Movement is a basic cinematic element: They’re called motion pictures for a reason. But dancing in movies — one of the glories of the form, from the arrival of sound through film’s serial golden ages — what happened to that? The movie musical expired. The music video arrived. At the multiplex, the city-smashing superhero action sequence supplanted the large-scale production number. Instead of dazzlingly figurative sublimated sex, we could now gaze on the (simulated) real thing.

We still crave dance on screen, even if we consume it as camp or nostalgia or contest — or in quotation marks, as in “La La Land” or “Magic Mike.” Movies with music and about musicians are big again. Movies about dancers still exist. But rarely are the musicians dancing, and rarely do the dancers act. Can choreography really tell as good a story as screenwriting? For decades, we’ve been afraid to say yes. We distrust it as a vehicle for narrative or feeling.

But there is so much feeling that needs a story right now, when all kinds of people are mad — in real life and in the movies — for all kinds of reasons. Some of those people are played by the 12 actors selected for this year’s Great Performers Issue, especially by the women. When we finished with our list, we noticed that women outnumbered men, three to one. We thought about adjusting the balance but decided not to. Female anger is a potent political, social and creative force nowadays, and perhaps our critical antennas (like the movies themselves) picked up on that.

Sometimes the anger roars. Other times it seethes. It can be silent or eloquent, mighty or impotent, righteous or nasty. Or almost invisible. In the case of the famous writer’s spouse played by Glenn Close in “The Wife,” fury is the subtext, the road not taken, the reasonable but somehow unacceptable response to a life of almost-imperceptible humiliation. If Toni Collette’s character in “Hereditary” were to unleash her anger, the gates of hell might literally open. (Spoiler alert: They do anyway.) For the housekeeper in “Roma,” played by Yalitza Aparicio, rage is a luxury her social status denies her. And yet it’s a moment of sudden, almost tidal fury that irrevocably alters her life.

So what to do with that rage? One option is to dance it out, which feels like a very movie thing to do, an old-school movie thing to do. The cast members of this year’s Great Performers do magnificent — and magnificently physical — work in their respective movies. What they don’t do is much dancing, with the spectacular exception of Rachel Weisz in a memorable scene in “The Favourite,” in which she tears up a ballroom floor. There’s an argument to be made that the best outlet for rage is rage itself: Scream; stomp your feet; punch the wall; vote the bastards out. You might feel better. The history of film, and the dancing these actors do in our pages, raise another possibility too: What if movement is another form of ventilation?

Glenn Close

Film: “The Wife”

Graeme Hunter/Sony Pictures Classics

We like to pretend that the best acting is lifelike, that it’s sitting for a portrait or a still life. Sometimes it is. But acting is also an art of emotional ostentation and hysterical lunges, an art of shamelessness that’s a lot larger than life. Glenn Close has always been at home in acting’s too-much zone — meltdowns, snaps, dam bursts, breaks from reality and blatant cuckoo-clocking, which she can explode into without warning, a bomb with no fuse.

Close does something different in “The Wife.” She’s all fuse. For decades, her character, Joan Castleman, has been married to a pompous novelist of great renown. He wins the Nobel Prize, and she accompanies him to Stockholm, dragging the fuse along with them. It’s a delicate trick Close has to perform. The exact nature of Joan’s frustration with what we suspect is some awful marital transgression has to remain private, for plot purposes. We don’t know what’s going on with her until the final minutes of the movie, but the skill of the performance distracts you with an unsettling sensation of pretraumatic stress.

