It’s Academy Awards season, and that means it’s time for my annual Oscar survey highlighting my best picks in the acting categories. Whenever I am asked about the best part of being a film critic, my answer often comes down to the acting. No matter how mediocre a movie, the saving grace of a terrific performance almost always serves as a life raft. I am forever amazed at how good actors are able to insinuate themselves into the very depths of the people they play.
As usual, my choices and the best acting nominees of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are not in total sync. (The Oscars ceremony airs on ABC on March 15). More so than ever, the performances that often meant the most to me were in underseen, out-of-the-mainstream fare. All the more reason for me to weigh in. Riches are to be reaped if you know where to look. Many of these movies are either streamable or still in theatrical release.
Best Actress
Why We Wrote This
While the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences often nominates actors with flashy, scene-stealing performances, Monitor critic Peter Rainer prefers the quieter, deeper approaches to acting.
All five nominees are notable: Rose Byrne (“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”); Emma Stone (“Bugonia”); Renate Reinsve (“Sentimental Value”); Kate Hudson (“Song Sung Blue”) and Jessie Buckley (“Hamnet”). Of these, I was most impressed with Hudson and Buckley. Hudson’s turn as a beleaguered, resilient pop singer revealed a depth and range I had not expected from her. “Hamnet” is a four-hankie sobfest, but Buckley’s all-out acting earns the tears she elicits.
A number of other performances in this category I thought were equally deserving, if not more so. Jane Levy is subtly, heartbreakingly powerful in “A Little Prayer” as a troubled wife who rescues herself from sadness. Eva Victor, who not only stars in “Sorry, Baby” but also wrote and directed, plays a survivor of sexual violence – we never see the assault – who refuses to be victimized. It’s one of the most authentic depictions I’ve ever seen of recovery from trauma.
In “Preparation for the Next Life,” the new-to-movies
Sebiye Behtiyar plays an unauthorized Uyghur immigrant in New York on the run from the authorities. Her incisive, intuitive work here has the force of a hundred headlines. Chase Infiniti, also a relative newcomer, makes a smashing movie debut as the renegade daughter of anarchists in “One Battle After Another” – an intermittently brilliant movie that, for all its acclaim, I felt cartoonized the violence of political insurrection. (See “Message for a troubled America?” page 40.)
In the neglected “Left-Handed Girl,” Shih-Yuan Ma plays to perfection a Taiwanese daughter caught up in a dysfunctional family maelstrom. Her seemingly effortless acting was, to be sure, anything but effortless.
Agata Grzybowska/© 2025 Focus Features LLC
Best Actor
There is much to like in the five nominees: Leonardo DiCaprio, wearing a ratty bathrobe for half the movie, gets to display his comedic chops in “One Battle After Another.” Timothée Chalamet is a human spark plug as the table tennis phenom in “Marty Supreme,” though the actor never really hits more than one note. In the overrated “The Secret Agent,” Wagner Moura adeptly enacts essentially three different roles as a Brazilian professor fleeing political persecution. In “Sinners,” Michael B. Jordan plays identical twins, courtesy of a bit of camera trickery that preserves the power of his presence as both brothers. In “Blue Moon,” Ethan Hawke, my favorite of these nominees, plays the dissolute Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart with a mix of nonstop jabber and furtive sorrow.
Neglected but no less worthy is Ralph Fiennes as the Yorkshire choirmaster in “The Choral,” a film that never came close to receiving its due. Fiennes is a master at underplaying. Acting awards are most often given to overplaying. David Strathairn, as the churchgoing Vietnam vet in “A Little Prayer,” is another underplayer par excellence. So is Joel Edgerton, playing a logger in early 20th-century America in “Train Dreams.” His silences have a resounding eloquence. Tom Basden, as the over-the-hill rock idol in “The Ballad of Wallis Island,” which he also co-wrote, goes way beyond the usual pop star clichés. Beneath the preening and the bad moods lies an unextinguished innocence.
Best Supporting Actress
I have no bone to pick with the five nominees: Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas (“Sentimental Value”); Amy Madigan (“Weapons”); Wunmi Mosaku (“Sinners”); Teyana Taylor (“One Battle After Another”) and Elle Fanning (“Sentimental Value”). Fanning, in particular, playing an American movie star in a Swedish art film, is especially touching. The scene in which she ruefully confesses to the director (supporting actor nominee Stellan Skarsgård) that she is not right for the part is the best scene in the movie.
I would also single out Kerry Condon in a small but piercing cameo in “Train Dreams” as a U.S. Forest Service worker who explains why a dead tree is just as important as a living one. Odessa A’zion, as Marty’s co-conspirator in “Marty Supreme,” fulfills one of the key requirements of good acting: You never quite know where the performance is taking you. This is equally true of Margaret Qualley in “Blue Moon,” who gives her Yalie socialite unexpected resonance.
Best Supporting Actor
Besides Skarsgård, I’m fine with Oscar picks Benicio Del Toro (“One Battle After Another”) and Delroy Lindo (“Sinners”). Del Toro, with the driest of deadpans, plays a cooled-out martial arts sensei running a kind of underground railroad for undocumented migrants. Lindo has a bone-deep authenticity as a Mississippi Delta bluesman. As for the remaining two nominees, Jacob Elordi as the monster in “Frankenstein” was all sound and fury signifying, well, I’m not sure what. And as the brutal Col. Steven J. Lockjaw in “One Battle After Another,” Sean Penn, who I would watch in anything, appears to have locked down every other part of his body as well.
Not nominating William H. Macy as the grizzled, hypertalkative logger in “Train Dreams” was a big miss for the Academy. Andrew Scott’s Richard Rodgers in “Blue Moon” was equal, in its own subtle way, to Ethan Hawke’s work. Tim Key has a wonderful oddball charm as the eccentric millionaire in “The Ballad of Wallis Island.” In “Nuremberg,” Russell Crowe plays Nazi leader Hermann Göring, a role I assumed he had been miscast in until I saw what wonders he wrought.
Finally, there’s Simon Russell Beale’s cameo as the temperamental British composer Edward Elgar in “The Choral.” If this performance had appeared on stage and not on film, it would have prompted a standing ovation. I’ll give it one anyway.
Peter Rainer is the Monitor’s film critic.
