the film is very interesting

It's fascinating. It's intriguing. I couldn't tear myself away. I couldn't put it down. (this phrase is used for en extremely interesting book) I was so into it, I lost track of time. It does nothing for me. I was bored to tears. I was bored to death. I was dying of boredom. It's about as exciting as watching paint dry. (= it's very The film is so very interesting that I have seen it for three times. A. Very. B. Have seen. C. For. Đúng(0) Đúng 2GP. Okee 5 tháng 11 2018 lúc 21:31. Bạn ơi câu 1 ấy sửa lại từ whom thành gì ạ? Đúng(0) Đúng 2GP. Ngọc ngọc 30 tháng 11 2021 lúc 12:11. Better: Education is important in lowering crime rates because convicts who receive a college degree while in prison are much less likely to re-offend than those who haven't. Great: Education is important in lowering crime rates. The okay topic sentence states a fact. It would probably do best in the middle of the paragraph as support for the Today I would like to outline the three most important aspects of continuity in relation to shooting your film. Continuity is so important. It is one of the areas that the emerging film maker consistently overlooks with negative consequences. I would like to break continuity down into four areas. Acting continuity. Places far away have come closer, thanks to technology. The pace of life has increased. Communication is rapid, travel is fast, movement is easy, action is quick, interaction has sped up and so has life. Things that once took hours to complete, can be done in seconds today. The world is smaller and life is fast. Site Rencontre Pour Ado Sans Inscription. In the entirety of the history of cinema, many legendary filmmakers have paved the way for future storytellers to tread on. They broke the mould and experimented with unorthodox techniques to tell their story. They often challenged the status quo and brought about revolutions in cinema. They are unique films that dared to pioneer certain aspects of films. Here is the list of most inventive, imaginative and creative movies. You can watch some of these movies filled with creative ideas on Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime. 12. Hardcore Henry 2015 Ever since I read the first book that was written in the first person, I wondered if that could be translated to movies. While films capture a singular perspective usually following a single character, they were never from the protagonist’s perspective. The films were tainted by the director and cinematographers opinions on camera placement to evoke emotions through close-ups or low-angle or high-angle shots. One film made a mark in 2015, though for literally stepping into the protagonist’s shoes. After the success of a YouTube video titled Bad Motherfucker’ made completely in POV, the director made this feature length film. It was partially produced through crowd-funding which is quite a landmark in itself. While the story is just a sci-fi action flick, what is most important is that the movie is completely shot in the first person perspective and is adamant on sticking to its film device making it a unique experience. With the advent of VR, we may see more movies of this type very soon. Read More Best Movies About Nihilism Ever 11. Buried 2010 There have been some movies that had a single character and there have been some that take place in real time or in a single location. But what Buried’ manages to do is bring all of that and more into an interesting movie. The film features an American truck driver being waking up buried alive in the middle of the desert in war-torn Iraq. While films like Locke’ also primarily have a single actor, their sense of peril is far less than in Buried’. The entire movie takes place in the extremely claustrophobic interior of the wooden coffin with a phone and lighter. The story talks about the reality of war and how it affect people and about the will to survive but the movie rests on the shoulders of the only actor we see in the flesh; Ryan Reynolds. In one of his best performances, he carries the film through his frustration and expressions. The shot of darkness outside the coffin lit by the lighter is hauntingly beautiful. The movie treads a very risky line of having a single actor doing most of the hard work but it pays off. Read More Best Movie Franchises of All Time 10. Adaptation 2002 So the story of Adaptation’ goes like this; it was 1999 and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman had been signed to make a cinematic adaptation of The Orchid Thief’, but he was frustrated with a writer’s block as he didn’t know what to think of the book. Finally, in a stroke of genius, he instead wrote a screenplay based on his own experiences of adapting the book, topping actual facts with a dollop of fiction. Though the film is billed as an adaptation of “The Orchid Thief”, its primary narrative focus is Kaufman’s struggle to adapt the book into a film, while dramatising the events of the book in parallel. This ingenius self-referential and metacinematic plotline alone would be enough to grant a film a spot here, but Director Spike Jonze’s original and funny rendition as well great performances all around make it soar right at the penultimate position. Read More Best British Movies of All Time 9. Birdman 2014 Bursting and bristling with raw energy, Birdman’ plays around with the art of movie-making and gives a new dimension to it. It surprises, challenges, and dazzles; sometimes all at once. It is zany, exhilarating, and an experience that you, in all likelihood, would have never had at cinemas. It is not that the one single take hadn’t been attempted before, but Birdman’ — with Emmanuel Lubezki at the helm of camera — takes it to another level and pulls it off with amazing results. Read More Best Movie Quotes of All Time 8. Russian Ark 2002 Many great directors have used the famous long-take aka Oner to great effect in Touch of Evil’, Rope’, Atonement’, Children of Men’ and so many more. What Russian Ark’ achieves though is an almost unbelievable feat. It condenses centuries’ worth of the country’s history transcending time in one single take shot in real time. The camera follows a character credited as “The Stranger” as he moves across the Hermitage Museum as he encounters various historical figures. Nearly an hour and a half long, this is a testament to the will of filmmakers to realize even the toughest of things for the sake of art and in this case, history. Owing to the great production design and performances along with brilliant blocking, Russian Ark’ is one of the most beautiful movies ever made with every frame being as beautiful as a painting. Read More Best Biopic Movies of All Time 7. Blair Witch Project 1999 Not many movies can say that they made an entire genre of filmmaking. Blair Witch Project’ though, did exactly that. All horror movies before it were usually supernatural creatures chasing people and most of the fright came from jump-scares rather than storytelling. With the new advancement in technology of the handheld camera for regular people, this movie made the genre of found-footage’ films. It used brilliant effects at a very small budget and brought about terror by not showing more than it did. This was a way to make a film on a very small budget but it paid off becoming one of the best horror movies of all time. It also revived horror flicks and paved the way for movies like Paranormal Activity’ that entirely thrived on found-footage tropes. In the two decades, many movies have been inspired by this one even lending a little bit to the shaky-cam technique used in big budget action movies. Read More Best Movie Couples of Last 30 Years 6. Boyhood 2014 Richard Linklater’s entire filmography consists of very creative and unorthodox scripts from the walk-and-talk Before Trilogy’ to the unique magic of Dazed and Confused’ and the psychedelic commentary on life that is Waking Life’. But the one he is most appreciated for was the masterpiece that is Boyhood’. A frankly simple but deceivingly crazy idea to shoot actors as they grew in real life is the most out-of-the-box idea. At first glance, many members of the audience dismissed it as a gimmick but when one sees the movie, they can appreciate its mastery over depiction of reality. The device used blends into the story and the spirit of the movie. The fact that he couldn’t reshoot any part of the film if required makes it a scary task but it is executed to perfection. While it is a novel concept that will unknowingly influence films for decades, the difficulty to actualize the concept will make sure that not a lot will try to follow in its footsteps keeping Boyhood’ in a league of its own. Read More Best Animated Movies of All Time 5. The 400 Blows 1959 While there is no single movie that started the French New Wave of Cinema, The 400 Blows’ is a guess as good as any. It is the story of a 14 year old boy struggling with a tough home and getting into all sorts of trouble at school. All of this is shown in a very new way using jump cuts and other techniques to make the viewers realise that they are watching a film. French New Wave or Nouvelle Vague was the movement pioneered by great French filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. They gave the movies identity as a form of art made using a camera. They accepted the presence of a camera and broke the rules that old Hollywood had set. Their works of art made possible the auteur cinema of Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Stephen Spielberg and most of the legendary filmmakers after the 60’s. Read More Best Twist Ending Movies of All Time 4. Memento 2000 Widely considered the crowning gem of Nolan’s career, Memento’ is a masterpiece. Quite a few movies had experimented with moving back and forth in time across the movie but the Nolan brothers created a script that essentially played out in reverse. The brilliance of the movie doesn’t lie in that though. The unreliable narration of the movie flips the basic formula of films on its head. Most movies are the journeys of their