60. Adam Sandler, “Uncut Gems”
Adam Sandler’s performance in Josh and Benny Safdie’s pulse-quickening underworld caper “Uncut Gems” is as much of a transformation as anything the actor has ever done (sorry, “Jack and Jill”), with the actor sporting fake teeth, a questionable goatee that makes him look like your sleazy uncle, and an assortment of brilliantly garish designer duds, including a pair of absolutely amazing/awful rimless frames. However, at the end of the day, “Uncut Gems” is a movie that understands the very essence of the Adam Sandler ethos: the moments of insecurity and sadness, yes, but also the dizzying levels of mania, aggression, and rage that are central to his most memorable characters. The Safdies freely admit that they love Sandler’s great, early dumb movies and his seminal comedy records, and Howard Ratner – the spectacularly ill-fated, perpetually unlucky hero of their latest masterwork – feels he was created by two people (plus co-writer Ronald Bronstein) who love and understand the Sandman identity on a deep, deep level. Like many of Sandler’s classic comic characters, Howard Ratner is in a state of everlasting fury: most of the movie’s scenes see him screaming, braying, or otherwise on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He’s also a somewhat familiar Jewish archetype: a born hustler, a go-getter, a strong, naturally magnetic Semitic presence in the vein of Rodney Dangerfield or Howard Stern. “Uncut Gems” is as panicky and disreputable as “Good Time” or “Heaven Knows What,” but the rave reviews Sandler has been receiving for his work here could very well indicate that his well-deserved first Oscar is now officially on the horizon. – NL
59. Matthew McConaughey, “Killer Joe”
The whole hunky pothead-cowboy thing has always been central to Matthew McConaughey’s appeal. And yet, the Texas-born star is also capable of projecting a chilly, sociopathic self-absorption (he made a loathsome character strangely magnetic in Harmony Korine’s latest, “The Beach Bum”) that belies his otherwise mellow demeanor. “Killer Joe” – released in the heat of the early-2010’s McConaissance period that also included “Magic Mike” and “Mud” before culminating in the Oscar darling that was “Dallas Buyer’s Club” – is a nasty piece of work and it sees McConaughey at his most odious. “Killer” Joe Cooper is a man who operates almost purely off of his lizard brain (you wouldn’t believe the things he does with fried chicken), and since there isn’t a damn decent character in the entirety of William Friedkin’s unapologetically nasty Southern potboiler, Joe ultimately emerges as a guy with a twisted but incontestably consistent moral code. The movie’s bizarre blend of gory farce and nihilistic small-town treachery is worthy of Jim Thompson, but throughout the madness, McConaughey keeps us drawn into his character’s toxic orbit. He doesn’t do away with his trademark charm – he just plays it in a more threatening and yet somehow genial register, as if your cool-guy uncle were inviting you over for a piece of pie that happened to have a razorblade baked into it. To be honest, this movie is kind of nauseating, but that’s the point of it and his searing performance is worth watching for the film’s final twenty-minute stretch alone (with apologies to his “Wolf Of Wall Street,” “Magic Mike” performances and the entire Mcconaissance decade). –NL
58. Tiffany Haddish, “Girl’s Trip”
Malcolm D. Lee’s “Girls Trip” could have just been another run-of-the-mill raunchfest starring a bunch of funny and talented women – and on those grounds alone, the film could probably still be considered a success. “Girls Trip,” however, manages to transcend the sophomoric limitations of its genre, emerging as a simultaneously uproarious and insightful ode to the complexities of female friendship in the 21st century. Everyone in the central cast is great –Regina Hall and Jada Pinkett Smith both give exceptional performances – but if there’s an actress who all but walks away with this spirited, buoyant comedic lark, it’s Tiffany Haddish. Haddish had done some solid guest work in sitcoms like “New Girl” and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” but “Girls Trip” was inarguably the project that introduced Haddish to the world at large. Haddish plays Dina: the shameless, unapologetic, and charismatic wild card of the girl’s group at the center of Lee’s film. She’s masterful at playing a version of the one friend we all have: that person who is liable to start trouble under the wrong circumstances, but who is also undeniably the life of the party, capable of enlivening any room they walk into with their uncouth magnetism. Haddish’s performance benefits from the fact that she is unashamedly herself: there is not a trace of movie-star vanity in this performance, and “Girls Trip” on a whole is all the better for it. Haddish has gone on to become a new kind of comedy star, and “Girls Trip” offers viewers a glimpse into how her meteoric trajectory took flight. – NL
