From the return of a screen-actor GOAT to not one but two great turns from Michael B. Jordan — these were the actors that made our year
A mother grieving an unfathomable loss. Another mother who loses her mind. An angel who loses his wings. A small-town gumshoe trying to crack a murder case in clickity-clack heels. An unwelcome visitor with surprisingly potent powers of persuasion. Not one but two different stoic recluses who live in the woods, and must eventually find their way back to society. Not one but two identical twin brothers with business aspirations, and who must eventually contend with some nasty-ass bloodsuckers.
These were some of the screen performances that left us laughing, weeping, gasping, and in several cases, breaking into spontaneous applause. 2025 was a very good year for movies, and a great year for outstanding, offbeat, and occasionally unhinged turns from both veterans and next-gen superstars. Some were leads. Some were scene-stealing (or even scenery-chewing) supporting parts. You’ll see several double acts on here, with both players pairing nicely — and if the number 17 seems a little off at first, it’s because we’re counting one actor who played two distinct roles twice. But all of them kept us spellbound once the lights went down.
Photographs in Illustration
BBP Train Dreams. LLC/Netflix; Kimberly French/MUBI; Maria Lax/Focus Features; Claudette Barius/Focus Features
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Michael B. Jordan, ‘Sinners’
Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
Portraying identical twins is often a bucket-list item for actors, though viewers are usually more preoccupied with the “how’d they do that?” of scenes involving someone playing off themselves in the same scene. When you see what Michael B. Jordan is doing in Ryan Coogler’s epic tale of Southern blues music and bloodsuckers (both the supernatural and human kind) the only question you have is: Am I watching two different actors right now? The star does such an incredible job fleshing out both of the Moore siblings — Smoke, who’s ironically the more solid and stable of the two, and his wild-card brother Stack — that the title of this entry should technically read “Michael B. Jordan and Michael B. Jordan, Sinners.” He gives great performances plural here, which is why we’re counting him twice. But the accomplishment doesn’t just stop at distinguishing these two juke joint owners who see their grand-opening shindig turn into a Grand Guignol massacre. When Smoke eventually tussles with his kin, there’s a moment where he hesitates staking him. Stack then forgives him for what he needs to do — and suddenly, you don’t see the gallons of blood spilled all around them. You only see the film’s heart.
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Jessie Buckley, ‘Hamnet’
Image Credit: Focus Features
People will be crowing a lot over director Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s bestseller for the next few months. They will be talking about Jessie Buckley’s performance, however, for years — it’s the sort of work that blends nuance and full-on expressionism, quiet moments and blood-curdling shrieks. The howl of anguish that her character, Agnes, lets loose upon acknowledging the death of her son is gutting. The affection she holds for her children and the anger aimed at her husband William (as in Shakespeare), not to mention a world cruel enough to rob her of a child, are both tuned with precision to crack your noble heart. And when Agnes steps, dazed and confused, into the Globe Theater to watch Hamlet and experience something close to catharsis, Buckley somehow makes you see a light shining out of her. The Irish actor has crafted dozens of broken, batty, bold, and even bizarre characters over the past 10 years, yet what she’s doing here feels unprecedented. It rewires your expectations of how to play someone rediscovering their soul.
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Sean Penn and Teyana Taylor, ‘One Battle After Another’
Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
You won’t find a weak link among the ensemble of Paul Thomas Anderson’s thundering drama of paternal love and political resistance — we could have devoted our entire list to this cast alone, from Benicio Del Toro and Regina King’s rock-solid supporting turns to the way SNL vet Jim Downey makes a three-course meal out of the phrase “lunatics, haters, and punk trash.” But it’s the unlikely couple that dominates the first quarter of PTA’s masterwork that we find ourselves still fixating over, even after four-and-counting viewings. There’s a reason that Teyana Taylor is the first person you see onscreen, striding forward with precision and purpose; she’s the one meant to lead the revolution by any means necessary. And when she meets her moral opposite in Sean Penn’s aspirational white supremacist, you expect her to dispatch of the enemy with extreme prejudice. Instead, she leaves this macho military man in a state of priapic obsession. It will be the undoing of both of them. One of these actors is dialed in to a degree we haven’t seen from him in years; the other is just starting a screen career that suggests we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. One is onscreen from start to finish, while another bows out after the first act. But their game-recognizes-game double act, brief or not, is what sets this whole battle into perpetual motion.