respective characters as they change or are changed because of circumstances that take place. But owing to the protagonist’s memory loss, there isn’t any scope for him to change as he resets to the same state every 15 minutes. And this is a deliberate move. Since our character cannot change, our perception of the character changes radically from the start to the end. Every rewind in time, explains to us but not to the character what happened before. It is a deeply layered film exploiting our expectations to drastically change our perspective throughout the film. Read More Best Movies With Strong Female Leads 3. Dr. Strangelove 1964 There have been satirical pieces in all art-forms from 1984’ to Her’ but Dr. Strangelove’ is the best example of art taking on reality. It follows the events after a high-ranking military officer madly launches a nuclear attack. Stanley Kubrick makes it a textbook example of dark humour in a setting as serious as can be. But the ludicrous characters and the absurdity of the entire situation make it a very interesting movie to experience. It may be especially fitting with the current political scenario around the world. It can also be understood as a critique of how a few people can have the power to change the course of mankind and how their subordinates who actually carry out the orders have no say in the matter just as the public has seemingly no say on the international matters that affect them daily. Every time you watch the movie, you will probably learn something new. And you will also appreciate the genius of Kubrick. Read More Best James Bond Movies of All Time 2. Toy Story 1995 Animation has been a cornerstone of cinema for decades. But they were always very time-consuming to make and it took a lot of artists to render every frame. One invention brought the animated film industry into the forefront of movies and a staple in popular culture. Pixar’s Toy Story’ was the first feature length movie to be made entirely using computer technology. With a stellar cast, endearing characters and a simple yet effective story, it made a huge splash in the sea of movies. The studio founded by a visionary; Steve Jobs and helmed by John Lasseter made sure that the animation was on point. Every frame was made to look realistic but animated enough to stay out of the Uncanny-Valley. The balance of art and technology meshed together to bring us great animated movies that transcended age and gender. It also made a huge impact in CGI technology to be used in live-action films. The only downside was gradual drying out of hand-made animation of old times but it solidified animation as a staple of films and it even led to the separate category for animated films in the Oscars. Read More Best Found Footage Movies 1. Citizen Kane 1941 This is a movie that is a regular in all lists of best movies of all time. This has led to some modern audience members calling it an overrated and hyped movie. But when they see the movie with a keen eye they see the greatness of the film. Orson Welles studied films for years and borrowed, expanded on and invented ways to tell a story through film. The story itself is one of the disconnect that comes with success and the importance of innocence. But the movie shaped films for centuries to come. It established rules of framing and drawing attention that have since become a staple of cinema. He used size and motion in deep focus to draw attention while showing a wide picture letting the viewer pick and chose what they want to see. This movie in particular has inspired many filmmakers to use the art-form to tell stories. It is an understatement to say that it is the most influential movie. It is a classic for being creative, inventive, artistic and innovative. It is truly one of the best movies ever made. Read More Best Alien Movies of All Time Home What's new Latest activity Authors Tài liệu Đánh giá mới nhất Tìm tài liệu Thi online Blog Tin tức - Sự kiện Bí kíp học thi Hướng nghiệp - Du học Trắc nghiệm tính cách Diễn đàn Bài viết mới Search forums Đăng nhập Đăng kí Có gì mới? Tìm kiếm Tìm kiếm Chỉ tìm trong tiêu đề By Tìm nâng cao… Bài viết mới Search forums Menu Đăng nhập Đăng kí Navigation Install the app Thêm tùy chọn Liên hệ Đóng Menu Home Diễn đàn Trung học phổ thông Lớp 12 Tiếng Anh 12 Ngân hàng câu hỏi trắc nghiệm môn Tiếng Anh You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites should upgrade or use an alternative browser. The film is interesting. We’ve seen it twice. Tác giả The Collectors Creation date 14/12/21 Tags trắc nghiệm tiếng anh 12 Đăng kí nhanh tài khoản với Facebook Google 14/12/21 Câu hỏi Mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the sentence that best combines each pair of sentences in the following questions. The film is interesting. We’ve seen it twice. A. The film is too interesting for us to see it twice. B. It is so an interesting film that we have seen it twice. C. The film is so interesting we have seen twice. D. The film is so interesting that we have seen it twice. Too + adjective/adverb + for so + to do sth So + adjective/adverb + that + clause Such + a/an + Nouns + that + clause Đáp án D. Click để xem thêm... Câu hỏi này có trong đề thi Đề thi thử tốt nghiệp THPT 2020 môn Tiếng Anh - ĐH Ngoại Ngữ - Đề 35 50 câu hỏi 90 phút 59 lượt thi Bắt đầu thi Bạn phải đăng nhập hoặc đăng kí để trả lời. Các chủ đề tương tự Article This is the most interesting man I’ve ever met. The Collectors 31/5/23 Ngân hàng câu hỏi trắc nghiệm môn Tiếng Anh Trả lời 0 Đọc 37 31/5/23 The Collectors Article My sister thinks the film is too frightening. I am not... The Collectors 11/3/23 Ngân hàng câu hỏi trắc nghiệm môn Tiếng Anh Trả lời 0 Đọc 54 11/3/23 The Collectors Article The film is good, _________? The Collectors 14/4/23 Ngân hàng câu hỏi trắc nghiệm môn Tiếng Anh Trả lời 0 Đọc 921 14/4/23 The Collectors Article - Hana "The book is really interesting and educational." The Collectors 27/4/23 Ngân hàng câu hỏi trắc nghiệm môn Tiếng Anh Trả lời 0 Đọc 50 27/4/23 The Collectors Article - Peter "The book is really interesting and educational." The Collectors 5/4/23 Ngân hàng câu hỏi trắc nghiệm môn Tiếng Anh Trả lời 0 Đọc 280 5/4/23 The Collectors Chia sẻ Reddit Pinterest Tumblr WhatsApp Email Link Quảng cáo Home Diễn đàn Trung học phổ thông Lớp 12 Tiếng Anh 12 Ngân hàng câu hỏi trắc nghiệm môn Tiếng Anh Back Top 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. 25 Gael García Bernal MANOHLA DARGIS When Alejandro González Iñárritu’s thriller “Amores Perros” and Alfonso Cuarón’s road movie “Y Tu Mamá También” were released in American art houses a year apart, the shocks were seismic. Their directors were soon racing toward international renown and so was Gael García Bernal, their shared star. He was gifted, held the screen and had a face you kept looking at, partly because — with his doe eyes and lantern jaw — it seamlessly fused ideals of feminine and masculine beauty. This contrast wasn’t especially obvious in “Amores Perros” 2001, but it helps enrich the warmer “Y Tu Mamá También” 2002, a soulful coming-of-age story that opens with a whoop and ends on a sigh. García Bernal plays Julio, a working-class teenager on a journey of discovery of the self, of others. Along with his best friend played by Diego Luna, Julio tumbles through life heedlessly until he doesn’t. As the story’s raucousness quiets, Julio’s adolescent machismo fades, replaced by pensiveness that the actor makes so physical, you see the character retreating inside himself. By 2004, García Bernal had appeared in Walter Salles’s “The Motorcycle Diaries” as the young Che Guevara and played a duplicitous chameleon in Pedro Almodóvar’s “Bad Education.” Almodóvar put the actor in heels to play a noirish femme fatale, a role that García Bernal apparently didn’t much like doing so but that deepened his persona with a smear of lipstick and a psychological coldness that created new shocks. A. O. SCOTT In Pablo Larraín’s “No” 2013, García Bernal plays Rene Saavedra, a hotshot young advertising creative in 1980s Chile, with his usual charm. He’s cool but not intimidatingly so; good-looking in the same measure; funny but not to the point of obnoxiousness; self-confident but not a jerk. At first, it’s easy to underestimate both Rene and García Bernal, to mistake their casual, unassuming naturalness for a lack of gravitas or craft. Rene is enlisted by a group of opposition political parties to produce television spots supporting a “no” vote on a referendum extending the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Rene’s job is to sell rejection as an upbeat choice, to acknowledge the brutality of Pinochet’s regime while focusing on the happy future without him. Though Rene believes in the cause, he also views it as a marketing challenge, and there is a bit of a “Mad Men” vibe to his wrangling with clients, colleagues and rivals. It’s up to García Bernal to provide the dramatic link between the banalities of the media business and the terror of political repression, and he does it almost entirely with his eyes. One night, the apartment he shares with his young son is vandalized while they sleep, and in that moment Rene’s chipper resolve liquefies into pure fear. The next day he is back at work, and both he and the audience have a new and profound understanding of what the work means. Rent or buy “No” on major streaming platforms. 