57. Natalie Portman, “Black Swan”
Acting in a Darren Aronofsky movie can’t be easy: if you don’t believe us, go ahead and look up interviews where Jennifer Lawrence talks about the emotional toll of performing in the director’s divisive 2017 effort “mother!” This, in theory, would make Natalie Portman a performer ideally suited for Aronofsky’s explosive temperament. Portman is spectacularly gifted at playing women who are coming unglued at the seams: in the last few years alone, she’s played a grieving first lady (“Jackie”), a depressed scientist (“Annihilation”), a self-imploding pop diva (“Vox Lux”), and an unbalanced astronaut (this year’s “Lucy in the Sky”). In that regard, it’s tempting to view Portman’s fearless turn in Aronofsky’s ballerina drama “Black Swan” as a sort of test run for the terrific work she’s been doing these last couple of years. Playing a sexually repressed dancer haunted by demonic visions and her own nagging sense of inadequacy, Portman acquits herself beautifully to her director’s “Repulsion” by-way-of “The Red Shoes” milieu. One must swing for the fences in an Aronofsky movie, and to be sure, Portman goes huge here. That said, she never overacts, and she never lets us forget that we’re watching a real person, not a screenwriter’s composite of female hysteria – which is practically a feat in and of itself, considering the theatrically outré nature of the movie she’s in. –NL
56. Charlize Theron, “Young Adult”
This shouldn’t be news to anyone, but Charlize Theron can do damn near anything: she can embody a feminist action movie icon in George Miller’s landmark spectacle “Mad Max: Fury Road” or imbue the tired formula of “stoner schlub gets the girl” with a kick of effervescent life in this year’s formulaic but fun Seth Rogen-starring rom-com, “Long Shot.” She’s also maybe the only actress who could have played Mavis Gary, the bitter, hard-drinking, defiantly tough-to-love protagonist of Jason Reitman’s finest film, “Young Adult.” Mavis is, as the title of Reitman’s film dictates, a writer of young adult fiction. She’s a paradox: someone whose work speaks to essential human truths who nevertheless seems to loathe humankind on a very fundamental level. For some viewers, Mavis will not be an easy person to spend time with. She’s spiteful, nasty, short-tempered, and largely unpleasant. She’s also a recognizable – and recognizably flawed – human being, and one of the more brilliant components of Theron’s performance allows us to see the hypocrisy that so many female performers are burdened with when they make the brave choice to play so-called “unlikeable” characters. Theron never lets us lose sight of this woman’s bruised humanity, even when she’s behaving in an absolutely indefensible manner. Reitman’s best films have always been character studies about defective American strivers, and in spite of all the smart choices he makes in “Young Adult,” it is Theron’s blistering, intelligent, and unsentimental work that ultimately carries the film to the finish line. – NL
55. Robert Redford, “All is Lost”
Here’s a strange elevator pitch for you: let’s cast Robert Redford, one of cinema’s most alluring leading men, in a harrowing disaster drama where he has next to no lines. Frankly, on paper, sounds like an idea that could have gone wrong in a million different ways. Thankfully, director J.C. Chandor (“A Most Violent Year,” this year’s Netflix thriller “Triple Frontier”) is a person who appreciates a challenge. Chandor saw something in Redford that many viewers tend to overlook: he looked beyond the matinee idol good looks and easygoing charisma and saw a man looking for the purest form of salvation. “All is Lost” is a stark, somewhat disarming film, particularly when one considers that Chandor’s previous movie, the mile-a-minute Wall Street flick “Margin Call,” was basically all talk. After all, any hack screenwriter can let us know what their character is supposed to be thinking and feeling via a deluge of expositional dialogue. Redford’s acting in “All is Lost” is all the more impressive when you consider that he’s emoting entirely with his face and body language, battling the elements in a bruising manner that’s worthy of Hemingway at his least sentimental. As fun as it can be to see Redford lean into Butch Cassidy vibes in something like “The Old Man and the Gun,” there’s a particularly electric thrill in seeing him play wildly against type in a film such as this one. –NL
54. Kim Hye-ja, “Mother”