This trick is achieved through a lot of wincing and bristling and glowering, but also a lot of smiling and reassuring and deflecting. This isn’t just some great man’s spouse. She’s a master politician. And when Close does, at last, run out of fuse, what’s moving about her detonation is how this master of emotional eruption strives to contain it. Joan doesn’t think she can afford to blow up. Maybe her rage is too dangerous. Or maybe Joan is a culmination of Close’s previous women and the consequences of their anger — how it was misconstrued, laughed at, punished. Her refusal to go all the way off feels like a cruel lesson learned. There’s power in that, and for Close, another occasion for psychological ingenuity. Here’s one of our most daring actors reaching into her legendary toolbox to play both bomb and bomb squad. Wesley Morris

Ethan Hawke

Film: “First Reformed”

A24

As a devout literalist, I try not to use the word “icon” and its derivatives to refer to anything other than a religious image of the kind associated with the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches. A movie star’s performance, for instance, should not be labeled “iconic” unless someone is likely to kneel and pray before it. Ethan Hawke’s face in “First Reformed” comes close to fulfilling this narrow rule, and not only because the grace and intensity of his performance invite reverent awe.

Filmed in close-up, in shadow, in winter daylight, that well-known visage is haggard and thoughtful, earnest and melancholy. It belongs to a man — the Rev. Ernst Toller, minister to a dwindling congregation at a small, historic church in upstate New York — menaced by spiritual and physical agonies that he works hard not to show. He spends his solitary nights drinking whiskey and writing in a diary, his days attending to pastoral business, like counseling sessions with a troubled young environmental activist. Quietly and inexorably, Toller’s pains and frustrations grow into a full-blown crisis, as the state of his soul becomes entwined with the fate of the earth itself.

Linking the global consequences of climate change with the unraveling of an individual psyche sounds like a recipe for disaster — or at least for a hectoring, grandiose movie. “First Reformed,” written and directed by Paul Schrader, is the opposite of that. Schrader’s style is austere, understated, with spare dialogue and minimal camera movements. His cinematic influences include rigorous antishowmen like Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson, and his own religious background (in a denomination like Toller’s) is profoundly anti-iconic, suspicious of graven images, especially moving pictures.

Hawke’s performance thus exists in a state of tension with itself: The only way to convey Toller’s inner torment authentically is not to show it; the only way to respect his moral anguish is to allow him to disappear. This abnegation demands a discipline that goes much deeper than the usual actorly virtue of underplaying. It requires something akin to holiness. A.O. Scott

Toni Collette

Film: “Hereditary”

A24

Horror is the most Freudian of genres, less for its traffic in the terrors of the unconscious than for its exploitation of the psychoanalytic concept of ambivalence. We identify, by turns, with the victim and the monster, and a lot of recent horror movies heighten this thrilling confusion by making it hard to tell which is which. This is especially true when mothers are involved: We don’t always know whether to be afraid for them or afraid of them.

Ari Aster’s “Hereditary” is a maze of horrors built on this ambiguity, with Toni Collette’s Annie at its center. Annie, who lives with her family in a hulking wood-frame house somewhere in the American West, is an artist who specializes in miniature architecture, making hyperrealist dollhouses haunted by her own bad memories and anxious premonitions. As a mother, she’s convincingly imperfect. She’s flummoxed by her young daughter’s eccentricities and sometimes comes down too hard on her teenage son. But Annie seems like a big improvement over her own mother, a fiendishly complicated woman whose death sets in motion a swirl of increasingly scary business.

For most of the movie, we can’t identify the source of the fear, though we suspect that it’s coming, as the saying goes, from inside the house. Which might mean from inside Annie’s psyche, a fascinating and unnerving place. She is analytical, hysterical, cruel, selfless, exhausted, impatient and inspired — a portrait of the artist as a woman on the verge of ... what? A nervous breakdown? A creative breakthrough? A marital breakup?

Whichever it is, Collette’s complicated presence — the way she sets her teeth, narrows her eyes, claws at the air to take back words she didn’t mean to say — is what gives “Hereditary” life. But as often happens with mothers, her heroic work is taken for granted and pushed aside. Patriarchy is a hell of a thing. A.O.S.

Lakeith Stanfield

Film: “Sorry to Bother You”

Annapurna Pictures

To give the hero of a dystopian satire of 21st-century hypercapitalism the name Cash Green is to make his already-dicey existential state that much more precarious. The poor guy is sure to be haunted by the suspicion that he’s nothing more than an allegorical figure, a metaphor called into being to illustrate his creator’s ideas. And in a movie like “Sorry to Bother You” — a dystopian satire etc. created by Boots Riley — that burden is inevitably downloaded onto an actor. Luckily for all concerned, the actor who plays Cash Green is Lakeith Stanfield.