24 Sônia Braga MANOHLA DARGIS I just recently rewatched “Aquarius” 2016 for our ode to Sônia Braga. For those who haven’t seen it Braga stars as Clara, a writer whose apartment faces the Atlantic. Most of the story follows Clara just living her life while swatting away her landlord. Braga fits seamlessly into the director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s wonderful, unfussy realism. This time while viewing the movie, though — partly prompted by, ahem, a chapter title called “Clara’s Hair” — I noticed how Braga kept rearranging her opulent curtain of hair. And, as she swept it up and let it down, I realized that Mendonça wasn’t just presenting a character but also the legend playing her. A. O. SCOTT It’s a reminder — subliminal and brazen at the same time — that Braga was a big deal in Brazil and beyond in the 1970s and ’80s, her nation’s answer to Sophia Loren. Her films with Mendonça “Bacurau” this year as well “Aquarius” draw on that history and exploit her old-school charisma. But they aren’t just late-career star turns. Clara isn’t Sonia Braga She’s a highly specific woman with her own history of achievements, love affairs and regrets. But only a performer with Braga’s utter self-assurance, her heroic indifference to what anyone else thinks of her, could bring Clara to life. DARGIS Yet what I found fascinating about “Aquarius” this time is that Clara is also Braga, in the sense that the character’s meaning is partly shaped by everything that Braga brings whenever she’s onscreen, including her history in Brazilian cinema as a woman of mixed ancestry as well as her adventures in Hollywood. There’s something fantastically liberating watching Braga play this majestic woman, who has visible wrinkles and never had breast reconstruction after her mastectomy. That’s especially true given how Braga was once slavered over as a sex star. “There is nothing else to call her,” a male critic once wrote — well, you could call her an actress. SCOTT Her skill manifests itself in a totally different way in “Bacurau” this year, a crazily fantastical and violent science-fictionish allegory of Brazil in crisis that departs from the realism of Mendonça’s other films without abandoning their political passion or their humanism. Braga, part of a sprawling ensemble that includes nonprofessional actors, is essential to this. She plays Domingas, a small-town doctor with a drinking problem and a sometimes abrasive personality — a deglamorized, comical role that no one else could have managed with such depth and grace. Or as Mendonça put it, “In a symphony, she’d be the piano.” Stream “Bacurau” on the Criterion Channel and “Aquarius” on Netflix. 23 Mahershala Ali A. O. SCOTT Mahershala Ali has one of the great faces in modern movies — those sculpted cheekbones, that high, contemplative brow, those eyes tinged with melancholy. His presence on camera is magnetic, but also watchful and sly. His characters tend toward reticence, guardedness, but their reserve is its own form of eloquence, their whispers more resonant than any shout. 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. And then, between the first and second acts, he vanishes. But Ali haunts the film even after his departure. He’s both its tragic, nurturing image of manhood and the first man worthy of Chiron’s love. MANOHLA DARGIS 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. I was so accustomed to seeing Ali in a bespoke suit and sometimes out that I didn’t recognize him at first in “Moonlight.” It wasn’t simply the different wardrobes, but the precise bearing that Ali gave each man, variations in bodies, yes, but also in how those bodies move and signify. In “House of Cards,” Remy flows and there were moments when I thought I was looking at the next James Bond. In “Moonlight,” Ali creates a titanic character whose force, even after he disappears from the movie, continues to resonate. The actor creates a very dissimilar character in “Green Book” 2018, his second Oscar winner, this time with a performance — as the musician Don Shirley, whom Ali plays as a man and a defended fortress — that surpasses the movie. SCOTT I would almost say that the performance is the opposite of the movie. Ali is graceful, witty and self-aware while “Green Book” is clumsy, jokey and blind to its own insensitivities. I’m not sure any other actor could have handled the notorious fried chicken scene with such sly dignity. That “Green Book” and “Moonlight” were both best picture winners speaks to the contradictions of our cultural moment, but it’s proof of Ali’s talent that his subtle craft and unshakable charisma can anchor two such divergent films. Stream “Moonlight” on Netflix. 22 Melissa McCarthy MANOHLA DARGIS When critics anatomize comic performers like Melissa McCarthy, we often touch on familiar qualities like timing, grace and elastic physiognomy. But we’re also talking about acting. Since making the transition from TV to movies, McCarthy has repeatedly demonstrated her range and exhilaratingly helped demolish regressive ideas about who gets to be a film star. No movie has served her better than “Spy” 2015 in which she plays Susan, a timid analyst who’s sent on an outlandish mission that allows McCarthy to mince and then delightfully swagger. Essential to the subversive fun of “Spy” is how it deploys genre conventions to showcase McCarthy’s talents while also blowing up stereotypes. Susan contains multitudes, first as self-protection she dampens her fire and later as an expression of her humanity. In the field, she unhappily assumes several frumpy, tragically bewigged disguises — variations on how others see her — before transforming into a sexy, trash-talking fantasy of her own design. As Susan lets down her hair and inhibitions, McCarthy cuts loose. Her voice booms, her fluttery hands ball into fists, her Kewpie-doll face goes full-on Medusa. McCarthy isn’t playing one woman — she’s all of us, with a vengeance. A. O. SCOTT Lee Israel is funny. She shares a fast and furiously aggressive verbal wit with some of McCarthy’s other creations, like Tammy in “Tammy” 2014 and Mullins in “The Heat” 2013. But Lee was a real person, and “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” 2018 isn’t exactly a comedy. It’s not quite a biopic either, but rather a highly specific slice of late-20th-century New York queer and literary life threaded through a misfit buddy picture and twisted into a caper film. Lee is not easy to like or root for. She’s abrasive, self-absorbed and self-sabotaging. She alienates friends and maintains as tenuous a grip on ethics as on sobriety. McCarthy resists turning her story — which involves trading a faltering career as a writer for a lucrative stint as a forger of famous writers’ letters — into a parable of recovery or redemption. It’s about how Lee and her sidekick the wonderful Richard E. Grant gamble on survival, rebelling against the fate that an indifferent world has prepared for them. The movie’s title poses an honest question. Maybe you can’t forgive Lee for her lapses and lies, her lack of consideration for other people’s words and feelings. But there’s no way you can forget her. Rent or buy “Spy” and “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” on most major platforms. 21 Catherine Deneuve In a lengthy career working with a who’s who of auteurs, Deneuve has stood for a certain kind of elegant Frenchwoman whether she’s playing an ordinary wife, a down-on-her-luck bistro owner or even an Iranian mother. For that last role, in the animated “Persepolis” 2007. Deneuve voiced a character based on Marjane Satrapi’s mom. We asked Satrapi, who directed the film with Vincent Paronnaud, to explain why she sought out Deneuve. If you live in France, Catherine Deneuve is the symbol. When I was growing up, she was the 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. She doesn’t try to be likable. She’s very frank. There is this scene when I come home and my mom starts yelling at me “You know what they do with young girls in Iran? You have to get out of this country.” I remember when she played it, she was a little bit off. She tried to contain herself as she normally does. I was like, “No, Catherine, you’re really out of your mind.” She did it and she actually cried. That was extremely moving. And still, after all these years, each time I see her, I have the heartbeat. She is like a lion. She is not loud, she does not make gestures. But even if she is behind you and you don’t see her, you feel that a feline is in the room. It feels at the same time very exciting and very dangerous. She is ferocious and she is fearless, and I love that about her. — Interview by Kathryn Shattuck Rent or buy “Persepolis” on most major platforms. 20 Rob Morgan A. O. SCOTT The great character actors are masters of paradox, at once indelible and invisible. You don’t necessarily recognize them from one role to the next, but they leave their stamp on every film, enhancing the whole even in small parts. If you saw “Mudbound,” “Monsters and Men,” “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” and “Just Mercy” — four movies released between 2017 and 2019 — you are aware of Rob Morgan, whether or not you know his name. As a death row prisoner in “Just Mercy,” he is a notably undramatic presence, a quiet man haunted by remorse, helplessness and fear whose plight encapsulates the film’s humanist argument. In each of the other movies, he plays a father, in the Jim Crow South and the modern urban North — a man who knows more than he chooses to say. The sons in those movies do most of the talking, but Morgan gives eloquent expression to experiences that lie outside the main story even as they ground it in a larger history. In “Last Black Man” he appears in a handful of scenes and utters just a few lines, but everything that movie is about — the pleasures and disappointments of life at the margins of an idiosyncratic, rapidly changing city — is written in his face. He listens, he chews sunflower seeds, he plays a few chords on an old pipe organ, and after a few minutes in his presence you understand exactly what you need to know. MANOHLA DARGIS Every so often, a small movie gives an actor a chance to go bigger and hold the center, which is what Morgan does in Annie Silverstein’s “Bull” 2020. He plays Abe, a former rodeo bull rider with stiff joints, blood in his urine and a fragilely held together life. His bull riding days over, he now works on the ground as a bullfighter, helping protect fallen riders. The role of Abe, mercifully, isn’t overwritten, which allows Morgan to define the character with a persuasively embodied performance, one whose head tilts, sideways looks and withdrawn presence expresses a bruising past and the self-protecting