Great Performers The 10 Best Actors of the Year

Chosen by A.O. Scott and Wesley Morris

Photo Portfolio by Jack Davison

These are the 10 actors whose work in movies we found most captivating, challenging, shocking and inspiring in 2019. The performances are wildly varied and yet, this year, we stumbled up on a theme, or at least a pattern. Call it a motif of meta-ness: Most of these actors — not all, but a clear majority — have been chosen for their portrayals of other performing artists, people who live on the stage or screen or some other space where authenticity and artifice collide. This isn’t new. Movie actors have been impersonating actual and fictional thespians and thrushes at least since “The Jazz Singer,” and the musical or theatrical biopic may be the most reliable route to an Academy Award. Just ask Barbra Streisand (Fanny Brice), Sissy Spacek (Loretta Lynn), Jamie Foxx (Ray Charles) and Rami Malek (Freddie Mercury). This year is no different, with Taron Egerton’s Elton John, Renée Zellweger’s Judy Garland and Tom Hanks’s Fred Rogers all vying for Oscar biopic love. But the performers we chose did more than embody the stars of the past. They created new ones. In a culture saturated with celebrity and ruled by reality television, that is no small feat. The roster of great performers in these pages includes not only Jennifer Lopez but also Ramona Vega, the gentlemen’s-club dancer who brings dazzle and drama to “Hustlers.” Not only Elisabeth Moss but also Becky Something, a rock ’n’ roll diva who spends nearly the entirety of “Her Smell” teetering on the edge of abjection and transcendence. Not just Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson but also Charlie and Nicole Barber, the theater artists in “Marriage Story” who started out as actors and find themselves competing to direct the sad comedy of their divorce. Not just Antonio Banderas but also Salvador Mallo, the cineaste facing the austere autumn of a career defined by flamboyance in “Pain and Glory.” Not only Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt but also Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth, a minor Hollywood star and his stunt double, holding the line against the counterculture in “Once Upon a Time …in Hollywood.” Professional performers aren’t the only ones putting on an act. The hit man played by Robert De Niro in “The Irishman” pretends to be anyone other than who he really is, even as he risks losing touch with his self and his soul. Julianne Moore, as the utterly ordinary title character Gloria Bell, enacts a dramatic critique of the roles that women are compelled to play in everyday life. And Lupita Nyong’o, in “Us,” splits herself in two, brilliantly challenging our assumptions about private and public behavior and the masks we wear to deceive our families, our societies and ourselves. We’re in an era of high performance, of constantly questioning the reality not simply of what we see but also of who people are. Is this elected official, reality-show participant, Facebook friend to be trusted? That wariness makes perfect sense. (Who wants to be duped?) But it might miss the point of a proper performance, a proper great performance. You need a sense of artistry for that, a talent for magnifying the central elements of a character or an idea. We tend to talk about performance as though it’s the definition of falsehood when, at its best, it’s the height of truth. — A.O. Scott and Wesley Morris Read More

Adam Driver ‘Marriage Story’ If you want to insult an actor, you call him “interesting.” On the other hand, if you said that about someone you met in real life, it would be a pretty unambiguous compliment. An interesting person is someone you want to know better, someone worth thinking about, someone who has shown you something of who he is but at the same time held a little something back to encourage your ... interest. Adam Driver has to thread this needle in “Marriage Story,” Noah Baumbach’s tale of a divorce. There’s no question that Charlie Barber, Driver’s character, is an interesting guy. He knows it, too. A director who runs a theater company in Manhattan, he is used to being listened to, admired and liked. His confidence in his own appeal just makes him more appealing. His charm is unforced. His soon-to-be-ex-mother-in-law adores him, maybe more than she likes her own daughter, his soon-to-be-ex-wife. But his wife — Nicole, played by Scarlett Johansson — doesn’t love Charlie the way she used to. That’s largely why they are splitting up, and a lot of the plot of “Marriage Story” involves Charlie’s struggling to understand what is happening. Like many intellectuals, he’s deficient in both self-knowledge and the full awareness of other people’s existence. Nicole was always there, part of the unified field of his ego, which is now fracturing. In order to hold on to the people he loves, Charlie needs to let go of some of his narcissism, which is to say that he has to learn to be less interested in — less interesting to — himself. Driver, of course, has to move in the opposite direction, drawing us closer to the character and deepening our willingness to care about him. From the very beginning of his career — ever since he was that other Adam, on “Girls” — he has displayed a complicated charisma. He’s like a jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces. The essential picture keeps shifting from sweet to angry, sardonic to sincere. This is more than just the technical mastery of emotional complexity. There is an element of epistemological volatility in his acting: You never know for sure if the hints of self-consciousness, of anti-realism, come from him or from the characters. That’s always interesting. In “Marriage Story,” it’s devastating. — A.O. Scott

