From Timothée Chalamet’s latest high-wire act to Amy Madigan’s indelible horror villain to dynamic duos and standouts from around the globe, these were THR critics’ favorite big-screen turns of the year.
Published on December 10, 2025
Clockwise from top left: Timothée Chalamet in ‘Marty Supreme,’ SZA and Keke Palmer in ‘One of Them Days,’ Ben Whishaw in ‘Peter Hujar’s Day,’ Amy Madigan in ‘Weapons.’
A24/Courtesy Everett Collection; Anne Marie Fox/TriStar Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection;Janus Films/Courtesy Everett Collection; Courtesy Warner Bros.
From newish faces to veterans treading fresh ground, acting craft was on glorious display in 2025. For every commanding lead performance — Rose Byrne, Timothée Chalamet, Wagner Moura, Toni Servillo — there was equally striking ensemble work and many sublime pas de deux, among them Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgard, Keke Palmer and SZA, Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone.
The year was so flush with great screen acting that some of our favorites, regrettably, had to be left out. But that doesn’t mean we weren’t awed by performances like Sergi López in Sirāt, Amanda Seyfried in The Testament of Ann Lee, Joel Edgerton in Train Dreams, Vicky Krieps in Father Mother Sister Brother, Jacob Elordi in Frankenstein or Eva Victor in Sorry, Baby. Read on for the 25 turns that stayed with us the most.
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Adam Bessa, Ghost Trail
Image Credit: Music Box Films/Courtesy Everett Collection
The French-Tunisian actor packs a stealthy emotional wallop in this terrific, underseen thriller, playing a Syrian exile tracking down his former torturer in France. With dreamy, almond-shaped eyes and high-cut cheekbones, Bessa has a soulful movie-star magnetism that he modulates flawlessly. But he also makes his recessive, traumatized character a fully rounded human being, showing us cracks of acute panic and deeper hollows of despair as well as an abiding gentleness. It’s a deceptively economical, richly affecting performance that should bump him up casting director wish lists on both sides of the Atlantic.
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Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Image Credit: Logan White/A24/Courtesy Everett Collection
There is barely a minute of Mary Bronstein’s cinematic anxiety spiral that does not have Byrne front and center, often in unforgiving close-ups that provide no quarter for vanity or error. But Byrne, playing a stressed-out mother on the edge of delirium, does not need any. She layers an entire life’s worth of exhaustion and despair into every twist of her lip or rise in her voice, yielding a performance so raw that it hurts to witness, and so mesmerizing that we can’t help but watch anyway.
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Lee Byung-hun, No Other Choice
Image Credit: Neon/Courtesy Everett Collection
One of the jokes of Park Chan-wook’s anti-capitalist comic thriller is that its protagonist is no one special, just an ordinary family man driven to darkly hilarious lengths. Lee Byung-hun’s killer lead turn, however, is another story. Man-su’s flailing attempts at murder provide a riotous showcase for Lee’s impeccable physical comedy chops, while his increasing desperation lets the actor play with different notes of resolve, fury and insecurity — yielding an antihero who’s equal parts weirdly endearing, bleakly relatable and, above all, utterly unforgettable.
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Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme
Image Credit: A24/Courtesy Everett Collection
In just over a decade, Chalamet has built up the most impressive body of work of any young actor in movies today, with high points including Call Me by Your Name, Lady Bird, Little Women, the Dune films, Bones and All and A Complete Unknown. (Let’s not discuss Wonka.) But in Josh Safdie’s hyper-kinetic reinvention of the sports comedy, Chalamet gets to flex muscles previously unseen. As table tennis prodigy Marty Mauser, angling to ping pong his way out of New York’s Lower East Side in the early ’50s, the actor seems powered by an internal combustion engine that never stops revving. Marty is an operator who would sell his own mother to get ahead, and yet for all his attitude and opportunism, he’s somehow an endearing antihero.
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Kathleen Chalfant, Familiar Touch
Image Credit: Music Box Films/Courtesy Everett Collection
By the time we meet Ruth, the protagonist of Sarah Friedland’s tender debut, she’s already so deep into memory loss that she mistakes her son for a handsome stranger. But even as Ruth forgets her life’s details, Chalfant ensures that we never lose sight of her soul. Imbuing every gesture from the handling of a kitchen knife to the stroking of fabric with decades of experience, and turning every facial expression into a dynamic journey between bewilderment, playfulness, kindness and sorrow, she delivers a full-body performance that’s all the more vibrant for being so exquisitely subtle.