instincts of a man in emotional retreat. “Bull” should be only about Abe, but it instead focuses on his relationship with a white, rootless 14-year-old neighbor, Kris Amber Havard. Their fates sourly cross after she’s caught trashing his house, and is shaped by the unearned optimism that’s foundational to American cinema. In other words, Abe and Kris save each other. What saves the movie, though, is the window Morgan opens onto the Black cowboy and how the performance complicates America’s favorite myths, including the figure of the hard, stoic loner. Abe doesn’t ride in from John Wayne territory; Abe rides in from an entirely different land that Morgan makes visceral, haunted and wholly alive. Stream “Bull” on Hulu. 19 Wes Studi By Manohla Dargis Wes Studi has one of the screen’s most arresting faces — jutting and creased and anchored with the kind of penetrating eyes that insist you match their gaze. Lesser directors like to use his face as a blunt symbol of the Native American experience, as a mask of nobility, of suffering, of pain that’s unknowable only because no one has asked the man wearing it. In the right movie, though, Studi doesn’t just play with a character’s facade; he peels its layers. A master of expressive opacity, he shows you the mask and what lies beneath, both the thinking and the feeling. He shows you the mask and what lies beneath. Studi vaulted into cinematic consciousness as the vengeful Huron warrior in Michael Mann’s epic “The Last of the Mohicans” 1992, a character the actor conveys with powerful physicality and intensities of contempt, impatience, resentment, fury. Doing a lot with a little has been a constant in Studi’s movie career, which includes signifying roles in “The New World” 2005 and “Avatar” 2009. Like many actors, he has done his share of forgettable work, made exploitation flicks and TV fodder. Often specifically cast as a Native American, he has played Geronimo and Cochise; he might right more film wrongs if westerns were still popular. And if the industry were adventurous, he might also play more types like the supervisor of a homeless shelter in “Being Flynn” 2012, a man who doesn’t wear what Studi calls “leathers and feathers.” Instructively, he wears neither in Scott Cooper’s “Hostiles” 2017, about life and death in late-19th-century America. Studi plays Chief Yellow Hawk, a dying Cheyenne prisoner whom the federal government has agreed to return to his ancestral lands. The movie is largely interested in his escort, a war-ruined Indian hater played by Christian Bale, the star. Once again, Studi delivers a supporting turn that complements the leading performance — his character’s indifference to the escort’s rage is a wall that can’t be breached — and helps equalize the story’s balance. Yellow Hawk has survived long enough to die on his terms, survival that Studi makes a final act of self-possession. Stream “Hostiles” on Netflix. 18 Willem Dafoe By Julian Schnabel The actor has been a vital presence in movies as different as “Shadow of the Vampire” 2000 and “The Florida Project” 2017, for which he received Oscar nominations. He was also nominated for playing van Gogh in Julian Schnabel’s biopic, “At Eternity’s Gate” 2018. We asked Schnabel why he turned to Dafoe. Willem and I met more than 30 years ago. He has always lived in the neighborhood, and we had a lot of friends in common. Oliver Stone was shooting “The Doors” in New York, and we were standing around the set one night and that was the first time we really started to talk. One thing that’s super-important is he’s a very generous actor. He cares about other people’s performances and about helping them by being available in whatever he is doing. He’s very, very loyal and very, very smart. If you’ve got somebody who’s smart, they can make it better. He’s a very generous actor. He cares about other people’s performances. [For “At Eternity’s Gate”] I needed somebody that would have the depth of character to play van Gogh. And it wasn’t about just looking like him. It was somebody that could have enough life experience to be that guy. People thought, well, Willem is 60 years old, van Gogh was 37 when he died. That was irrelevant to me. You just have to have a hunch about trusting somebody and thinking that they can do something. I trust Willem implicitly. And that level of trust goes both ways. There’s stuff we shot in Arles after he arrived that we couldn’t use. He was wearing the same clothes, had the same hairdo, but he wasn’t the guy yet. Then there was a certain moment when all of a sudden he was. He was transformed, transfigured. He was somebody else. One of my favorite scenes is where he’s talking to the young Dr. Rey, who is seeing him after he’s cut his ear off and he is guaranteeing him that he’s going to get to paint when he’s in the institution. That interaction is extraordinary, what Willem does there. He’s basically sitting at a table and there’s not a whole hell of a lot of room for movement. But what goes on in his face in his response to what the young doctor is saying to him — and also in response to whatever other thoughts seem to be traveling through his mind at that time — is a landscape of events and an interior life like foam coming to the top of a vanilla egg cream. — Interview by Kathryn Shattuck Rent or buy “At Eternity’s Gate” on most major platforms. 17 Alfre Woodard By A. O. Scott In a just world, there would be a bursting roster of great performances to fill this entry, a collection of matriarchs, romantic heroines, divas and villains to reflect the full range of Alfre Woodard’s gifts. Such roles are always in short supply for Black women, but even in small parts in minor movies or television series, Woodard is an unforgettable presence, at once regal and utterly real. The two films that have given her the most room — Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave” 2013 and Chinonye Chukwu’s “Clemency” 2019 — both place the question of justice front and center. In each, Woodard must assert her character’s dignity and ethical integrity in the face of impossibly cruel circumstances. Bernadine Williams, the prison warden in “Clemency” whose job includes supervising executions, finds her professionalism increasingly at odds with her humanity. In “12 Years,” Mistress Shaw, an enslaved woman whose relationship with a plantation owner has brought her a measure of privilege, has bargained with a system built on her dehumanization. Woodard’s art, her commitment to truth, is what you see. The contradictions that Bernadine and Mistress Shaw contend with are larger than any individual. What Woodard does is make them personal. Self-control is a matter of survival, and Woodard sets her face into a picture of proper decorum, impersonating the genteel Southern lady or the efficient bureaucrat that the situation requires. She doesn’t so much let the masks slip — except perhaps in the devastating final scenes of “Clemency” — as show the cost and care that go into wearing them. The characters are also performing, playing their roles for mortal stakes, and Woodard’s art, her commitment to truth, is what you see in the space between how they seem and who they are. Stream both “Clemency” and “12 Years a Slave” on Hulu. 16 Kim Min-hee By Manohla Dargis In Hong Sang-soo’s “Right Now, Wrong Then” 2016, a woman and man meet. They drink and drink some more and testily part ways only to meet in the movie’s second half as if for the very first time, a setup that evokes “Groundhog Day.” Once again, they go to a cafe, a studio, a restaurant. Yet while their actions generally remain the same, as does the overall arc of the evening, enough has changed — how they look at each other, the inflections in their voices — to turn this second encounter into something different. Kim Min-hee’s exquisitely nuanced performance is at the center of the movie, and the actress herself has been at the heart of Hong’s work ever since, appearing in most of his ensuing movies. An established art-house auteur, Hong tells modestly scaled stories that are formally playful, sensitive to human imperfection and drenched in soju. Familiar things happen, sometimes unfamiliarly. Repetition is often a narrative focus, one that is grounded in life and beautifully served by Kim’s lucid expressivity. In Hong’s minimalist canon, life is condensed in everyday moments, in conversations and the way bodies lean toward one another. The differences in the two halves of “Right Now, Wrong Then” reveal new facets of the characters and create new tensions between them. They also give free rein to Kim’s range, allowing her to play with intonation, gestures, flickering looks. Yet while the movie’s two sections feel like variations of the same story, her performance feels more like it’s coalescing as — smile by smile, with deflected and fixed gazes — Kim gathers the character into a whole. She goes big and small, veers from monstrous to mousy. She went for baroque in Park Chan-wook’s “The Handmaiden” 2016, her best-known movie. In this outlandish, often perversely funny drama set in Korea in the 1930s, she plays a Japanese noble who’s saved from her deviant uncle by her wiles and by another woman. The story’s flamboyant excesses and narrative twists allow Kim to use every tool in her workbox. She goes big and small, veers from monstrous to mousy, and alternately hides her character’s feelings and lets them run amok. Her body rocks and her face distorts as fear and pain give way to ecstasy and release. The character is a mystery that the movie teases but that Kim deliriously unlocks. Stream “The Handmaiden” on Amazon Prime Video. 