In “Get Out,” Stanfield was the abductee whose behavior revealed the higher horror of the whiteness, the scale and depravity of what was going on in the Armitage household. On the FX series “Atlanta,” he has been Donald Glover’s sidekick, foil and sacrificial friend. His face conveys kindness and melancholy, diffidence and sensitivity in combinations that are hard to read and impossible to stop studying. He’s unpredictable, mercurial, interesting.

“Sorry to Bother You” didn’t require so much finesse from its star. Cash is Riley’s Candide, making his way through an increasingly bizarre version of a familiar reality. His passivity is what allows him to function as our eyes and ears as we explore the nooks and crannies of this world of telemarketing scams, tech-bro schemes and bioengineering catastrophes. His luck, perhaps more than his ambition, propels him into its upper reaches.

But it’s his feelings that make the movie more than just (brilliantly) wacky or (startlingly) didactic. Cash may be naïve out of necessity — the story requires that he be dazzled and disillusioned by what he learns about wealth, power and ruling-class ethics — but he is also clever and vulnerable. He can be flattered and humiliated, most brutally in a painful party scene where he is reduced to a caricature of blackness. His pain at that moment is a reminder of how easily, how automatically, black men are reduced to symbols, in movies and elsewhere. In defiance of his name, Cash Green fights to be free of that. A.O.S.

Regina Hall

Film: “Support the Girls”

Magnolia Pictures

“Support the Girls” is a comedy set in Texas, at a Hooters-style sports bar called Double Whammies, during a particularly chaotic 24 hours in the life of its unsinkable general manager, Lisa. The cable is out, there’s a robber stuck in a vent, one waitress has run over her ex, one just got a taboo tattoo and another has dragged in her sick son. Oh, and the owner is a lunatic.

Let’s say there are two ways to play Lisa: with her hair on fire or Regina Hall’s way. She applies all of her vulnerability, comic timing and Lone Star twang to a part written to be no bigger than the size of life. Hall has been acting — in spoofs and dramedies and ensemble crowd-pleasers — for more than 20 years, and this is the richest part she has ever had. But rather than sit back and savor that, she seems to be in motion through most of the movie’s 90 minutes, pacing and running and escorting people here and there. Even when Lisa is just sitting curbside, Hall keeps the character’s mind racing — with stress, sure, but also with wonder. She also keeps Lisa a little mysterious. The performance is a kind of balancing act — of plot, feelings, consequences. Lisa’s a black woman, overseeing a place that runs on misogyny and racism. (“You’re not allowed to put two black girls on the same shift,” somebody reminds her.) She knows her life is contradictory, but she also seems to know that all life is contradictory.

“Support the Girls” was directed by Andrew Bujalski, one of the pitifully few young American filmmakers who still believe in the inexhaustible possibilities of light comedy. He also believes in Hall. There’s a brief passage in which she disappears from the movie. It’s meant to get her boss to see how Double Whammies doesn’t work without Lisa. But it also feels like an argument for any movie Hall’s in. Bujalski appreciates that she’s an artist who can juggle the humane and the ridiculous, who can make a joke and take a joke without ever having to be the joke. W.M.

Julia Roberts

Film: “Ben Is Back”

Mark Schafer/LD Entertainment/Roadside Attractions

How did Julia Roberts, of all people, seem to come out of nowhere in 2018 and blow us away?

Part of the force in her performance in Peter Hedges’s “Ben Is Back” has to do with our long relationship with this star. We don’t know Julia Roberts, but we do know “Julia Roberts.” And here she is in a new mode: churchy suburban mom whose cozy life with a second family turns upside down when her addict son from a previous marriage (the Ben of the title) comes home for Christmas. Roberts uses her stardom some — that smile of hers is forced into a rictus of iffy optimism — but it’s more restrained. She has discovered new ways of doing fear and nervous comedy, not for acting’s sake, but to serve the mounting desperation of her character.

