Top Performances
Robert Downey, Jr.’s 10 Best Performances
A rich filmography that includes Brat Packs, tramps, and superheroes, oh my. Robert Downey, Jr.’s 10 Best Performances Leah Pickett and Roy Ivy
Samuel L. Jackson’s 10 Best Roles
Top Performances is a recurring feature in which we definitively handpick the very best performances from an iconic actor or actress. Samuel L. Jackson is far, far more than a series of memes. It’s a fact worth remembering as time goes on, and the actor’s most iconic performances have become inexorably linked to “say what again” image macros and a great many jokes about motherfuckin’ snakes on motherfuckin’ planes. But there’s so much more to the venerable performer than younger audiences may realize and perhaps even more than Pulp Fiction enthusiasts do either. Over a staggering 178 onscreen appearances since 1972 (and with nine more on the way, at various stages of production), Jackson has carved out a distinct niche as an untouchable tough guy with a disarming humor about...
Julianne Moore’s 10 Best Performances
Top Performances is a recurring feature in which we definitively handpick the very best performances from an iconic actor or actress. This article was originally published in 2015. We meet again, Miss Moore. Congratulations are in order for Julianne Moore. On Sunday night, she won a well-deserved, and long-hoped-for Oscar for Still Alice. She brought infinite grace, humanity, and incredibly affable qualities to a person stuck in a dire situation, and Moore walked away from the movie with Best Actress at the Oscars, for what might be remembered as her seminal role — not to mention one of the surest bets in recent Oscar history. But is it Moore’s best? Moore’s had an exhaustively diverse career, with one uniting quality: She’s really, really good in everything she’s in, and everybody l...
Matt Damon’s 10 Best Roles
Top Performances is a recurring feature in which we definitively handpick the very best performances from an iconic actor or actress. It has been updated for Matt Damon’s 52nd birthday. It’s not enough for Matt Damon to be conventionally attractive, or even physically imposing. He also has to be preternaturally intelligent, a savant capable of outwitting a Fields Medal-winning mathematician, a ruthless Russian card shark, or a millionaire casino owner, as the occasion may demand. This is the curious truth at the center of Damon’s career: Though he’s got all the looks you could hope for in a leading man, it’s what’s behind those steely blue eyes that keeps us coming back for more. Maybe it’s because he played a boy genius in 1997’s Good Will Hunting, then followed up that breakthrough ...
Will Smith’s 10 Best Film and TV Roles
Top Performances is a recurring feature in which we definitively handpick the very best performances from an iconic actor or actress. This has been updated on the occasion of Will Smith’s birthday. Considering Will Smith’s impish charisma and still-boyish good looks, it’s shocking to realize he’s been around for nearly 30 years. Take that, Paul Rudd! Audiences have literally witnessed the actor grow from a 24-year-old MC of the hip-hop duo DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince to family man. He’s garnered chart toppers and box office hits; television stardom; and blissfully lived as the other half of a power couple with wife Jada Pinkett-Smith. He’s one of the few movie stars left, a cultural crossover sensation capable of leading a film to profitability based on his sheer talent and aura. ...
Robert De Niro’s 10 Best Performances
Top Performances is a recurring feature in which we definitively handpick the very best performances from an iconic actor or actress. This has been updated on the occasion of Robert De Niro’s birthday. It’s not that we’d ever refer to many of Robert De Niro’s best roles as “vulnerable” in and of themselves. The legendary actor is one of the all-time great performers of tough guys, in their many forms, and there’s a ferocity to many of his early turns that’s gone nearly unparalleled in the years since. Yet one of the significant aspects of De Niro’s genius as an actor is the way in which he’s been able to build a long career out of playing on the earlier performances he’s delivered, whether it’s in adding new shades to the plethora of gangsters and fallen icons he’s portrayed for Martin Sco...
Alan Rickman’s Top 10 Performances
Top Performances is a recurring feature in which we definitively handpick the very best performances from an iconic actor or actress. This article was originally published in 2006. He was the villain. Until he wasn’t. You can take this angle on the late Alan Rickman in two ways. The first is his film career, in which the actor set himself up to be a go-to heavy for years to come. His Hans Gruber in Die Hard was the perfect foil for Bruce Willis’ John McClaine — the former neat, succinct, calculating while the latter was a mess, foulmouthed, and always improvising. Then there was the scenery-chewing performance as the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, a movie oft-maligned but not because of Rickman. Far from it. These evil performances were not an indication of what wo...
Denzel Washington’s Top 10 Performances, From Malcolm X to Macbeth
This feature originally ran in September 2014. We’re reposting it in celebration of Denzel Washington’s 67th birthday today. Top Performances is a recurring feature in which we definitively handpick the very best performances from an iconic actor or actress. Six-time Academy Award nominee and two-time winner. Can play it over-the-top, but knows when he needs to play it cool, to play down. One of the more gracious actors you’ll ever see on the big screen. I’m talking, of course, about Denzel Washington, and through careful consideration, Leah Pickett and I have gone through his filmography to select his 10 finest performances. Keep in mind these rankings are based on Washington’s performances, not the movies in which he performed. Did we forget anything? Did we place a performanc...
Adam Sandler’s Top 10 Performances
Gossip suggests that Adam Sandler fears that he’ll be found out any minute as a fake, or that people will stop wanting him around. On the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast, the late-night host and former SNL colleague once highlighted that Sandler is the type of guy who will confide in colleagues that “they’re on to him” after even the most successful of films and highest of praise. “They” being the public, fans, anyone that’s seen a Sandler project. They will just up and quit on the comic icon. As a lifelong watcher of Sandler — from Opera Man to Uncut Gems — nothing could be further from the truth. We are on to him: He’s an outrageous talent. It’s without a shred of controversy that we can comfortably proclaim Sandler an all-star of unsung dexterity. On one hand, he’s a popular, moder...
Tom Hardy’s Best 10 Movie Performances
Tom Hardy is one of Hollywood’s last old-fashioned movie stars — a big, magnetic leading man of the school of Marlon Brando and Orson Welles. He’s a performer of incredible subtlety and teeth-gnashing intensity in the same breath, drawing pools of weary wisdom from his big, soulful eyes one minute before screaming in a goofy accent in the next. Hardy has the capacity to be both menacing and sweet, pained and predatory; despite the go-for-broke marquee madness that usually follows him, one often misses that Hardy’s bluster goes hand in hand with a wounded vulnerability. Of course, like Nicolas Cage before him, Hardy (at least in his perception to the general public) is more meme than man, the finely-tuned layers of his performances hidden behind layers of prosthetics or that ever-present ma...
