We are in a golden age of acting — make that platinum — as we realized when we decided to select our favorite film performers of the past 20 years. There’s no formula for choosing the best (just squabbling), and this list is both necessarily subjective and possibly scandalous in its omissions. Some of these performers are new to the scene; others have been around for decades. In making our choices, we have focused on this century and looked beyond Hollywood. And while there are certainly stars in the mix and even a smattering of Oscar winners, there are also character actors and chameleons, action heroes and art-house darlings. They’re 25 reasons we still love movies, maybe more than ever.
Here are some best hollywood actors for your reference:
Mahershala Ali
Ali has won two Oscars for best supporting actor. The first was for “Moonlight” (2016), in which he quietly demolished a durable Hollywood stereotype. Juan is a drug dealer, a figure of community destruction and implicit violence. What defines him, though, is his gentleness, the unconditional kindness he bestows on Chiron, the young protagonist. Juan listens to the boy; he answers his questions; in one of the film’s most moving scenes, he teaches him to swim.
Ali first got my attention in the Netflix series “House of Cards.” He played Remy Danton, a Washington lawyer whose knowing little smile could flicker like a warning, signaling the danger in his world. Remy entered in the second episode in a scene at a restaurant, where the lead character, Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey), is eating with two other power brokers. Remy doesn’t stand over the seated men, he looms. You know Underwood is bad news, but when the director David Fincher cuts to Remy’s face, Ali abruptly changes the temperature by dropping his affable facade for skin-prickling wariness, making it clear that he isn’t talking to a man but to a predator.
Catherine Deneuve
If you live in France, Catherine Deneuve is the symbol. When I was growing up, she was my dream. She always made choices that were too advanced for her time, more anarchist than bourgeois. She has always looked like a very bourgeois Parisian woman, which is absolutely not true. She is a rebel who looks like a grande dame.
The first time I met Catherine Deneuve was like meeting God in person. I was so impressed. And yet, I had to direct her, and I didn’t dare tell her a thing. The first two hours, I was completely paralyzed, and she calmed me down. She told me, because she’s a very generous woman: “You’re the director and I’m your actress. Tell me what to do and I will do it.” She didn’t do it in front of other people. She said, “Let’s go have a cigarette,” and she said it to me privately.
For the character of the mother, I needed to have someone who is not this eternal mother who is very lovely, because this is not my mom. My mom is a very lovely person but she is like: “You do this. You do that.” I needed somebody who had the power of a woman that wants her daughter to [make her life] better and be more emancipated. Catherine Deneuve has this way of talking that is not playful, because she doesn’t try to be likable. She’s very frank. When she talks to you, she looks straight into your eyes.
Oscar Isaac
When actors make a profound first impression, they sometimes get bound up with your ideas about what they can do. After “Llewyn Davis,” I associated Isaac with soulful defeat, with an undercurrent of grudging resentment. A few other roles shored up this idea of his innate mournfulness, including his performance as a besieged mayor in the HBO series “Show Me a Hero” (2015). This partly has to do with his broody, romantic looks and how his brows frame his luxuriously lashed eyes. And then there’s his voice, it's pretty sound but also how its resonance creates intimacy. Even when he puts nasal in it, his voice retains a quality of closeness, one reason it often feels, sounds, like Llewyn is singing more for himself than the audience. Isaac’s voice also softens his beauty, drawing you in. Sometimes, though, as in “Ex Machina,” he uses that intimacy for something insinuating, sinister.
Tilda Swinton
Tilda Swinton has created enough personas — with untold wigs, costumes and accents — to have become a roster of one. She’s a star, a character actor, a performance artist, an extraterrestrial, a trickster. Her pale, sharply planed face is an ideal canvas for paint and prosthetics, and capable of unnerving stillness.
Those roles can be theatrical, but they almost never feel gimmicky. Swinton has roots in an avant-garde tradition — earlier in her career, she worked with Derek Jarman and Sally Potter — that emphasizes the mutability of identity and the blurred boundaries between artifice and authenticity. Over the past 20 years she has brought some of the intellectual rigor and conceptual daring of that work to Hollywood and beyond. She’s not only a uniquely exciting performer, but also one of the great living theorists of performance.
Julianne Moore
Moore could have placed Cathy’s anguish in quotation marks, evoking the suffering divas of ’50s cinema while winking at a modern audience contemplating the bad old days from a safe aesthetic distance. Instead, she goes all the way in, staring out from the soul of a woman who is rooted in her time and absolutely modern, trapped by rules and appearances and also — terrifyingly and thrillingly — free.
Moore has played plenty of wives and mothers, but hers are sometimes more complex and surprising than her movies, an index of her sensitivities and talent. One reason she lifts her characters out of stereotype is that she plays with codes of realism, whether she’s delivering a naturalistic performance (“Still Alice,” the 2014 melodrama about a professor with Alzheimer’s) or a hyperbolic one (David Cronenberg’s 2015 satire “Maps to the Stars,” where she’s a Hollywood hyena). Moore can externalize a character’s interior state beautifully, so you see feelings surface on her skin. But she’s an artist of extremes, and she and Cronenberg have fun playing with her gargoyle faces.
