Delroy Lindo – “Da 5 Bloods”
Lindo’s thunder in Spike Lee’s take on films like “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” and “Apocalypse Now” rumbled over the world when “Da 5 Bloods” landed on Netflix this past June; for most people writing most year-end lists and cashing in their year-end awards ballots, his work here justifies the “Best Of” appellation, because yes, he is in fact that goddamn good. His fourth-wall breaking monologue, that long slog toward the camera through Vietnam’s jungle, is an all-timer in his filmography, but the groundwork needed for that moment to work is laid throughout the rest of the movie. Paul, his unhinged MAGA vet, didn’t come out of the womb a macho, me-first Trump supporter; life shaped him into one, or at least into the kind of person the Trump promise of fortune and opportunity appeals to. Lindo puts his whole spirit into the expression of Paul’s life journey, the bumps and bruises, the rancor, and right at the end, the grief that made this man and brought him low. It’s an indelible role in an accomplished body of work from one of the day’s underappreciated greats. – AC
Julia Garner – “The Assistant”
Ever felt like you’re suffocating even when you’re breathing? Let Julia Garner’s character in Kitty Green’s “The Assistant” demonstrate what it’s like to be smothered without having a pillow pushed into your face; as Jane, a junior assistant to a Harvey Weinstein surrogate figure, she spends her days watching abuses of all stripes unfold before her eyes, unable to do anything about them for fear of being targeted for abuse herself. Her boss uses his office as a carnal den for nubile young ladies trying to break into the movie business; he rains terror on subordinates who displease him. Such is the asphyxiating effect of his piggish tyranny that Jane can safely inhale only when she’s on her sidewalk smoke break. Garner wears the strain of that toxic work environment like contact lenses: The faraway, hollow look in her eyes says more than any line of dialogue could ever. – AC
Kelly O’Sullivan – “Saint Frances“
Is it unsporting for O’Sullivan to star in the movie she wrote? Does she have an unfair advantage over her peers for having an inside understanding of her role, a luxury many actors don’t get to indulge? If the answer to either is “yes,” then does it really matter given that she’s wonderful playing the listless, aimless 30-something heroine of her own screenplay? As Bridget, O’Sullivan dazzles: She’s luminous and lethargic at the same time, playing Bridget not as ambivalent but as lost, a woman lacking a purpose as well as the drive to find one. It happens that a purpose winds up finding her instead. What’s a child agnostic person to do when a nannying gig falls in their lap, especially when weighed down by the emotional burdens of abortion? Bridget’s ward, Frances (Ramona Edith Williams), helps melt away her defenses and uncertainty, and O’Sullivan gradually shines more and more of her light for audiences to see as her character slowly gravitates toward her adulthood. – AC
Sônia Braga – “Bacurau”
Only Braga could play low-key and go all in at the same time on the same performance. Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles go ham to make “Bacurau” as oddball and out there as possible, and Braga, in her own quiet way, follows suit as the small fictional town of the title is subject to a handful of inexplicable and strange happenings, including the arrival of a flying saucer (that’s really just a drone) and their home’s sudden disappearance from maps online. No matter how bizarre things get, no matter how great the threat to the village grows, Braga acknowledges worsening events around her with seen-it-all-before insouciance. She isn’t a woman easily rattled. She is a woman who’s severely allergic to bullshit and all too happy to let everyone around her know how she feels when life spurns her; she’s met, for instance, attending a funeral and hurling obscenities at the body in the casket. It’s a level of abrasion. – AC
Eliza Scanlen – “Babyteeth”
Nobody ever really knows when they’re going to die, except for those poor unfortunates sentenced to death by terminal illness. In Shannon Murphy’s “Babyteeth,” Milla (Scanlen) has that cursed gift of foresight. With each passing day, she’s forced to reconcile with her mortality, with death and dying, and with what exactly her death means: For her, of course, and for her mother, Anna (Essie Davis), her father, Henry (Ben Mendelsohn), and Moses (Toby Wallace), the troubled 20-something addict she’s infatuated with (and who’s in turn infatuated with her). Scanlen takes this hellish cycle, this awful existential crisis, and turns it into a journey for Milla, a woman too young to face her imminent death and yet graceful enough that she makes that dread confrontation look surprisingly peaceful. It’s the relationships she has with the living that are up and down. Maybe dying isn’t the hard part. Maybe it’s living. – AC