6 Best Movie Performances Since 2000

Over the course of the past 26 years, movie acting has evolved in all sorts of interesting directions all over the world. For many a reason, performances on the big screen have distanced themselves more and more from the theatricality and elegant polish of the past. Non-verbal acting has become more powerfully subtle than ever before, and emotional realism and spontaneity have become all the more valuable. From this modern landscape of film acting have come several performances so riveting, so complex, and so unforgettable that they very much deserve to now be counted among the greatest in cinema’s history.

Whether it’s a performance that demonstrates the power of incredibly understated and low-key acting, like Philip Seymour Hoffman‘s jaw-dropping turn in Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master; or a performance that there’s still plenty of room for over-the-top acting when the role demands it, like Heath Ledger‘s Oscar-winning work in Christopher Nolan‘s The Dark Knight, there are plenty of ways for an actor to cement a performance of theirs in modern film history. There have been six pieces of acting in particular since the arrival of the 2000s that will very likely be remembered among the greats a few decades from now.

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Mads Mikkelsen — ‘The Hunt’ (2012)

Image via Nordisk Film

While the vast majority of the most universally-recognized masterful performances since 2000 have come from Hollywood, one of the wonderful things about the last 26 years has been that international cinema has become more widely accessible and closer to the mainstream than ever before. Thanks to that evolution, non-English-language powerhouse performances like that delivered by Mads Mikkelsen in Thomas Vinterberg‘s The Hunt have been able to gain more international recognition than they would have a few decades prior. It may very well be the best movie performance not in English from the 21st century.

The Hunt as a whole is one of the best Scandinavian movies of all time, but it’s also inarguably the sort of movie that lives or dies by its lead performances. In anyone else’s hands, the role of Lucas, a divorced kindergarten teacher who becomes the target of a mass hysteria campaign after a student lies about him having sexually assaulted her, might have devolved into cartoonish territory. Instead, Mikkelsen develops the character with a level of patience that’s a hell of a sight to behold. It’s not until the film’s momentous third act that Mikkelsen finally allows Lucas to explode, and that perfectly-calculated subtlety is what lends The Hunt most of its emotional power.

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Philip Seymour Hoffman — ‘The Master’ (2012)

Image via The Weinstein Company

Paul Thomas Anderson is far and away one of the most talented filmmakers currently working, an auteur who has been behind several of the greatest motion pictures since the late ’90—and certainly since 2000. One such masterpiece is The Master, one of the best character studies of the 21st century. Alongside Joaquin Phoenix, who also delivers a performance that deserves to be counted among the greatest in modern film history, Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as the charismatic cult leader Lancaster Dodd.

Despite his direct similarities to Scientology’s L. Ron Hubbard, Hoffman steers clear from making Dodd a simplistic caricature of him. Rather, he perfectly embodies and elevates the themes that Anderson explores in The Master: post-war trauma, the complex psychology of all cults (rather than just a specific one), and the visceral human instincts of submission and domination. Hoffman commands the screen with absolute mastery (pun not intended) every single time he’s on it, without ever making Dodd feel cartoonish or one-dimensional. Charming, warm, and psychologically complex, his performance here was perhaps the best he ever delivered in a motion picture.

4

Mo’Nique — ‘Precious’ (2009)

Image via Lionsgate

Based on the novel Push by Sapphire, Lee Daniels‘ Precious is an undeniable masterpiece, but it’s also the sort of film so painfully gut-wrenching that you watch it once and then never want to watch again. A lot of that comes from the heartbreaking character of Mary Lee Johnson, the unemployed and abusive mother that makes Precious’ life a living hell. The twist? In the role of Mary, Daniels cast not a seasoned dramatic titan, but Mo’Nique, an over-the-top stand-up comedian playing very much against type. The result is one of the best Oscar-winning performances of all time.

But while Mo’Nique could have fully embraced the subversion of her casting and gone for a purely provocative performance relying solely on shock value, she instead takes Mary and turns her into one of the most memorable drama movie characters of any movie from the 2000s. She plays the role with such twisty charisma, such gravitas, and such a complete lack of vanity that this allows her to find the humanity in the character with just as much ease as she finds the rage and vitriol.

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Heath Ledger — ‘The Dark Knight’ (2008)

Saying that Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is one of the most acclaimed action film trilogies in modern Hollywood history would be an understatement, and saying that The Dark Knight in particular is almost universally recognized as the best superhero movie in film history would also not begin to cover the film’s legacy. That’s all fully deserved, since this is indeed one of the best-crafted and most exciting action thrillers of the 21st century. One would be lying, however, if one didn’t admit that the film wouldn’t be nearly as legendary without Heath Ledger’s iconic performance as The Joker.

Though it’s probably true that Ledger’s tragic passing right before The Dark Knight‘s release and subsequent posthumous Oscar victory largely contributed to the performance’s iconicity, it’s beyond undeniable that this is a masterful piece of villainous acting in its own right. Ledger takes one of the most beloved comic book characters in history and reinvents him completely, taking the role fully seriously and delivering an unrecognizable turn as an absolute force of nature. Unpredictable and full of little touches that add unforgettable texture to the character, from his tics to certain surprising line deliveries, Ledger’s take on the Joker completely redefined the character across all forms of media.

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Daniel Day-Lewis — ‘There Will Be Blood’ (2007)

Image via Paramount Vantage

There Will Be Blood, one of the most perfect movies of the last 30 years, proves lots of things about Paul Thomas Anderson. One of them is that there are very few filmmakers as capable of pulling a legendary performance out of an actor as he is. And though the debate on what the best performance in a PTA film is can often elicit multiple different responses, there’s one that’s always bound to come up far more often than most: Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood, the movie that earned him his second Academy Award win for Best Actor. It was a well-deserved victory, too, since this is regarded by many as the best Best Actor Oscar-winning performance of the 21st century.

But regardless of superlatives, the fact of the matter is that Day-Lewis’ performance as the ruthless oil man Daniel Plainview in this riveting rags-to-riches story is the pillar that the entire movie rests on. Plainview is the human embodiment of unchecked capitalist greed, but even though Day-Lewis understands that symbolism perfectly and allows it to drive the arc of his character, he refuses to ever let Plainview feel one-dimensional. He imbues his performance with a layeredness and a terrifying sense of deep-rooted misanthropy that make his the best male performance since 2000.

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Ellen Burstyn — ‘Requiem for a Dream’ (2000)

Image via Artisan Entertainment

Many tend to regard Ellen Burstyn not winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for Requiem for a Dream in 2001 as one of the biggest travesties in the ceremony’s history, and for good reason. Burstyn plays Sara Goldfarb, a lonely Brooklyn widow who dreams of appearing on a TV game show and becomes addicted to diet pills in her quest to achieve her dream. If Requiem for a Dream is one of the heaviest drama movies of all time—and it definitely is—, it’s largely because of the gut-wrenching arc undergone by Sara.

But as well-written as Sara and her character arc are, the vast majority of the reasons why the character works as well as she does rest on Burstyn’s shoulders. It’s a performance as transformative as it is incredibly depressing, capturing Sara’s despair, loneliness, innocence, and addiction with a perfect commitment to both realism and perfectly-calculated melodrama. Requiem for a Dream is another instance of a film that you watch once and then never again, and that’s largely because Burstyn’s performance is so heartbreaking that the thought of sitting through it again is painful in itself.