15 Michael B. Jordan By Ryan Coogler Michael B. Jordan has played lawyers, athletes and superheroes, but even before his range became clear, the director Ryan Coogler wanted to work with him. Coogler has made three features “Fruitvale Station,” “Creed” and “Black Panther” and Jordan stars or co-stars in all of them. We asked the director to explain just what it is about the actor that draws us in. I met Mike in 2012 when I was doing research and working on the script for “Fruitvale.” He was who I decided would be best for the role before I met him, based on the other work that I’d seen him do — a couple of movies that year, “Red Tails” and “Chronicle,” and a bunch of stuff in the TV space. But I thought that he could play Oscar. He looked like him, but also what I saw was this ability to make you empathize with him. Not all actors have this thing, when you immediately care about somebody right offhand and that triggers an empathetic reaction. He had that. He also has a very advanced tool kit as an actor. What I saw was this ability to make you empathize with him. He’s been in all the feature films I’ve done. And I keep casting him because he’s the best person for the job. “Creed” [2015] had another character I thought he could play well. Before Mike was an actor, he was an athlete, back in elementary school and high school. He had played athletes on TV, the most famous being on “Friday Night Lights,” so some of the things we knew his character would have to do in “Creed,” Mike felt right for it. It was a part of him that wasn’t a big reach. And [in] “Black Panther” [2018], with him and Chadwick facing off and going toe to toe, it felt like an event. Their stars were rising. They were both leading men by the time we shot that movie. Now, what’s exciting about us getting older in the industry is getting to work together in different capacities. He’s doing a lot of stuff behind the camera now. And we have some opportunities to work together beyond actor and director. He’s very ambitious in a way that’s endearing. He always wants to push and challenge himself further. And that comes across in his performances, but also in the business sense. That ambition keeps him open-minded. He watches everything and doesn’t want to cut himself off from certain genres or opportunities. So I think the sky’s the limit for him and his career. — Interview by Mekado Murphy Stream “Black Panther” on Disney+. 14 Oscar Isaac A. O. SCOTT While I can take or leave the recent “Star Wars” movies, I do have a fondness for some of the characters, in particular Poe Dameron, the resistance flyboy who is the third trilogy’s designated charmer. As Poe, Oscar Isaac is an appealing, easygoing presence in those movies, a guy who seems to know what he’s doing. His characters aren’t always as lucky, or as sure of themselves, but the man himself operates with the precision of someone who is confident enough in his skills to push himself into risky new territory. The summer before “Inside Llewyn Davis” 2013 was released, Joel and Ethan Coen told us that they had originally wanted to cast a well-known musician in the title role. Instead, they found Isaac, who told them according to Joel that “most actors, if you ask them if they play guitar, they’ll say they played guitar for 20 years, but what they really mean is they’ve owned a guitar for 20 years.” Isaac could actually play. When I think about what makes him so credible as an actor, that’s the first thing that comes to mind. Not because it’s such a big deal to play guitar, but because whatever Isaac is pretending to do onscreen — selling heating oil in the underrated “A Most Violent Year,” 2014; inventing sexy robots in “Ex Machina”; flying X-wing fighters — I always believe that he really knows how to do it, and that I’m watching some kind of authentic mastery in action. MANOHLA DARGIS 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, its 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. Isaac has a supporting role in “Ex Machina” 2015, but he’s vital to its vibe and power. He plays Nathan, a Dr. Frankenstein-like tech billionaire involved in artificial intelligence who’s building and destroying beautiful female androids. A savagely critical stand-in for today’s masters of the digital universe, Nathan could easily have dominated the movie. Isaac instead keeps his own charm in check, letting the character’s creepiness poison the air. Nathan’s mercurial moods and surprising looks — his shaved head and full beard, eyeglasses and cut muscles — make it difficult to get a bead on him. But when he suddenly boogies down, executing an amazing dance, Isaac lays bare all you need to know about Nathan in the geometric precision of his choreographed moves and the madness in his eyes. It’s 30 seconds of pure genius. Rent or buy “Ex Machina” on major streaming platforms. 13 Tilda Swinton MANOHLA DARGIS The woman of a thousand otherworldly faces, 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. You want to read her but can’t. That helps make her a terrific villain, whether she’s playing a demon, a queen or a corporate lawyer. In “Julia” 2009, she drops that wall to play an out-of-control alcoholic and child-snatcher, giving a full-throttled performance that is so visceral and transparent that you can see the character’s thoughts furiously at work, like little parasites moving under the skin. A. O. SCOTT We like to praise actors for “range,” but that’s an almost laughably inadequate word for the radical shape-shifting that Swinton accomplishes. Just look at one strand of her career her work with Luca Guadagnino, a filmmaker who shares her delight in self-reinvention. In “I Am Love” 2010 she played the Russian wife of an Italian aristocratic, giving a performance in two languages and in the key of pure melodramatic heartbreak. In “A Bigger Splash” 2016 she had barely any language at all She decided that it would be interesting if her glam-rock diva character had been struck mute by throat surgery. In “Suspiria” 2018 she executed one of her many self-doublings, appearing as a member of a balletomaniac coven of witches and also as an elderly male Holocaust survivor. DARGIS That doubling shapes her most androgynous performances, where she effortlessly blurs gender, confirming yet again the inadequacy of categories like “man” and “woman.” She’s both; she’s neither. A different doubling happens when she plays twins, in the 2016 “Hail, Caesar!” as rival gossip columnists and in “Okja” the next year as visually distinct very cruel captains of industry. In each, Swinton shows us two sides of the same person, much as she does in “Michael Clayton” 2007 when her lawyer rehearses a duplicitous spiel in front of a mirror. As the lawyer talks, pauses and drops her smile, you see her desperately trying to control a reflection that is already cracking. SCOTT 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. All of these Tilda Swinton films are available on major streaming platforms. 12 Joaquin Phoenix By James Gray Joaquin Phoenix has appeared in four of the director James Gray’s movies, starting with “The Yards” in 2000 and including “We Own the Night” 2007, “Two Lovers” 2009 and “The Immigrant” 2014. We asked Gray to explain how the actor has expanded — and improved — on his own vision. When I saw “To Die For,” I said, “That actor” — I didn’t even know his name yet — “is unbelievably good at conveying his internal life without dialogue.” That’s a really important thing in cinema, because the camera reveals everything. Here was an actor who had so much going on and you could tell. I thought, “That’s a very interesting actor. I’d love to meet him.” And I did. We were on the same wavelength, instantly. We liked the same things. We thought about things the same way. And I just immediately liked him. He had that dimensionality to him. The first film we did together [“The Yards”], I’m sure that I pissed him off a lot. I have a very direct way. Sometimes that’s good and sometimes it’s not so good. I’m better at it now. Let’s just say that I wasn’t always willing to say, “Yeah, that’s interesting, but let’s try this.” I was more into, “Joaq, what are you doing? That sucks, try another one.” And I know I would frustrate him because his talent was so vast. He has a limitless ability to surprise you in the best ways and inspire you to move in a direction that you haven’t thought of originally, better than what you have in mind, and expands the idea. He’s extremely inventive. He’s always thinking and actually has gotten more so over the years. I’ve never said, “I want my vision on the screen.” I want something better than that. You want to lay down the parameters of what it is you have in mind, and then surround yourself with people who will make it all more beautiful. Not different, necessarily, but more intense, more vivid. He has a limitless ability to surprise you in the best ways. You want the actor to surprise you, and to do so in a way that seems consistent with the character but also very interesting. Joaquin was absolutely fantastic at that. That’s inspiring. You don’t know what to expect in the best sense. Joaquin Phoenix is one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. If I have any regret at all, it would be that he’s not in every single movie I made. — Interview by Candice Frederick Stream “The Yards” on CBS All Access. 11 Julianne Moore A. O. SCOTT The unhappy American housewife — smiling to keep up appearances in the face of domestic tragedy and inner turmoil — is a durable movie archetype. It’s one that Julianne Moore has both explored and exploded, in “The Hours” 2002 and especially in her collaborations with Todd Haynes like “Far From Heaven” 2002. That film is set in Connecticut in the 1950s, but it’s a pointedly stylized landscape, evocative of the Hollywood melodramas of that period. Cathy and Frank Whitaker Moore and Dennis Quaid are each pulled away from their stifling marriage by forbidden desires Frank for other men, Cathy for Raymond Deagan, a Black landscaper Dennis Haysbert. These transgressions aren’t symmetrical or intersectional. In their heartbreak, humiliation and longing, Frank and Cathy have no consolation to offer each other. 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. MANOHLA DARGIS Unhappy or not, wives can be dead ends for actresses and for too many there comes that time when they’ve been forever banished to the kitchen. 