The best films of 2025 are rich with ensembles, with some offering half a dozen performances that feel worthy of year-end superlative consideration. This was the case as far back as April, when Sinners emerged with Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Delroy Lindo, Wunmi Mosaku, and Jack O’Connell giving some of their career-best performances, not to mention Miles Caton in a dazzling debut. Then One Battle After Another put awards season in a chokehold in September, in part because Leonardo DiCaprio, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti, Benicio del Toro, Sean Penn, and Regina Hall all came across as Oscar contenders.
In the process of whittling down my list of the 17 best film performances of the year, I opted to showcase no more than one performance from any movie I saw this year. But I still couldn’t justify space for any individual performance from Sentimental Value, despite being collectively ensorcelled by Stellan Skarsgård, Renate Reinsve, Elle Fanning, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas. Nor did I reserve a spot for Emma Stone or Jesse Plemons, two halves of the paranoid battle of wills in Bugonia. George Clooney, Adam Sandler, and Billy Crudup as Jay Kelly’s trio of reflective, regretful, resentful men were also left to sit on the sidelines and wait for the Academy to come calling instead.
Picking just one cast member from Hamnet meant no room on the list for Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, or my most heartbreaking omission, Noah Jupe, whose final-act turn as the onstage Hamlet is so crucial to that movie landing with the emotional wallop it does. There was one undeniable performance in Weapons, and that meant leaving off Alden Ehrenreich’s overmatched cop and Austin Abrams’s intrepid junkie. Meanwhile, going for a smaller supporting performance in Train Dreams meant I had to leave off Joel Edgerton delivering captivating interiority.
In the end, I owe apologies to Julia Roberts and Jennifer Lawrence, who threw heaters in After the Hunt and Die My Love, respectively, but did not make my final cut. Neither did Tim Robinson, who translated his comedy of discomfort onto the big screen in Friendship, or Tom Blyth, who plays a closeted ’90s Syracusian in the worth-seeking-out Plainclothes. In a less competitive year, my real sicko selection would have been Seymour Hersh, who is so compulsively watchable as he accedes to the documentary treatment in Cover-Up. To cast these performances aside, the following 17 must be pretty damn good, right?