Lupita Nyong’o ‘Us’ I’m greedy about my stars. There is usually never enough of the good ones. Take Lupita Nyong’o. This woman can make a perfume ad worthy of the Louvre. She can turn a red carpet into the Yellow Brick Road. But I also like my stars onscreen. And she’s just not there very often. How can the fashion world be treating an Oscar winner better than the movies? I’m not the only person who wants to know. Jordan Peele appears to have been so determined to intervene that he cast Nyong’o in his horror-thriller ‘‘Us’’ — not once but two times, as a woman and her clone. One is ‘‘sane’’ and the other is ‘‘evil,’’ meaning Nyong’o alternates, terrifyingly, between two poles of psychological extremity. Sure, that in itself is a feat. But it’s merely the most obvious thing to applaud. The rigor of her achievement is that it won’t stop revealing itself. For the movie’s first third, what she’s doing might seem rather unremarkable. She plays Adelaide Wilson, who is bright, upper-middle-class and on vacation at her California ranch house with her goofy husband and their two children. Her biggest worry appears to be her teenage daughter’s decision to quit the track team. But you can sense her gathering fear that some terrible event is on its way; it’s dimming her glow as it heightens our anticipation. The event, of course, is the other Nyong’o. ... Read Wesley Morris on Lupita Nyong’o

Julianne Moore ‘Gloria Bell’ What a crapshoot actor Julianne Moore is! She’ll go for broke even if she breaks the movie, even if the movie might break her. (No movie has yet managed that.) Her best mode is some combination of wisdom, carnality and lunacy (the film’s as much as the character’s). Another way to put this is: I love deep-end Julianne Moore. To start: “Safe,” “Boogie Nights,” “The Big Lebowski,” “Magnolia,” “Chloe,” “Don Jon,” “Maps to the Stars.” “Gloria Bell” is mid-deep-end Moore. She’s an owlish divorcée who manhunts at her favorite nightspot. The movie is less about romantic predation than it is about nostalgia. Gloria believes in love in this club because once upon a time we all did. Moore makes Gloria radiantly lonely. Then she meets a prospect (John Turturro), and Moore gets to sensualize herself. Gloria doesn’t appear to be a deep-ender at all — until you realize she has already leapt into a void. Moore plays her in a way that seems suspended between an afterlife and actual existence, as a viable middle-aged woman resisting the retiring ghostliness expected of her. Solitude has left her enticingly off. That’s what Moore makes the most of: how Gloria’s a little too eager to connect, to be known — by men in that nightclub, by her own adult children. “It’s your mother,” she’ll say at the end of a rambling voice mail message. The entire performance (based on the Gloria that Paulina García so archly played in the original 2013 Chilean movie) is suffused with subdued panic. Is Gloria as sad, nervous and faux-casual as Moore makes her appear? If she falls in love again, will she stay in it? The thrill of Moore in this movie is the nature of that leap. It’s physics. It’s existential. Where’s she going to land? Will she land at all? Moore thrives in the peculiar gray zones of adult feeling. She can give a character life. But lots of good actors can do that. Moore can give you something greater: a character you can see has actually lived. — Wesley Morris