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Jennifer Lawrence, ‘Die My Love’
Image Credit: Kimberly French/MUBI
“Fearless,” “brave,” “unflinching,” “bold,” “gutsy” — these descriptives get thrown around a lot when people compliment screen acting. What Jennifer Lawrence is doing in Lynne Ramsay’s chronicle of a new mother slowly losing her mind certainly ticks all those boxes. But the main word that comes to mind when you watch the star embrace an ever-enveloping madness is “free.” It’s not just that Lawrence sits perched on a shelf in an open fridge, spitting beer out of her mouth like a fountain. Or that she prowls around on all fours, sniffing at her partner like a panther in heat. Or even that she idly stabs the ground with a butcher knife, as her other hand slides down her pants. It’s more that you’re witnessing the sort of in-the-zone flow that’s normally associated with jazz soloists and pro athletes. Lawrence is liberated from anything resembling propriety or self-consciousness here. She’s 100 percent committed to embodying a woman who’s no longer on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but deep into one already in progress.
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Daniel Day-Lewis, ‘Anemone’
Image Credit: Focus Features
You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, they say, and watching Daniel Day-Lewis, playing a former British soldier living in self-imposed exile in filmmaker Ronan Day-Lewis’ debut, only underlines why his eight-year absence from the movies has left the medium somewhat poorer. The Oscar winner and screen-actor GOAT’s reputation as one of the most compelling, chameleonic performers to ever do it is well-earned, yet you would never accuse him of coasting on his legacy here. From the early sequences involving his stoic recluse warily welcoming his brother (Sean Bean) into his rural cottage to his hilariously funny, filthy monologue about scatological revenge, Day-Lewis is fully in the pocket, locking in to this lost soul and delivering something that feels both technically meticulous and utterly spontaneous. We hope this is the beginning of a new chapter for the legend. If this does turn out to be his final bow, it’s a hell of a swan song.
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Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett, ‘Black Bag’
Image Credit: Claudette Barius/Focus Features
Steven Soderbergh’s whipcrack espionage thriller puts its entire cast through their paces, moving them around the film’s find-the-mole chessboard with a characteristic deftness. It’s really a two-hander at heart, however, and it’s impossible to overstate how integral both Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett are to making this whole endeavor work. Titled after the central couple’s code for “don’t ask, don’t tell” regarding their mutual intelligence-agency missions, Black Bag is as much a testament to the dynamics of a working marriage as it is a spy-versus-spy potboiler — it’s the sort of film both Ian Fleming and Ingmar Bergman would love. He’s assigned to investigate who’s leaking state secrets within their organization. She’s the prime suspect. And the way that both Fassbender and Blanchett tease out their characters’ mutual passion for — and mistrust of — each other is the fuel for every twist and turn. You can sense the hardcore Nick-and-Nora chemistry between them from the jump, which is the only thing more potent in their household than the truth serum they give their dinner-party guests. May they co-star in a thousand more of these films together.
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Joel Edgerton, ‘Train Dreams’
Image Credit: BBP Train Dreams. LLC/Netflix
Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella describes its early-20th-century laborer Robert Granier as someone “of whom it might have been said, but nothing was ever said of him, that he had little to interest him.” In other words: an overall Nowhere Man, just drifting through life even when great tragedy rears its head. Yet in the calloused hands of Joel Edgerton, Granier becomes not just a stand-in for all of the stoic loggers, railroad workers, and others who built America, but the quietly noble hero of his own story. The Australian actor has always been the sort of burly supporting presence perfect for cops, soldiers, fighters, and other tough-guy roles; when he’s given the chance to step things up in movies like Warrior or Loving, you can tell that there’s usually a lot being left untapped. Clint Bentley’s adaptation of Johnson’s book makes the most out of Edgerton’s ability to suggest more with less. And when he eventually lets you see how vulnerable Granier can be when he confronts his emotions, and how awestruck he is when he finally takes in the beauty of it all, the result is both heartbreaking and uplifting.
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Amy Madigan, ‘Weapons’
Image Credit: Warner Bros.
By the time you’re formally introduced to Weapons‘ Aunt Gladys — unwanted houseguest, practitioner of the dark arts, instant inspiration for a thousand Halloween costumes — you’ve seen recurring glimpses of some strange figure lurking about the movie’s vignettes, waving and grinning and emanating a heavy Joker vibe. Not even the foreshadowing can prepare you for that scene in the principal’s office, in which viewers finally get the full Gladys treatment; rarely has polite insistence, constant deflection, and a 10-ton application of rouge felt so simultaneously ridiculous and menacing. That’s the genius of Amy Madigan’s performance in a nutshell — the veteran actor knows exactly where the halfway point between camp and creepy-as-fuck lies, and proceeds to set down roots in that midground for the remainder of Zach Cregger’s horror film. And this is before we find out what Gladys is really up to, or that triple-scoop serving of just desserts she receives at the go-for-broke climax. This could have been a run-of-the-mill villain role in a red wig. Madigan is the one who lobs it just under the over-the-top mark and manages to add grace notes to Gladys without selling her parasitic hold short.