Pushing the thankless job of parenting to tragic extremes, the unnamed title character of Bong Joon-ho’s “Mother” shoulders unspeakable moral and emotional burdens on behalf of a naïve and utterly dependent son. When the young Do-joon is bullied and manipulated into confessing to the murder of a local school girl, Kim Hye-ja’s tenacious widow is forced to take matters into her own hands and rescue her only child from a woefully indifferent legal system. Though the mother is certain of Do-joon’s innocence, her own journey through the darkest corners of their community suggests even the most compassionate soul is capable of anything under the right circumstances. Here is a woman who’d probably tear down the world to preserve her son’s purity, growing ever more ruthless as her desperation mounts. Kim’s fretful performance presents this private turmoil in a deceptively gentle package, channeling the contradictions of a character who chases the truth yet remains in denial about her family’s own grim history. In her own way, she’s as dependent on Do-joon as he is on her, though her most devastating moment arguably arrives when she has to view someone else’s son through plexiglass and realize the cost of her devotion. – David Pountain
53. Greta Gerwig, “Frances Ha”
It’s tough work, making an audience like a character who is as self-absorbed and aimless as the lead character of “Frances Ha.” Noah Baumbach is a specialist in profiling these kind of drifting, hung-up urbanites, and when he first worked with Greta Gerwig on the set of the languorous L.A.-based tragicomedy “Greenberg,” he found an ideal collaborator as well as someone who shared this very specific anthropological interest. Frances Halladay, the apartment-hopping Brooklyn searcher who is constantly putting her foot in her mouth throughout “Frances Ha,” is a character we’ve seen versions of before. She’s neurotic but somehow affable, far from lonely but liable to bungle a first date, and entirely dependent on the emotional support of her weary best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner). What makes Gerwig’s performance as Frances so enchanting is its warmth and specificity. There’s a loopy poetry to Gerwig’s line readings in the film, and she careens recklessly through the movie’s luminous black and white frames with the screwy elegance of an old-timey dancer (not for nothing is the movie’s most iconic sequence the one that depicts Frances racing through New York’s Chinatown to the sounds of David Bowie’s “Modern Love”). Gerwig has gone on to become a star since “Frances Ha” (after “Little Women,” she may very well be considered an auteur), but this star-making performance was the one that justifiably introduced her to a larger audience. – NL
52. Julie Delpy, “Before Midnight”
It’s a performance 18 years in the making – the story of Celine and Jesse, once two strangers on a train, now a couple married with children, comes to a close with Richard Linklater’s “Before Midnight,” the third film in the acclaimed trilogy. Delpy has always mastered a strong sense of control, of straightforward influence as Celine. She has the power to say yes or no in the first film, she makes the move to find and keep Jesse in the second one, and in the third, she establishes the problems, asks the questions, makes the decisions. There’s a sense of weariness, one that has come with parenthood but also perhaps a relationship turned less spontaneous, less aspirational than it once was. It’s a mature performance, one full of active efforts – to educate, to seduce, to convince. Delpy commands attention and Celine demands what she deserves. She’s always been confident and intelligent, but the evolution of the character and the relationship leads Delpy to act with a sense of greater urgency, tinged with sadness. As Celine sits with Jesse to watch the sun set, the omnipresence of a ticking clock is unavoidable, moving them ever further from their youthful days of romantic performance too fast. In Delpy’s eyes, her resigned eyebrows and a sigh that tries to be silent, there’s a lifetime of feeling. – EK
51. Woody Harrelson, “Rampart”
If Abel Ferrara’s “Bad Lieutenant” is the definitive portrait of a corrupt law enforcement official spiraling downward into a purgatory of his own making, Oren Moverman’s scalding and woefully underseen “Rampart” is determined to give that squalid arthouse classic a run for its money. Moverman specializes in films about hardened men battling their inner demons, and with LAPD officer Dave Brown – played in a terrifying key of animalistic fervor by the great Woody Harrelson – Moverman has located his ideal subject. From frame one, Brown looks as though he hasn’t slept in weeks. This is probably due to the fact that he’s been tirelessly railing against the “scum” that plague the gritty Westlake-Rampart neighborhood just West of Downtown Los Angeles where he regularly patrols, which is to say nothing of his propensity for violating the civil rights of those he encounters. Moverman is an inherently humanist filmmaker (his previous collaboration with Harrelson, “The Messenger,” proved this much), but in “Rampart,” neither he nor Harrelson ask for sympathy for Dave Brown. Harrelson’s turn here is a fearless exhibition of pure malice: this character is a pit bull let off the leash, with Harrelson shedding his more likable qualities to give us a portrait of a bad man doing bad things in a world where white privilege is a thing to be weaponized. – NL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd_u2G_ucCU