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. For the most part, her work in “Gloria Bell” 2019 is in a realist key. She plays the title character, a generous-hearted divorced insurance worker with two adult children, an ex she doesn’t hate and an achingly lonely apartment. The movie itself is modest, intimate, thoughtful and rich in human detail. Gloria starts an affair with a man. It goes badly, they break up. Not much happens in ordinary movie terms, yet everything happens because Gloria loves and is loved in turn. It’s a story that could have led to buckets of snot and empty showboating. But Moore and the director Sebastián Lelio transcend obviousness. They don’t merely create a story about a woman’s feelings — and being — as she falls in love; they create a landscape of emotions, the texture and shape of a sensibility. Moore’s Gloria doesn’t cry and laugh; she shows you what love looks like from the inside. It’s a miracle of a performance. Stream “Gloria Bell” on Amazon Prime Video. 10 Saoirse Ronan By A. O. Scott How many different ways can one person come of age? 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, sadder, freer and more herself in each new role. Of course, it’s mostly the characters who undergo those changes. Eilis Lacey “Brooklyn,” 2015 finds love and independence in her new home; Christine McPherson “Lady Bird,” 2017 learns to appreciate her mother; Jo March “Little Women,” 2019 finds her voice as a writer. Ronan herself, inhabiting these women and girls in all their particularity, has been almost unnervingly consistent, in full, disciplined command of her gifts right from the start. In full, disciplined command of her gifts right from the start. 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. And that sense of danger persists, whether her character is vulnerable as in “The Lovely Bones,” 2009 or violent as in “Hanna,” 2011. Even when she’s in becalmed period dramas or gentle comedies of domestic life, Ronan brings a quicksilver precision that is thrilling and a little unsettling to watch. This is because as much as she captures the emotional weather and specific body language of, say, a 16th-century Scottish queen or a 21st-century California teenager, what she conveys even more vividly is the way those people think, the way it feels to be inside their heads. That may sound like a cerebral, intellectualized approach to acting, but it’s really the opposite. 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. Stream “Atonement” on Peacock. 9 Viola Davis By Denzel Washington Viola Davis has worked with Denzel Washington several times in the last 20 years — whether he was the director “Antwone Fisher,” 2002, star playing Troy Maxson to her Rose Maxson in the August Wilson family drama “Fences” on Broadway and then on film in 2016 or producer he cast her in the title role in the forthcoming Wilson jazz drama “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”. We asked him to explain what makes her so tremendous I knew that she was a great actress going back to when she auditioned for “Antwone Fisher” 20 years ago. I experienced her power, her strength and her talent [during the shoot]. She came in ready, in character, and I basically just left her alone. It was really nothing to say to her but “Thank you” and “Let’s do one more.” She’s a once-in-a-generation talent. You don’t always know that right away, but we’ve all experienced it now over time. When I was with her in the play [“Fences”] even in rehearsal it was like, “Oh, OK, she’s a powerhouse.” She has a big scene when she finally unloads on Troy; about the third week of rehearsal she showed where she was going. And I was like, “I better catch up with her. I’ve got to concentrate.” We had tremendous success, so there was never a question about who was going to play the role in the movie. And a powerful, strong woman, and humble. The director [George C. Wolfe] had to convince her [on Ma in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”]. I did, too. She was like, “I can’t sing. I don’t have any rhythm,” all that kind of stuff. She can do whatever she wants. She’s got that much ability. I trust her completely. Why does someone want to play in a band with Miles Davis? Because he’s a great collaborator, innovator, artist. She’s the same thing. She can do whatever she wants. She’s got that much ability. She’s one of the best interpreters of material that I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with. — Interview by Candice Frederick Rent or buy “Fences” on major streaming platforms. 8 Zhao Tao MANOHLA DARGIS Since 2000, the Chinese actress Zhao Tao and the director Jia Zhangke have made more than a dozen features and shorts, dramas and documentaries as well as work that resists such neat categorization. Their filmmaking alliance is so holistic and familiar that it is hard to imagine what these movies would look like without Zhao’s face and grounding presence. She’s often called his muse they’re married, but that doesn’t come close to capturing the richness of her contribution — its poetry, symbolism and emotional granularity. In Jia’s movies, people do a whole lot of walking and no one has clocked more miles than Zhao, often in real time. A former dance teacher, Zhao moves with poise and fluidity, whether her characters stroll down a hall “The World” in 2005 or wander a derelict school “24 City” in 2009. In “Still Life” 2008, Zhao plays Shen Hong, who’s looking for her husband in an ancient town that’s going to be flooded for a controversial dam. Shen Hong is often seen in medium and long shot, but when someone asks if she’s in a hurry, Jia cuts to her in close-up. “Not really,” she says, her face filling with regret or perhaps memories right before she walks out the door. Jia’s many travelers are mapping China story by story, whatever their literal or metaphoric destination. Maybe that’s why Zhao’s posture seems so striking. Even when her characters drift, they do so with straight backs. A. O. SCOTT The ongoing transformation of China — its fashion, its music, its economy, its architecture and topography — is Jia’s all-consuming subject, and Zhao is its avatar and test case. She is a kind of Everywoman, which is to say that she embodies many different women, sometimes within the space of a single movie. In “Ash Is Purest White” 2019, she plays Qiao, who starts out as part of a gangster couple in the northern industrial city of Datong. She and her lover, Bin, are fearless and glamorous, even as Qiao is connected through her father to an older world of worker’s councils and proletarian toughness. It’s the early 2000s, and everything about Qiao — her hair, her clothes, the way she strides through gleaming nightclubs and battered factories — expresses confidence in modernity and her place in it. Then everything falls apart. Her loyalty to Bin lands her in prison, and when she is released he is gone. Her travels, by boat, foot, motorbike and train, take her on a long grueling odyssey back to where she started. Her suffering is relentless, but her stoicism makes it almost comical at times, as if she were simultaneously the heroine of an old Hollywood melodrama and the protagonist of a Samuel Beckett play. The performance is a marvel of endurance, rooted in the earth but somehow also larger than life. Stream “Ash Is Purest White” on Amazon Prime Video. 7 Toni Servillo By A. O. Scott 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, Servillo recalls a more established version of the social butterfly Marcello Mastroianni played in “La Dolce Vita” — a detached, vaguely depressed participant-observer in a swirling spectacle of hedonism. 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. Such analogies are insufficient. Servillo has been the central avatar in Sorrentino’s excavation of the corruption and hypocrisy — but also the improbable glory and absurd resilience — of modern Italy. In particular, he has incarnated two of the most powerful and polarizing real-life political leaders in the country’s recent history Giulio Andreotti in the scabrous and satirical “Il Divo,” 2009 and Silvio Berlusconi in the epic and weirdly tender “Loro,” 2019. 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. Neither “Il Divo” nor “Loro” is a conventional biopic, and Sorrentino is no realist. These movies revel in the theater of power, and Servillo, in grotesquely artificial makeup, sometimes resembles a puppet or a political cartoon. He emphasizes Andreotti’s reptilian guile and secret vanity, and Berlusconi’s glibness and self-pity. Even if you aren’t versed in the seamy lore of Italian politics, you can feel the wild comic energy of these performances, and the moral fire behind them. These are actual people! These things — murders, bribes, double-crosses, orgies — really happened! He makes vivid the extravagant humanity — and the deep mystery — of men who live to bend the world to their will. But what Servillo is doing is more than just superior sketch-comedy satire. Like a Shakespearean actor delving into the majesty and monstrosity of ancient or imaginary kings, he makes vivid the extravagant humanity — and the deep mystery — of men who live to bend the world to their will. He also captures their loneliness. Stream “Loro” on Hulu; rent or buy “Il Divo” on major streaming platforms. 