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Frank Dillane, Urchin
Image Credit: Courtesy of Charades
Harris Dickinson’s accomplished directing debut is an intimate character study of unhoused addict Mike, who’s fighting to stay clean on the London streets. In a high-wire performance that inhabits almost every frame, Dillane has a nervy volatility offset by insouciant charm and humor, tapping into our compassion without overtly asking for it. Mike is a chronically dishonest screw-up capable of violence at his most desperate — the kind of mess most of us walk by on the street as if he’s invisible. It’s to Dillane’s credit as much as Dickinson’s that we are forced to see Mike and feel for his struggle.
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Jodie Foster, A Private Life
Image Credit: Sony Pictures Classics/Courtesy Everett Collection
What a joy to watch Foster, known for her flinty intelligence and tight control, cut loose — and show off her impeccable French — in Rebecca Zlotowski’s chaotically entertaining mystery comedy. Foster invests her character, an American shrink in Paris, with spiky vitality and an unexpected playfulness, heightened by every moment she shares on screen with Daniel Auteuil as her ex-husband when they team up for some amateur sleuthing and flirty badinage.
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Amy Madigan, Weapons
Image Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros.
It is Gladys’ look in Zach Cregger’s suburban horror that draws our attention first: With her off-kilter wig, clownish makeup and giant green glasses, she’s like an alien trying and failing to pass as human. But it’s the cloying voice she uses to ingratiate herself, the sadistic smile as she prepares to strike, the cold, hard cruelty she reveals once she’s in control, that really chill the blood. Hilariously campy, thrillingly nasty and totally bewitching, Madigan delivers a horror movie villain for the ages.
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Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgard, Pillion
Image Credit: A24/Courtesy Everett Collection
The unflinching queer kink of a master-slave relationship might seem an unlikely source of tenderness, but that’s intrinsic to the charm and humor of Harry Lighton’s debut. It’s also a result of the disarming interplay and subtle power shifts between Harry Melling as panting puppy dog Colin, a shy traffic warden from the outer London suburbs, and Alexander Skarsgard as Ray, a steely-eyed, leather-clad member of a sub/dom gay biker gang. “What am I going to do with you?” Ray asks rhetorically. “Whatever you want,” replies Colin, with an eagerness that suggests the nuances of surrender and control even in submission.
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Wunmi Mosaku, Sinners
Image Credit: Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection
The magnetism of Michael B. Jordan as dapper twins returning to their Mississippi Delta home is the engine driving Ryan Coogler’s genre-bender about race and freedom. But a handful of incisive supporting turns give the film its emotional sweep, none more so than Mosaku’s as a spiritual healer whose romantic history with one of the brothers encompasses joy and unimaginable sorrow. For audiences familiar with the Nigerian British actress from her many standout TV roles or the crackling horror His House, Mosaku’s gifts will come as no surprise. Her warmth, sensuality and tenacity in the face of supernatural evil spark a fire in the movie’s heart.
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Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent
Image Credit: Neon/Courtesy Everett Collection
Marking a triumphant return to Portuguese-language cinema in a role written for him by director Kleber Mendonça Filho, Moura plays a brooding Brazilian technology expert who clashes with a corrupt government official, hastening a return to his northeastern hometown in 1977. It’s a haunting, melancholy performance that evokes an unselfconscious masculinity largely vanished from American movies — like Kris Kristofferson, Paul Newman or Jeff Bridges at that age. Unlike many protagonists in thrillers set against a backdrop of dictatorship, Armando is neither a dissident nor an underground activist, but an ordinary man caught in a web that extends to Brazil’s far-flung corners. Draped in the heavy cloak of grief for his late wife, he reaffirms his bond with his young son and attempts to get them out of the country as contract killers close in.
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Dylan O’Brien, Twinless
Image Credit: Roadside Attractions/Courtesy Everett Collection
Just when you think O’Brien is giving the performance of his career as Roman, a lonely man mourning the death of his identical twin in James Sweeney’s sly and stirring second feature, he pulls off a magic trick by also appearing as said brother. Rocky is worldly where Roman is provincial, dazzling where Roman is dull, confidently gay where Roman is lumberingly straight. That O’Brien is equally convincing as both is a testament to his range; that we can no more resist falling for Rocky than we can feeling for Roman is proof of his irresistible magnetism.
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Josh O’Connor, The Mastermind
Image Credit: MUBI/Courtesy Everett Collection
In a role that could be a scruffy American cousin to his character in last year’s lyrical grave-robber tale La Chimera, O’Connor slides into the world of director Kelly Reichardt with such hangdog grace and ease that he could pass for a longtime collaborator. He plays J.B., an unemployed carpenter in early ’70s Massachusetts who cooks up a get-rich-quick scheme to lift a handful of paintings from a fictional museum. The actor beautifully balances low-key comic awkwardness with encroaching sadness and regret. “I didn’t really think it through,” says J.B. morosely as financial rescue slips further out of his grip.