Brad Pitt ‘Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood’ and ‘Ad Astra’ As the stuntman Cliff Booth in Quentin Tarantino’s ‘‘Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood,’’ Brad Pitt laid down a performance of vintage Hollywood dudeness. His character is equally at ease being a human security blanket for his B-list-actor boss, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, as he is subduing murderous Manson family members while tripping on acid. In James Gray’s ‘‘Ad Astra,’’ Pitt used the same tools he wielded so deftly in Tarantino’s film — laconic cool; understated emotion — to build an entirely different version of masculinity. In it, he’s Roy McBride, an astronaut on an interplanetary mission to find his absentee (in multiple senses of the word) father. But McBride’s imperturbability is rooted in repression and hurt, nothing like Booth’s so-it-goes acceptance. ‘‘The two characters could be connected,’’ Pitt says, ‘‘in the sense that you have to go through an evolution to get to a place of comfort. You have to go through profound internal hardships.’’ — David Marchese Read an interview with Brad Pitt

Antonio Banderas ‘Pain and Glory’ Aging should be the easiest thing to perform. Strictly speaking — and leaving aside enhancements like prosthetic wrinkles and talcum-powdered hair — you don’t have to play it at all. Sooner or later, age plays you. An actor who reaches a certain stage of life, and has been a familiar face for at least half of his earthly span, needs only to show us that face. We’ll do the rest, measuring the longevity of our attraction in crags and furrows and whitened follicles as we muse on the mercies and ravages of time. In “Pain and Glory,” his eighth collaboration with Pedro Almodóvar (but only their third since 1989), Antonio Banderas lets his grizzled, melancholy, beautiful features carry their share of the burden. It’s a little shocking to see him looking not just gray but frail, as if his almost-60 body harbored a soul in deep senescence. That body is racked by a painful medical condition, and also by memories. Banderas’s character, a Spanish filmmaker named Salvador Mallo, was once a rebellious and celebrated cultural figure, very much like Almodóvar himself. Now, 30 years past his groundbreaking early prime and in a semiretirement that looks a lot like creative paralysis, Salvador reconnects with his former leading man, Alberto, a wayward, charismatic actor who might have a resemblance to Antonio Banderas. But “Pain and Glory” is more than a game of biographical peekaboo. Banderas, trailed by memories of his studly-sensitive, sometimes brutish personas in Almodóvar’s “Law of Desire,” “Matador” and “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” embodies a faded, unapologetic flamboyance. He is a maximalist in a shrunken time, a former thirst trap playing a man whose throat has grown dry. He moves slowly and cautiously. His voice is heavy. His face is gentle and impassive. The performance is so quiet and specific you might wonder if Banderas is even acting. He is, of course, but that isn’t all he’s doing. He is paying tribute to a friend and mourning a friendship, being himself and channeling the man who made him who he is, reclaiming his prime and leaving us to wonder how it all went by so fast. — A.O. Scott

Jennifer Lopez ‘Hustlers’ We see Ramona do a final flourish and walk down the stage. As Jennifer Lopez remembers it, that’s how an early draft of the ‘‘Hustlers’’ script described her character’s first scene. The ‘‘flourish’’ turned into something much more elaborate: an extended pole dance in which Lopez, dressed in something close to nothing, spins, twists and kicks through a display of erotic athleticism that ends with 300 strip-club patrons on their feet roaring, the stage carpeted with dollar bills and a struggling young dancer named Destiny (played by Constance Wu) in a state of slack-jawed adoration. ‘‘Doesn’t money make you horny?’’ Ramona asks Destiny as she heads for the roof, where she stretches out in her fur coat and lights a cigarette. The pole work, which required six weeks of training with a Cirque du Soleil acrobat, was Lopez’s idea. She explained the genesis of the scene on a gray afternoon in November, almost exactly two months after ‘‘Hustlers,’’ shot in 29 days on a relatively low budget the previous spring, opened, becoming one of the few nonfranchise hits of the movie year. ‘‘I said to Lorene’’ — Scafaria, who wrote and directed ‘‘Hustlers’’ — ‘‘that we have to see why Ramona is the star of the club. We can’t say it. We have to show it. I’m going to do this amazing dance. I don’t know what it is, but it’s going to be good. And from there you will see that she has total control of the club and the crowd, and Destiny is going to fall in love. She can’t help it.’’ ... Read A.O. Scott on Jennifer Lopez