6 SongKang Ho By Bong Joon Ho The Korean actor Song Kang Ho probably first came to the attention of most American audiences in the 2020 best-picture Oscar winner, “Parasite,” playing an impoverished, conniving patriarch. That was his fourth collaboration with the director Bong Joon Ho, and we asked the filmmaker to explain why he has cast the star again and again. I first saw Song Kang Ho in “Green Fish,” the director Lee Chang-dong’s feature debut. He played a rural, small-time gangster, and his performance was so stunningly realistic that a rumor circulated among directors that he was an actual thug. I later learned that he was an actor who had been active in the Daehak-ro theater scene for a long time. Although I was a first assistant director at the time and not yet a director, I wanted to meet him. So, I invited him to the office for coffee in 1997. It was more of a casual conversation than an audition, but I could tell that he had the makings of a juggernaut. When I was writing my second film, “Memories of Murder” 2005 I had Song firmly in mind to play the country detective who is stuck in his old ways and has blind faith in his instincts. Because he was born for the role and it was made for him. [Whether in “Memories of a Murder,” “The Host” 2007, “Snowpiercer” 2014 or “Parasite”] it always feels like there will be a new layer to uncover. He’s like a canvas that grows and grows. No matter how many brush strokes I apply, there’s always more space to paint. I’m still eager to see what he will bring to a role. To me, he’s like an inexhaustible diamond mine. Whether I’ve done four movies with him or 40, I know I will unearth a new character. He has the ability to bring life and rawness to every moment. Even if a scene involves difficult dialogue or highly technical camerawork, he will find a way to make it seamless and spontaneous. Each take will be different, and the unwieldiest dialogue will seem like improvisation. It’s astounding and a pleasure to witness. He has the ability to bring life and rawness to every moment. His uniqueness as a protagonist comes from his ordinariness and mundaneness. Especially to the Korean audience, Song projects the quality of the typical Korean working man, a neighbor or friend you might encounter in your neighborhood. So, they are even more engrossed when they see this seemingly everyday character confronted by a monster or a monstrous situation in movies like “The Host” or “Parasite.” He starts from the ordinary and elevates it into a singular and inimitable voice. I believe that’s what makes Song Kang Ho and the characters he inhabits genuinely special. — Interview by Candice Frederick Rent or buy “Memories of Murder” on major streaming platforms. 5 Nicole Kidman By Manohla Dargis 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 snared 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 fame 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. Some years, the movies came and went almost without notice. Still, Kidman kept steadily working and continued elevating negligible material, pushing herself even when the movies didn’t. She has also played a whole lot of mothers, a necessary survival strategy in a world as creatively unimaginative as the movie industry. One pleasure of a virtuosic performer is watching them rise above their material. Kidman has done so repeatedly, including in “Birth” 2004, in which she plays a widow who comes to believe that a 10-year-old boy is the reincarnation of her dead husband. It’s pretentious twaddle that Kidman graces with delicacy and pinpricks of emotion. She’s flat-out glorious in “The Paperboy” 2012, a delectably vulgar whatsit in which she outshines a showboating male cohort, alternately urinating on Zac Efron and tearing her pantyhose in an orgiastic frenzy over John Cusack. You can’t take your eyes off her. You never can. More recently, Kidman starred in “Destroyer” 2018, a harsh thriller from Karyn Kusama about a detective’s long downward spiral. Kidman goes big and brutal — punching and running and gunning and drinking to wild excess — to play a middle-aged ruin whose terrible choices are etched in every crease and blotch in her hard face. The movie flopped, perhaps because it was too ugly for today’s audiences or maybe it all seemed too down-market for one of Vogue magazine’s favorite cover girls. But Kidman is brilliant, cold, raw and true. Even with her face obscured almost beyond recognition, she remains undeniable. You can’t take your eyes off her. You never can. Stream “Destroyer” on Hulu. 4 Keanu Reeves By A. O. Scott Maybe you’re surprised to find Keanu Reeves so high on this list. But ask yourself have you ever been disappointed when he showed up in a movie? Can you name one film that has not been improved by his presence? We’re talking about Ted Logan here. About Neo. John Wick. Diane Keaton’s also-ran love interest in “Something’s Gotta Give” 2003. Ali Wong’s also-ran love interest — a guy named Keanu Reeves! — in “Always Be My Maybe” 2019. Surely there is not another movie star who exhibits so much range while remaining so irreducibly and inscrutably himself. Can you name one film that has not been improved by his presence? But he has been curiously easy to underestimate. Like so much else in the ’90s, the appreciation of Keanu Reeves in the first phases of his career was hedged with irony. It was too easy to make fun of the blank, earnest confusion that defined his characters in “Point Break,” “The Devil’s Advocate” and the “Matrix” movies, to project their blankness onto him, to suppose that his still waters ran shallow. He was always in on the joke, though. And never entirely joking. In middle age, he has risen to a new level of achievement, a zone where artlessness and self-consciousness converge. He’s one of our most credible action heroes, and also one of our most resourceful and inventive character actors. He has weathered beautifully, becoming at once sadder and more playful without losing the otherworldly innocence that was there from the start. Is the melancholy, uxorious, dog-loving assassin in the “John Wick” movies a genre put-on, a paycheck gig, a midlife action workout? Probably. Of course. With let’s say Gerard Butler in the title role they would be slick, nasty throwaways. What Reeves does is give the franchise more gravity than it deserves, more humor than it needs, and the soul that it otherwise comprehensively lacks. One of the delights of movie-watching in the past decade has been encountering him in unexpected guises. As some kind of post-apocalyptic cult leader known as the Dream in “The Bad Batch,” Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2017 crusty dystopian fantasia. As the chalk to Winona Ryder’s cheese in Victor Levin’s abrasive anti-rom-com “Destination Wedding” 2018. As the voice of a cat named Keanu in “Keanu” 2016. There is more to the man than the sum of these parts, which are puzzles and koans, chapters in a perpetually updated manual in meta-modern movie stardom as a way of being. He’s not a perfectionist. He’s perfection itself. We were told a long time ago, and now maybe we can finally believe it he’s the One. Stream or rent the “John Wick” movies and other Reeves titles on major platforms. 3 DanielDay-Lewis By Manohla Dargis At the start of “There Will Be Blood” 2007, a man in a deep, dark hole rhythmically strikes the wall with a pickax, sending up sparks and dust. It’s so dim that you can’t make out his face, but his pale shirt draws your eyes and throws the contours of his powerful arms and their machinelike movements into relief. You only fully see him when he lifts his head to look up at the sky, causing light to flood his face. Behold, the man — behold, Daniel Day-Lewis! It’s an introduction as iconic, as character-defining and star-shaping as Rita Hayworth’s in “Gilda.” It also works as a nice metaphor for the painstaking act of Day-Lewis’s creative process, the building of his characters. As Daniel Plainview, Day-Lewis isn’t merely playing the protagonist; he is giving human shape to the filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson’s ideas and art. Plainview is many things man, machine, a terrible father, a rapacious oilman. He is also the manifestation of the ruinous substance — the “ocean of oil” — that he violently wrests from the earth. 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-mystical 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. His repeated retirement announcements have only expanded his aura and so has his selectivity He has made just six movies this century, some masterworks. 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. Day-Lewis knows both how to tease us and put on a show. The lore that has built around him is, to an extent, just a Method-era version of the mythification that has always been part of the creation of stardom. What sometimes goes missing is that reading more than 100 books to prepare for the title role of “Lincoln” 2012 is work, part of how an actor prepares. All that labor and those books are a reminder that acting is also a job, not magic, even when an actor’s performance seems or, rather, feels alchemical. Part of Day-Lewis’s talent is his tremendous ability to turn hard work into a character that fluently serves a director’s vision. Much depends on that vision. And it’s at this point that I must regretfully mention “Nine” 2009, a catastrophic folly that Day-Lewis serves diligently but cannot rescue. In “Gangs of New York” 2002, by contrast, his performance as Bill the Butcher is the apotheosis of that film’s ambitions, so when he’s not onscreen, 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’s absorbs, transforms and brilliantly refracts. Buy or rent “Phantom Thread” on most major platforms. 