself over to a character whose charm and urbane sophistication can only bolster him for so long.

GYARKYE It’s nice to see an actor take on a role that diverges from their previous work, like Craig in Queer — or Hugh Grant in Heretic. Playing an obsessive theologian who lures two Mormon evangelists into a trap, Grant wields his rom-com charm for sinister purposes, and his creepy performance gives the religious thriller its edge.

Also in horror territory, I’d be remiss not to mention Lily-Rose Depp in Robert Eggers’ gorgeous remake of Nosferatu. The Idol star does some of her best work as the catatonic, increasingly isolated Ellen, with a haunting physicality that relays a raw and palpable pain. Depp goes beyond Ellen’s virginal purity to complicate our understanding of this character’s relationship to darkness — how she is at once disturbed by and deeply intimate with it.

As to a different kind of darkness, I was impressed by Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump in The Apprentice. (His other big performance this year, in Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man, also deserves praise.) Taking on a part that could easily have devolved into cringey farce, he imbues it instead with surprising pathos, playing the future grifter-in-chief as a striver with daddy issues. He’s well complemented by Jeremy Strong, characteristically excellent as Roy Cohn.

ROONEY Keeping with the theme of unsettling tales about the U.S., I was bowled over by The Brutalist. Adrien Brody gives possibly his best performance as a Hungarian Jewish architect who survives World War II and tastes the opportunities of a new life in America until it’s rudely (brutally, if you will) pulled out from under him. His role, as a flawed genius who suffers for his art but is undone by his hubris, his drug addiction and the cutoff of his wealthy employer’s patronage, is harrowing.

And as that powerful industrialist, Guy Pearce is chilling. His privileged position allows him to be a benefactor one minute and a ruthless executioner the next, slashing the architect down to size as a reminder that they can never be equals.

But let’s shift into a more sensitive gear. Another wonderful performance that has stayed with me is Kieran Culkin’s in A Real Pain. His Benji is the filter-free, flaky polar opposite of his uptight cousin David, played by writer-director Jesse Eisenberg, and the odd-couple dynamic of their early scenes is hilariously spiky. But over the course of the pair’s tour of Poland to visit their late grandmother’s ancestral home, Benji’s flippant manner keeps dissolving to reveal internal conflict and profound melancholy. Culkin just wrecked me.

I was also moved by Cillian Murphy in Small Things Like These who delivers an internalized performance superior even to his very fine work in Oppenheimer. He plays a withdrawn coal merchant in 1980s Ireland who’s made to decide between looking the other way out of self-preservation or speaking up about the exploitation and suffering he witnesses. I can’t recall another actor this year who conveyed so much with his eyes alone.

GYARKYE The chatter about Nickel Boys has often been focused on its formal risk-taking, but I think it’s also notable for its lead performances, defined (like Starkey’s or Murphy’s) by their quiet intensity. Though the camera’s subjective point of view establishes a sense of intimacy, it’s the considered work by Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson, as two boys whose fates intersect at a violent reform school, that cements it.

I was likewise won over by the paired stars of Wicked. Ariana Grande undoubtedly shines as Glinda, but it’s Cynthia Erivo’s take on Elphaba that really stuck with me. Her withdrawn and wounded bearing taps into a vulnerability that later transforms into a heartbreaking strength — captured in a rendition of “Defying Gravity” that plays as a powerful act of self-reclamation.

ROONEY There are a bunch of other brilliant turns by women I’d love to bring into the conversation. Mikey Madison is both an innocent Cinderella and a scrappy spitfire in Anora, as a Brooklyn sex worker who impulsively marries the cokehead son of a Russian oligarch. Though her infantile husband and his family treat Anora as a disposable plaything, Madison gives her a thrilling pugnacity — while at the same time locating the pathos of her emotionally bruising ordeal. Her scenes with Yura Borisov, as an unexpectedly kind Russian goon, give the screwball comedy genuine heart.

Anora’s defiant spirit is shared by Fernanda Torres’ Eunice in I’m Still Here, a mother of five who reinvents herself as a lawyer and activist after her husband is disappeared by Brazil’s military dictatorship. Walter Salles’ shattering drama traces a lovely full-circle arc by casting Torres’ real-life mother, Fernanda Montenegro — unforgettable in the same director’s Central Station in 1998 — as Eunice in her final years.