Scarlett Johansson ‘Marriage Story’ Sides are the way of divorce. Each partner gets one, and then everyone else has to choose. So whose side is “Marriage Story” on? Seems like Charlie’s. Adam Driver plays him with so much coiled-up charm that you might excuse his self-absorption (he’s a worshiped downtown director) and fail to notice Nicole, the actress exiting his shadow. She emerges, in the opening shot, from darkness into light, then floods a montage with the attributes that Charlie finds most adorable. Minutes later, she’s slumped in a mediator’s office, irate. Her eyes are wet and concerningly tiny. She doesn’t want to be the dream girl from that montage. She wants to be who she is. And the only way to figure that out is to decamp. Playing Nicole, Scarlett Johansson might have the hardest acting assignment of the year. She has to observe and absorb while Driver simmers, Laura Dern declaims, Ray Liotta leaks unction and Julie Hagerty pilfers everything she gets her hands on. But Johansson’s combination of emotional steadiness and personal uncertainty is the core of this movie. At some point, Nicole visits the cozy, skyscraping law office of Dern’s Los Angeles divorce warrior, who leans over and all but whispers, “What we’re going to do together is tell your story.” And so for about 10 straight minutes, Johansson wanders around the room, in rumination, exclamation, exhalation, tears. Telling. At last. Johansson doesn’t get enough credit for being a great talker in the movies; for Woody Allen, in “Scoop” and “Vicki Cristina Barcelona,” and in a film like Spike Jonze’s “Her,” where her honeyed alto is the voice of an entire operating system. But giving language to years of unexpressed hope and exasperation in that lawyer’s office is the most wonderful, most human speaking Johansson has done. Johansson is playing a woman whose certitude has, for years, been divided by marital second guesses, by Charlie’s (and Driver’s) emotional bigness. What’s left is rue, weariness, indignation and self-rediscovery. Maybe it takes a second viewing to discover that Nicole’s rationality (and Johansson’s) obviate such a concept as sides. But this is a divorce film; and if it’s taking us to the battlements, I’m on hers. — Wesley Morris

Robert De Niro ‘The Irishman’ Disturbingly stoic, violent and seeking absolution he’s not sure he needs, the mob killer Frank Sheeran allowed Robert De Niro to deliver a majestic, subtle performance in ‘‘The Irishman’’ that has the feel of a crowning achievement — and for reasons that go beyond the screen. Based on Sheeran’s memoir, ‘‘I Heard You Paint Houses,’’ the film is haunted by the cinematic moments that De Niro, the director Martin Scorsese and the co-stars Al Pacino and Joe Pesci have made in so many movies about hard men with hollowed hearts. ‘‘The fact that me, Joe and Al were doing this film is something in and of itself,’’ said the halting, taciturn De Niro, who also played a key role in this fall’s controversial, Scorsese-indebted ‘‘Joker.’’ ‘‘Marty directing it says something. It all sets a tone. The audience’s perception of each character, us actors being together and what the story is — the film is all those things.’’ It’s also a reminder, as if we needed one, of the brutal and beautifully unsentimental revelations that only a peak De Niro performance can provide. — David Marchese Read an interview with Robert De Niro