2 Isabelle Huppert MANOHLA DARGIS Fearless and mesmerizing, sometimes scary, sometimes freakish, Isabelle Huppert has taken on an astonishment of roles over her career, moving effortlessly from tears to shrieks, from the straightest stories to the most gloriously unhinged. She’s acted in more than 50 movies this century alone, industriousness that speaks to her ambition and popularity, but also suggests a ravenous hunger that you can see in her acting. I love many of her performances, but I am especially captivated by her monsters, by her horrifying, unspeakable women. A. O. SCOTT Did somebody say “The Piano Teacher”? That 2002 movie is a terrifying tour-de force of lust, cruelty, masochism and musicianship. The title character, Erika Kohut, becomes obsessed with a student, and Huppert performs her descent into madness with icy precision and operatic intensity. Are we scared for her, or scared of her? Huppert is a virtuoso at that kind of ambiguity, at scrambling the usual codes about feminine vulnerability and feminist self-assertion, at defying assumptions about the sources of a woman’s toughness and fragility. One of my favorite examples is in Claude Chabrol’s “Comedy of Power” 2007, in which she plays a magistrate rooting out corruption in France’s political and business elite and taking on a powerfully entrenched old-boy network. The character’s name is Jeanne Charmant Killman, which may seem a little on the nose but which also captures some of Huppert’s graceful, lethal appeal. DARGIS The roles Huppert has been offered and those she’s sought out have been instrumental in her creation. And early in her career, she worked with filmmakers — Jean-Luc Godard, Maurice Pialat and, of course, Chabrol — who gave her creative space in which to develop. She could never have had a comparable career in American movies I shudder at the idea of her debuting at Sundance, where characters are rarely ambiguous and often shaped by bland imperatives like relatability and redemption. Huppert is known for embracing extremes, though I see this as an interest in the fullness of existence, including the disgusting and the taboo. Her characters boil over with life, some of it ugly, as in “Elle” 2016, Paul Verhoeven’s provocation about trauma and psychosis. The actress always surprises I suspect that she would get bored otherwise, but here, as a woman who confronts male violence, Huppert does something that rarely happens in movies she shocks. With lacerating wit — her weird smiles mock the audience’s pieties — she turns the mystery of another person into a thriller. I love that she forces me to look even when I don’t want to. SCOTT Did somebody say “Greta”? That was a wan little 2019 thriller in which Huppert played a psycho-mommy stalker preying on a dewy-eyed college student played by Chloë Grace Moretz. I bring it up only because the kind of mystery you refer to — the volatile compound of wit, charm and will — dominates that movie, which Huppert makes more intriguing than it has any right to be. Funnier and scarier. There’s no one else with her combination of intensity and restraint. This comes through especially in films where her character is involved in an all-out struggle for survival, like Claire Denis’s “White Material” 2010. Huppert plays a French plantation owner clinging to the last bit of colonial privilege in an African country convulsed by violence. She knows that her life is in danger, that her way of life is slipping away, and also that in the larger historical scheme of things, she may well deserve her fate. There’s no self-pity here and barely any drama in the conventional sense. Just pure nerve. Stream or rent “Elle,” “The Piano Teacher” and more on most major platforms. 1 Denzel Washington A. O. SCOTT We wrangled and argued about every other slot on the list, but there was no hesitation or debate about this one. Denzel Washington is beyond category 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. Who can forget his embattled working stiffs in “Unstoppable” 2010 and “The Taking of Pelham 123” 2009, a pair of big, noisy train-themed movies directed by Tony Scott? Neither one is a masterpiece, but I never get tired of watching Washington on the job. MANOHLA DARGIS He makes the job — by which I mean acting — look like breathing. There’s a reason he was perfect as Easy Rawlins in “Devil in a Blue Dress,” an early defining role. Since then, he has played a lot of characters who embody law or criminality, and some who exist in the space dividing the two. Along the way, he has become the dominant totem of a certain kind of male authority, like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood before him. Washington can express anguished vulnerability, but he can tower like a colossus, looming over worlds like an Old Testament patriarch — it’s extraordinary given the representations of Black masculinity onscreen not long ago. SCOTT That authority is credible even when the movies are … less so. “The Book of Eli” 2010? “The Equalizer” 2014? “Man on Fire” 2004? One of the things I love most about him is how magnificently he plays men who don’t seem to require or even deserve love. Think of Whip Whitaker in “Flight” 2012, a prodigiously skilled airline pilot who is also an epic train wreck. Not a nice guy, but as full and complex and vividly realized a human being as you will ever see on a movie screen. DARGIS Like all stars, Washington’s acting feels inextricable with his charisma, a combination that’s seductive but can overwhelm movies, like Antoine Fuqua’s violent potboiler “Training Day” 2001. Washington is sensational as a bad detective He’s loose, sexy, frightening but so much bigger than life that he shrinks the movie. In “Flight,” his magnetism deepens his character’s tragedy; it gives his walk swagger yet it’s also part of his crumbling facade. 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. SCOTT 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. Malcolm X is one, and Troy Maxson in “Fences” 2016 is another. There is so much pain and pride in that performance, which somehow measures the weight of American racism on a single person’s body and soul, without turning that person into a symbol of anything. The way Washington walks into that movie, his shoulders swinging with an athlete’s power, his frame dented by a lifetime of toil, is a moment of pure carnal eloquence, matched by the stream of vernacular poetry that comes out of his mouth. DARGIS Well, transcending your movie has long been a hallmark of real stardom! Actors choose roles for all sorts of reasons — age, schedule, taste, comfort, pay — and race matters, always. Washington likes playing goal-oriented characters and men who make a serious impression, with a gun, physical extremes or words. He likes to go big. He could make art films and provocative little indies but doesn’t. Maybe he isn’t interested; certainly he doesn’t need to. He is Denzel Washington, after all, a star whose career — in its longevity and dominance — is a corrective and rebuke to the racist industry in which he works. I imagine that he’s doing exactly what he wants. Stream or rent “Flight,” “Training Day” and more on most major platforms. by Kate Woodford Tom Merton/OJO Images/Getty Most of us like to discuss movies and shows that we have seen and books that we have read. This is the first of two posts that will provide you with a range of adjectives and phrases for describing what you have seen and read in a way that is precise and varied. We often want to say that we found a movie or a book enjoyable. Two very useful -able’ adjectives here are readable and watchable. Books that are readable are easy and enjoyable to read sometimes despite being about subjects that might seem difficult or boring It’s a very readable account of the history of this great city. Movies and shows that are watchable give you pleasure when you watch them It’s probably not his best movie but it’s very watchable. An adjective with a similar meaning is entertaining It’s not a great novel but it’s fairly entertaining. Meanwhile, a book that is very enjoyable may be described as a good read I’d really recommend his latest novel – it’s a good read. A number of adjectives describe movies and books that are very interesting. Absorbing is used for a movie or book that is so interesting, it completely holds your attention I really liked her last novel – I found it very absorbing. Engrossing means the same, but is stronger The movie was completely engrossing from start to finish. A movie or book that is intriguing, meanwhile, is very interesting in a way that is unusual or mysterious I found the storyline so intriguing – I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen next. Other adjectives and phrases describe books and movies that are very exciting Gripping is one such adjective and riveting another This is a series with great characters and a gripping storyline. You’ll love the novel – it’s riveting stuff. Compulsive is used to describe movies and books that are so exciting, you cannot stop watching or reading them. The adjective is often used in the phrases for movies, shows, etc compulsive viewing and for books compulsive reading His latest book is compulsive reading. I find hospital documentaries like these compulsive viewing. The adjective compelling means the same I found the whole series very compelling. Meanwhile, a book that is informal unputdownable is so exciting, you cannot stop reading it you cannot put it down’ His last novel was totally unputdownable. I read it over two days. We hope that you read something unputdownable or watch something riveting this week! by xkatiiee created - 23 Oct 2013 updated - 28 Feb 2016 Public A Personal Taste That Is In No Particular Order. Here You'll Find Quite An Interesting Mix Of Flicks That Span Over The Last 50 Years. There Is Something To Enjoy From All Walks Of Life. 76 Metascore A group of high-end professional thieves start to feel the heat from the LAPD when they unknowingly leave a clue at their latest heist. Director Michael Mann Stars Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Val Kilmer, Jon Voight Votes 678,084 Gross $ R 108 min Action, Thriller 44 Metascore Two Irish Catholic brothegyMTYtZmUxN2M3NmQ2NWJhXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTQxNzMzNDI._V1_UX140_CR0,0,140, data-tconst="tt0119217" height="209" src=" width="140" /> R 126 min Drama, Romance 70 Metascore Will Hunting, a janitor at has a gift for mathematics, but needs help from a psychologist to find direction in his life. Director Gus Van Sant Stars Robin Williams, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Stellan Skarsgård Votes 1,005,609 Gross $ R 133 min Drama 50 Metascore Each of the women portray one of the characters represented in the collection of twenty poems, revealing different issues that impact women in general and women of color in particular. Director Tyler Perry Stars Janet Jackson, Anika Noni Rose, Whoopi Goldberg, Kimberly Elise Votes 8,006 Gross $ Rate The story of Michael Oher, a homeless and traumatized boy who became an All-American football player and first-round NFL draft pick with the help of a caring woman and her family.

the film is very interesting