That desperation is communicated to the audience through the failure, or foreclosure, of precisely the brisk, incandescent brand of charisma we’ve grown accustomed to seeing as Julia Roberts-ness. Her defining roles involve triumph achieved through radiant confidence and hard-won competence. Holly Burns, her character here, tries to draw on her own version of those qualities, telling people off in ways that evoke the brassy heroism of “Pretty Woman” and “Erin Brockovich.”

Normally, when a Roberts character loses it, it’s because she’s right in a world that’s wrong, and the anger is meant to identify and then destroy the injustice. No rival can withstand that killer combination of righteousness and charm. But Ben’s addiction is a monster our familiar and beloved “Julia Roberts” can’t slay, and Holly’s discovery of the limits of her own will — and of the class privilege and maternal moral authority that back it up — gives horrific power to what might otherwise be a fairly conventional domestic drama.

Roberts has had to find new devices, and the shock of this performance is that she finds a lot of them — including a heartbreaking helplessness we’ve never seen before. A.O.S. & W.M.

Yalitzia Aparicio

Film: “Roma”

Alfonso Cuarón

In the history of American movies — and of Latin American movies, too — domestic workers have tended to be marginal figures, providing comic relief or moral support for the privileged people whose lives and struggles are expected to command our sympathy and attention. Even well-meaning attempts to overcome this injustice — “The Help,” say — wind up reproducing it. Condescension can seem to be built into the camera’s gaze.

Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma,” based on his own memories of growing up in a bourgeois Mexico City household, upends this tradition, placing a young housekeeper named Cleo at the center of a sweeping tale of family life and social upheaval. Cuarón’s expansive compositions and wide-ranging humanism provide the frame, but the story is animated by the sympathetic and authoritative presence of Yalitza Aparicio, perhaps the screen discovery of 2018.

Aparicio was training to be a teacher when she auditioned for the part of Cleo, her first film role. Film history abounds in memorable “nonprofessional” performers, the real-life peasants and workers who brought Italian neorealism to life and the untrained “models” who populate the work of Robert Bresson. What they contributed to cinema was a sense of the mystery and opacity of ordinary people. Aparicio has some of those qualities, but she also possesses what only true movie stars have — a unique amalgam of magnetism, fearlessness and craft.

The dramatic heart of “Roma” is a long sequence that begins at a furniture store and ends in a maternity ward, with a bloody riot in the middle. Cleo, pregnant by a young man who has run off to join a right-wing paramilitary group, is swept up in an almost unendurable storm of danger, fear and physical distress. Aparicio’s ordeal seems almost as intense, and the torrent of feeling she unleashes at the end of it does not look like acting at all. Which is to say that it’s everything acting can be. A.O.S.

Elsie Fisher

Film: “Eighth Grade”

Linda Kallerus/A24

If words like “um,” “you know” and “like” are conversational seasoning, then who among us isn’t guilty of oversalting? But when it comes to tic talk, Elsie Fisher is not one of us. She’s the Salt Bae of middle-school angst, an instant master of verbal awkwardness and its bodily expression. It’s possible to see “Eighth Grade” and assume you’ve stumbled upon some documentary about a miserable 13-year-old named Kayla. That’s only because Fisher so completely mixes inertia, inquisitiveness and insecurity — and because a lot of us hadn’t really seen her act before.

It would be easy to zero in on all the sad stuff about Kayla — her blemished skin and dire social life, her rage. But the surprise is how funny Fisher is with the emotional weight of her teenage temper: how it all but capsizes her father-daughter dinners or how she waddles toward a busy swimming pool with her arms folded around her middle, failing to hide her childlike bathing suit. It’s the physicality of Fisher’s performance that’s upsetting and also arresting, how humiliation sends Kayla’s body into a kind of rigor mortis. Fisher takes everyday mortification to a deeper, scarier place.