Elisabeth Moss ‘Her Smell’ There are difficult characters, antiheroes, supervillains, leading men and women who test the limits of likability — and then there is Becky Something. She is the frontwoman and main creative force in Something She, a fictional but unnervingly real-seeming ’90s all-female power trio. Also its main destructive force. Becky’s greatest talent may be alienating the people who care most about her. Those include an ex-husband, her mother, two long-suffering bandmates, the head of her record label and just about everyone in “Her Smell” not played by Elisabeth Moss. There are stories of addiction and recovery, portraits of artists on the verge of breakdowns, tales of rock ’n’ roll dysfunction — and then there is “Her Smell.” Moss, obliterating the memory of Peggy Olson’s “Mad Men” pluck and Offred’s “Handmaid’s Tale” stoicism — and also, of course, playing off those same qualities — gives a performance that is both violently verbal and abrasively physical. No vanity, but a kind of abject bravura. She does not fear sweat, spit, snot, vomit or smeared mascara, but she also relishes Becky’s flights of wit, invective, insight and inspired nonsense. (“Big bad bossy Becky makes maudlin Mari mope” is how she summarizes a fight with a bandmate in the middle of the fight.) The surprise of her language is the key: It’s why everyone keeps coming around, even when what they get is disdain, humiliation and abuse. There are directors who test the audience’s tolerance for discomfort, rubbing our noses in ordinary human awfulness — and then there is Alex Ross Perry. “Her Smell” is his sixth feature. Moss has appeared in half of them, often unhinged or in tears. This one, like a horror movie in reverse, lets the monster out early. And then, in the middle, Becky goes quiet. Sober and penitent, she’s almost catatonic, whispering as if afraid to wake up the internal demons. Her young daughter, visiting for the first time in a while, asks for a song, and Becky plays one on the piano: Bryan Adams’s “Heaven,” a cheesy Gen X ballad that is the opposite of punk rock. It’s a clumsy, heartfelt cover of a bad classic song, and it’s proof of Becky’s artistry, which is to say of Moss’s too. — A.O. Scott

Leonardo DiCaprio ‘Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood’ Do you consider Leonardo DiCaprio funny? Like, on purpose? Well, please do! Some of his best moments are the riotous ones. Once, in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” as the wolf, he downed some quaaludes and rolled down the steps of a country club like a sack of apples in a stop-motion dream. Another time, he was one of those genteel antebellum racists — Calvin Candie in “Django Unchained” — whom he inflated with a lot of “I do de-clahr!” effrontery. (With all due respect to Django, DiCaprio was unchained.) Rick Dalton is the latest and most embarrassed enrollee in DiCaprio’s Comedy Club. Rick is an actor whose star, in 1969, has grown dingy. And in “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood,” DiCaprio has a ball recreating Rick’s TV-western mulch and B-movie schlock. He gives the gunslinging every ounce of deadpan machismo he can summon and becomes exactly the flamethrowing maniac you need for an action pageant called “Fourteen Fists of McCluskey.” DiCaprio has to hold on to the movie’s satirical showbiz insanity as well as Rick’s alcoholism, square bravado, insecurity, faded stardom and private misery. None of that is funny, per se, except that DiCaprio wills it to be so, not simply in the furious mock-Hollywood bits but in a long, gorgeous passage right in the middle of the movie, on the set of a western series. Rick has taken a gig as a villain (another one), and before the cameras roll, he finds himself chatting with a young co-star who tells him he’s the best actor she’s ever worked with. In between, Rick flubs a line and, in costume and in his trailer, proceeds to berate himself for being an undisciplined hack. It’s as divine as any of DiCaprio’s great eruptions, at once a joke on acting and perhaps a window into the soul of a star — Jack Lord devastated that he’ll never be Jack Lemmon. I’m with the kid. Sort of. Rick is one of the most mediocre actors I’ve ever seen. But it takes a real maestro to summon all that talentlessness and keep knocking you out of your chair. — Wesley Morris