How on earth do you condense 26 years of cinema into just 50 performances? It can’t be done, of course – though The Independent’s culture desk have taken their best stab at it. In whittling down a list of the best performances of the 21st century, we enforced a few rules: firstly, that each actor could only appear on this once.
Every performance had to have been in a feature-length film that premiered between 1 January, 2000 and the present day. Our ranking has attempted to take into account a number of factors, including the charisma on show, emotional range, logistical difficulty, and in many cases the cultural impact – any factor by which a performance might be deemed “great”. We have also tried to feature a balance of familiar characters and lesser-known gems, and a diverse mix of genres.
Some areas of cinema are better represented than others; most are performances in the English language. There are many, many worthy omissions, inevitably, and although this ranking was assembled by committee, it is a matter of subjective taste, as all such rankings are. With all this in mind, here are The Independent’s picks for the 50 best movie performances of the 21st century...
Years before Brady Corbet earned his Best Picture nomination for The Brutalist, he released an equally damning portrait of America in the form of Vox Lux. It saw him place all of the nation’s demons inside one woman: a pop star called Celeste. Having survived a school shooting as a teenager, she sang a eulogy at the memorial, which was transformed first into a cathartic release, then a kind of marketable therapy.
Natalie Portman played her as feral, mighty, spiteful and manipulative, sharpening every one of her jagged corners. Celeste’s path of carnage leads, eventually, to a live concert, in which the actor weaponises every inch of her celebrity. She commands the stage, making us believe that this crowd of mostly young, broken teens, would come to her for some healing in an unredeemable world.
Russell Crowe in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) Russell Crowe won his Oscar for Gladiator, with a performance that capitalised on many of his best qualities at the time: tautness, aggression; sincerity. Three years later, as naval officer Jack Aubrey in Peter Weir’s Master and Commander, he may have been even better. The film’s reputation as an impeccably sturdy “dad movie” has only grown over the past two decades – “dad cinema” being a slightly (if only slightly) reductive descriptor for this all-male film about men and cannons and boats.
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