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Keke Palmer and SZA, One of Them Days
Image Credit: Anne Marie Fox/TriStar Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
Staking its place among the greatest buddy comedies of the 21st century, Lawrence Lamont’s feature debut owes its exuberance to the freshness and wit of Syreeta Singleton’s screenplay, but most of all to the dynamite pairing and killer delivery of Keke Palmer and R&B singer SZA in a delicious film debut. Playing ride-or-die best friends and roommates Dreux and Alyssa, who sit at opposite ends of the career-ambition spectrum, the stars share magical chemistry, whether they’re chilling over hot Cheeto martinis, running from the wrath of Aziza Scott’s hellcat Big Booty Berniece or navigating the temporary bust-up that’s baked into the formula. Divine.
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Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone, Bugonia
Image Credit: Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features/Courtesy Everett Collection
If the end is nigh, as Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest mindfuck suggests, what a boon that our species has survived long enough to produce this brilliant face-off between two of our finest actors. Stone is broken-glass-sharp as an avatar of corporate fuckery, burying her cruelty under sleek suits and meaningless jargon. Plemons has rarely been more unsettling, or more devastating, than he is plumbing the depths of a man so warped by despair that conspiracy theories are all he has left. Their clash lands with the force of a gravitational shift: shocking, destructive, undeniable.
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Renate Reinsve and Stellan Skarsgard, Sentimental Value
Image Credit: Kasper Tuxen/Neon/Courtesy Everett Collection
Joachim Trier’s elegant meditation on family, art and memory finds all four principals at the top of their game, but it’s Reinsve and Skarsgard, especially, that guide the movie’s turbulent mood shifts. Reinsve brings raw spontaneity and invigorating whispers of physical comedy to Nora, a theater actress given to hysterical bouts of stage fright, while Skarsgard is her semi-estranged father Gustav, a boozy, self-centered blowhard whose early acclaim as a film director lapsed into a 15-year fallow patch, which has done little to dull his hubris. The wariness with which they negotiate one another is both hilarious and brimming with pathos.
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Toni Servillo, La Grazia
Image Credit: MUBI/Courtesy Everett Collection
Since the start of Paolo Sorrentino’s directing career almost a quarter-century ago, the giant of Neapolitan theater Toni Servillo has been a talismanic presence in the Oscar winner’s filmography. Having played disgraced former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti in Sorrentino’s Il Divo, Servillo here takes on a figure that’s almost a unicorn in contemporary cinema: an honorable politician. In a performance as restrained as it is titanic, he plays a fictional president of the Italian Republic in the waning days of his term, who describes himself as gray and boring but is in fact a wellspring of deep feeling, humanity and needling doubt.
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Teyana Taylor, One Battle After Another
Image Credit: Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection
There’s a fierceness to Taylor’s beauty that has earned her frequent comparison to Eartha Kitt. She’s like a Pierre et Gilles artwork come to life, with a hard-edged glamour that makes her both alluring and dangerous. Not since her breakout role in 2023’s A Thousand and One has a director harnessed her transfixing presence like Paul Thomas Anderson in his dark comedy about revolution and resistance. Playing a far-left militant activist who goes by the epic name of Perfidia Beverly Hills, Taylor appears only in the film’s first 40 minutes. But the impression she leaves is that of a heat-seeking missile, blazing throughout the remaining two hours, right up to her stirring closing voiceover.
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Hélène Vincent, When Fall Is Coming
Image Credit: Music Box Films/Courtesy Everett Collection
In François Ozon’s deceptively placid latest, the journeywoman French performer plays a sweet Gallic Granny with a scandalous past, delivering one of those effortlessly unshowy but captivating lead turns that Euro actresses of a certain age seem to churn out (while their Stateside counterparts settle for scraps from the Ryan Murphy heap). Phrase by quaintly enunciated phrase, glance by furtive glance, Vincent conjures an entire turbulent life in all its many regrets, joys and mysteries. Her Michelle may look like a defenseless little old lady, but Vincent makes her unexpectedly sly and flinty, the scrappiest kind of survivor.
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Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, Peter Hujar’s Day
Image Credit: Janus Films/Courtesy Everett Collection
After playing the stoic husband whose forbearance with Franz Rogowski’s narcissistic filmmaker reaches its limits in Ira Sachs’ bruising Passages, the always-riveting Whishaw gives perhaps his most exquisitely layered performance in the director’s deceptively minimalist experiment in verbatim memoir. Nestling into the cocooning warmth of his author friend Linda Rosenkrantz, played with wit and enormous generosity of spirit by Hall, Whishaw allows the portrait photographer of the title, under-appreciated in his lifetime, to let down his guard while dissecting the minutiae of his previous day’s activities. What emerges is an uncommonly candid and affecting study of a queer artist and his mid ’70s East Village Manhattan milieu.
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