Kayla’s smartphone has become an external organ, a lifeline, a fun-house mirror and a portal for escaping her social isolation. She’s good at swiping and tapping but not so good at speaking to the kids she D.M.s, texts and ogles, or to her single dad, whose justifiable concern she shuns. There’s something mesmerizing about the way Kayla gazes into her phone — looking for answers, looking for herself. And Fisher’s approach is entirely original. How do you play somebody as generic as a pubescent teenage girl? And what kind of pubescent teenage girl do you play? Fisher actually creates two Kaylas. One is a knot of hormones and nerves and feelings. The other is the sunny life coach she pretends to be in her YouTube diaries, dispensing advice on confident comportment — a projection into the internet’s void of the self she wishes she could be. W.M.

Yoo Ah-In

Film: “Burning”

Well Go USA

What if we’ve been wrong about watching paint dry? What about the upsides? It’s true that, while the paint sets, you could be folding clothes or streaming an entire season of some TV show. At first, as you watch Yoo Ah-in move through “Burning,” slowly undertaking the most mundane tasks (chitchatting with a lonely cow; masturbating), you might think, a little resentfully, I’m watching paint dry. But eventually his methodical manner darkens outward into a kind of cosmic alienation. How Yoo goes from recent college graduate and struggling writer to vengeful stalker without outlining how, exactly, he got there — that’s the drying of the paint, and it’s riveting.

The movie, a slow-boiling thriller that Lee Chang-dong directed and adapted from a Haruki Murakami story, needs Yoo to do more listening and looking than talking. His character, Jong-su, befriends a girl who seduces him and then asks him to feed her cat while she’s away, which means driving to Seoul from the failing rural farm of his incarcerated father. She returns with a smooth yuppie whose seeming indifference to her subsequent disappearance arouses Jong-su’s gathering suspicion.

Yoo is a big, charismatic star in South Korea. Through Lee, he achieves a kind of sleight of hand, conjuring a state of bemusement that deepens into anomie. He’s almost anticharismatic — almost. He’s still got that open, handsome face, so you’re drawn to him, which allows for a grand misperception. It’s entirely likely that the person we’re left with at the end of the movie was also there in the opening minutes. All that drying paint has become an abstract painting — grim and stunning. W.M.

Emma Stone

Rachel Weisz

Film: “The Favourite”

Olivia Colman

Film: “The Favourite”



Yorgos Lanthimos/20th Century Fox Yorgos Lanthimos/20th Century Fox

Everything about “The Favourite” is a little geometric. Everybody is angling for something. But what Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz and particularly Olivia Colman are asked to do with their bodies becomes an achievement stranger and far more delightful than regular math. It becomes origami. They do flabbergasting amounts of rising and falling, topping and bottoming. Has there ever been a movie whose comedy is predicated upon physical abjection as a literal expression of its political and sexual corollaries? That’s a long way of saying that each woman’s performance has to keep a lot on the table and in the air. And Stone and Weisz have to orbit the bewitching solar object that is Colman.

Which is why picking just one of these performances seemed unthinkable. Remove one leg of the triangle, and the structure collapses, the B.D.S.M. Rube Goldberg contraption sputters and stalls. The three-way juggling act that Stone, Weisz and Colman undertake seems almost calculated to flummox the Academy, which insists on dividing performances into lead and supporting. For one thing, “supporting” in this case is synonymous with “undermining,” and for another, the shifting power dynamics work at the level of the narrative as well as in Queen Anne’s court. Stone’s Abigail might be the protagonist, as it’s her rise from the kitchen to the queen’s bedroom that propels the plot. But to the extent that “The Favourite” rewrites “All About Eve,” it’s Weisz’s Duchess of Marlborough who occupies the Bette Davis slot. Her fall is perhaps a richer drama than Abigail’s rise.

As for Colman’s queen, she can’t rise or fall — absolute monarchy is like that — but she is nonetheless the source of the film’s sharpest comedy and its deepest pathos. At a time when we seem to be fascinated with portraits of power, her combination of majesty and abjection feels like something new under the sun. A.O.S. & W.M.