Saoirse Ronan
Growing up is a lot of what young people do in movies, but few actors have been doing it for so long, or with such nuance, intelligence and variety as Saoirse Ronan. She has been maturing in front of our eyes for more than half her life (she’s 26) becoming wiser, freer and more herself in each new role.
In “Atonement,” her breakout performance from 2007, she played Briony Tallis, a perceptive 13-year-old who thinks she understands more about the adult world than she does. Ronan doesn’t only match Briony’s precociousness; she also communicates the volatile mixture of childish insecurity and romantic jealousy that makes this heedless, needy, half-innocent girl feel genuinely dangerous.
The most radical and revelatory ambition an actor can conceive is to inhabit another consciousness, and to bring the audience along on that parapsychological journey. This is more than just disappearing into a role, or methodically activating parallel memories. It’s a kind of self-authorized rebirth, as if Athena could spring not from her father’s forehead, but her own. It can be terrifying to witness, but genius often is.
Toni Servillo
Toni Servillo is probably best known to American audiences for “The Great Beauty” (2013), Paolo Sorrentino’s Oscar-winning tour of the decadent ways of the modern Roman cultural elite. That movie is what Pauline Kael called a “come-dressed-as-the-sick-soul-of-Europe” party, starring Servillo, playing a writer of slim accomplishment and large reputation, as the master of revels. With his handsome, creased face and impeccable haberdashery.
If you pull at the thread of Servillo’s collaboration with Sorrentino, you find something more intriguing and substantial than beauty. The two have worked together on five features, including Sorrentino’s directorial debut, “One Man Up,” and have developed a symbiosis that recalls some of the great actor-director partnerships of the past: Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro; Vittorio De Sica and Sophia Loren; John Ford and John Wayne.
Appreciating the scale of this accomplishment requires another round of analogies. Imagine if the same actor were cast as both Richard Nixon and Barack Obama, or Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. Andreotti, a seven-time prime minister and a prime mover in the long-ruling Christian Democratic Party, was a notorious backroom operator, shrewd and almost defiantly uncharismatic. Berlusconi, also a serial prime minister, was all bluster and charm, repellently sleazy to some Italians and endlessly magnetic to others.
Nicole Kidman
Artist, princess, writer, muse — Nicole Kidman has played them all, with short hair and long, a prodigious artificial schnoz and a fantastically jutting chin. She can smile like the sun and weep with enough tears that you want to hand her a box of tissues. In mainstream cinema, realism is an actor’s coin in trade, an aesthetic choice that helps turn artifice into something like life. For Kidman, a miniaturist with a lapidary touch, creating that realism sometimes involves obscuring the beauty (for the role, not awards) that has long defined her. It also means consistently playing with femininity.
Kidman entered the 21st century at the height of her stardom with “Moulin Rouge!” (2001). This was followed by a handful of other high-profile vehicles, most notably “The Hours” (2002), in which she played Virginia Woolf (cue the schnoz) and earned her an Oscar. It was a polite yawn of a movie that Kidman followed by starring in Lars von Trier’s “Dogville” (2004), a calculatingly abrasive Brechtian exercise in which her character, after being abused, picks up a gun and helps destroy a town. Kidman seemed to really enjoy that bit.
She’s made more than 40 movies since, some memorable and a number that are best forgotten. Like that of other actresses, Kidman’s celebrity has at times outstripped her bankability, creating a game that has less to do with the box office and more to do with a starry persona sustained by red-carpet mileage and a glut of fashion-magazine covers.
Daniel Day-Lewis
Day-Lewis is one of the most revered actors of the past half-century, a reputation based on his dazzling filmography and burnished by an aura of greatness that has grown to near-mythical proportions. His well-publicized preparations for his roles and his insistence on staying in character during production have become legendary, the stuff of excited headlines and fan fetishism. Like the exotic century plant, an agave that blooms spectacularly only once, Day-Lewis knows both how to tease us and put on a show.
His performance as Bill the Butcher is the apotheosis of that film’s ambitions, so when he’s not on screen, the picture sputters. Day-Lewis’s art is one of osmosis between him and his directors. And to date, his most fully rendered performances have been in the two films he has made with Anderson, most recently “Phantom Thread” (2017), whose beauties, depths and idiosyncrasies Day-Lewis absorbs, transforms and brilliantly refracts.
Denzel Washington
Denzel Washington is a screen titan who is also a subtle and sensitive craftsman, with serious old-school stage training and blazing movie-star presence. He can do Shakespeare and August Wilson, villainy or action heroism. He’s also one of the supreme regular-guy actors.
Like all stars, Washington’s acting feels inextricable with his charisma, a combination that’s seductive but can overwhelm movies. Few roles give Washington as much to work with, certainly not the movies with two of his favorite directors, Fuqua and Scott, who create a lot of commotion that Washington settles into — and centers — very comfortably.
Maybe one measure of his mightiness is how consistently he’s better than the movies he’s in. Amid the extensive run of excellent work — the coaches and cops, the gangsters and lawyers — there are a few monuments that show this towering talent in full.
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