GYARKYE As we’re discussing our favorite performances by women, my mind turns to Danielle Deadwyler in The Piano Lesson. Her Berniece explicitly connects this adaptation of August Wilson’s drama to its original inspiration — Romare Bearden’s 1983 color lithograph The Piano Lesson — and becomes the center around which the other actors revolve. In the film’s stirring climax, when Berniece’s encounter with the instrument becomes a moment of revelation, Deadwyler digs into the depths of Berniece’s rage, grief and vulnerability. It’s transfixing.

ROONEY Besides these great solo performances, there were some stellar female ensembles as well. Jacques Audiard’s queer crime musical, Emilia Pérez, has been sharply divisive, but few can argue with the soulful depth and self-discovery that Karla Sofía Gascón mines as the title character, a former cartel boss seeking redemption and the love of her family after gender-affirming surgery. There’s no less complexity or shading in Zoe Saldaña’s flinty performance as the morally conflicted lawyer roped into becoming Emilia’s problem-solver.

Then there’s the trio of outstanding leads from His Three Daughters: Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen, playing sisters who could not be less alike, forced to find common ground as their father lies dying in the next room. The electrifying sparks that fly among them are offset by exquisite moments of tender reconciliation, hatched out of their shared sorrow.

Some of the performances that stayed with me are from movies that otherwise didn’t. Civil War promises way more political provocation than it delivers. But Kirsten Dunst gives the film a battered humanity as a veteran war photographer whose eyes convey the horrors she has witnessed, now veiled by numbness, all the way up to a devastating final scene.

And Lovia, I think we agree that one of the most wildly overpraised movies of the year is The Substance, which milks body horror from the depreciation of women in a celebrity culture fixated on youth and beauty but does so with bludgeoning unsubtlety. What it does have in its favor is a mesmerizing performance, full of visceral desperation and operatic suffering, from Demi Moore — a star who no doubt knows a thing or two about the limited shelf life for women in Hollywood.

GYARKYE I agree with you about The Substance, David, and I particularly love that you keyed in to Moore’s visceral desperation. Nowhere is that more apparent and heartbreaking than in the date night scene, where Moore turns the application of makeup — the aggressive way she applies lipstick, or wipes off eyeliner and reapplies it — into a crushing barometer for insecurity.

All this talk about The Substance has me thinking about Zoë Kravitz’s Blink Twice. Naomi Ackie’s powerful performance, as a cocktail waitress who follows a disgraced tech tycoon to his private island, focuses a movie that otherwise is scattered in its messaging. She pulls from a thinly sketched character a raw and vulnerable portrait of a woman collapsing under the weight of sexual trauma.

Speaking of a woman and her traumas, I was so impressed by Kani Kusruti in All We Imagine as Light and Girls Will Be Girls. She plays a nurse wrestling with the fate of her marriage in the former — one of my favorites of the year — and I’d swear her face was made for the camera. Many of the most beautiful images in Payal Kapadia’s stunning debut are close-ups of Kusruti’s expressive eyes, constantly threatening to betray her poised demeanor.

In Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls, Kusruti plays an overprotective mother whose intervention in her teenage daughter’s romantic life leads to a startling love triangle. We’ve seen a number of onscreen romances between older women and younger men this year, and while this one never gets as explicit as Babygirl, it’s propelled by suggestion. Kusruti gives an invigorating performance as a character confronting a vibrant emotional life muted by domesticity.

ROONEY While we’re on the subject of actors who popped in multiple roles this year, a word about the incredible range of Josh O’Connor. In La Chimera, he’s part of a community of Italian grave-robbers looting Etruscan relics for resale. Dressed in the grubby linen suit of an English traveler gone to seed, he’s a man in torment, suspended between life and death, past and present, openheartedness and fatalism. By contrast, in Challengers, his sexual swagger is off the charts as the disruptive third point of a romantic triangle with Zendaya and Mike Faist.

Finally, I have to mention one of the year’s most eccentric performances — Nicolas Cage in another gonzo turn for the ages as the eponymous Longlegs. With his character’s quasi-falsetto and gender-blurring appearance, Cage tickled my glam-rock nostalgia, seeming to channel both Marc Bolan and Tiny Tim. You believe this psycho killer has a direct line to Satan when he gives a creepy smile and talks of “My friend downstairs.”

Lovia, we’ll no doubt be banished to hell with Longlegs’ friend for failing to mention a number of much loved 2024 performances. So let’s end by reminding readers that just because other actors aren’t included here doesn’t mean we didn’t appreciate their work. A word count is a word count.

This story appeared in the Dec. 4 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.