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Jacob Elordi, ‘Frankenstein’
Image Credit: Ken Woroner/Netflix
Guillermo del Toro said that he cast Australian actor Jacob Elordi as “the creature” in his decades-in-the-making dream project because of his eyes. That instinct makes perfect sense once you see how the Saltburn star leans into wordless expressions of woundedness and rage. When his monstrosity evolves into an eloquent outcast in an endless existential-crisis loop, Elordi affects a deep, guttural growl and a posture that suggests shame, resentment, and a readiness to strike. Yet there’s always a childlike quality to both his anger and his neediness, having been denied the milk of human kindness by his maker. And don’t even get us started on the way he and Mia Goth turn their first meeting into something both tenderly maternal and uncomfortably Oedipal.
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Lee Byung-hun, ‘No Other Choice’
Image Credit: NEON
He enters the movie as a first-rate white-collar professional with a picture-perfect middle-class existence, and exits it as the last man standing (he doesn’t even need to turn the lights off on his way out of the factory — that’s what the AI is for). In between those two moments, Lee Byung-hun’s paper-company manager will be forced to lie, cheat, steal, murder, and even [gasp] cancel the family’s Netflix subscription, because desperate times truly do require desperate measures. Park Chan-wook’s biting adaptation of Donald Westlake’s novel The Ax not only reunites the director with his Joint Security Area star, it allows the actor to flex some physical-comedy chops and truly tap into the darker side of a salaryman forced into a Darwinian fight to the finish. For those who simply know Byung-hun from his role as the resident big bad in Squid Game, his work in this pitch-black satire will seem like a revelation. For fans who have been following the South Korean star’s career, seeing him play against type, deftly navigate his way around several slapstick set pieces, and eventually get in touch with his killer instincts will prove he’s found a role that truly takes advantage of his talent.
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Margaret Qualley, ‘Honey Don’t!’
Image Credit: Karen Kuehn/Focus Features
Sure, Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s sapphic pulp fiction may have been a little underwhelming, to put it kindly. But don’t sleep on Margaret Qualley’s wisecracking gumshoe — a completel sui generis update of an age-old archetype. The way Qualley playfully pitches her queer P.I. Honey O’Donoghue at the perfect midpoint between screwball and hardboiled glides the movie over an abundance of rough patches. We’re used to seeing people in neo-noirs do variations on Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s line readings; no one has managed to fuse those icons’ respective personae into one role and make it feel completely their own until now. It’s truly a great sync-up of performer and part, enough to make you wish the vehicle Qualley was driving wasn’t quite so rickety.
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Keanu Reeves, ‘Good Fortune’
Image Credit: Eddy Chen/Lionsgate
You may ask yourself: Do I need to see a version of Wings of Desire, in which the celestial being who yearns to be human is played by the bassist of Dogstar? Personally, we would have said “nope” — and then we saw what Keanu Reeves does with the role of an angel forced to do time as a mortal on Earth, and dear god, how wrong we would have been. Writer-director-star Aziz Ansari’s skewed riff on It’s a Wonderful Life, in which his gig-economy grunt gets a chance to be a rich bigwig and Seth Rogen’s millionaire tech bro must struggle to make ends meet, is good enough. But Reeves is so funny, so sublime, and so fucking spot-on in his portrayal of a heavenly do-gooder whose switcheroo plan goes off the rails that he ends up slipping the movie into his Constantine-style overcoat pocket and walking away with it. So much of it is in his reaction shots, which run the gamut from perfectly deadpan to slow-burning frustration; once he’s forced to become human as penance, Reeves turns every brand-new sensation, every fresh hell of disappointment into a minor comedic set piece. Watch his face light up as he drinks milkshakes and eats tacos for the first time, and try not to crack up when someone criticizes him for taking up smoking and he snaps, “Leave me alone, I like it, it’s all I have!” Genius.
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Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio, ‘Caught Stealing’
Darren Aronofsky’s busy, Nineties-nostalgia throwback thriller may be remembered as the film that let Austin Butler shrug off the Method-y Elvis mannerisms and sell his bona fides as an old-school leading man. But for our money, it’s the villains who take over the third act that truly stick in our memory. There are siblings who mix the personal and the professional, and then there are the Drucker brothers — Lipa (Liev Schreiber) and Schmully (Vincent D’Onofrio), a pair of homicidal Hasidic mobsters who still make time to visit their bubbe on the way to a massacre. The rapport between these two veteran actors turns what could have been seriously dodgy caricatures into a first-rate double act, like Abbott and Costello with side curls and silencers. Their increased presence in the last half hour is welcome, and should Mr. Aronofsky have an idea for a Drucker-centric prequel, please note we already have our checkbook out.
