25 Favorite Film Performances of 2022

Before you go through this list of the best performances of the previous year, it should be noted that this selection was narrowed down based on some very arbitrary rules that I follow just to force myself to make tough choices: only one performance per actor, and more importantly, only one actor per film. This list also does not separate lead and supporting performances; or male, female, and nonbinary actors; or “breakthrough” performances and otherwise. Great performances are great performances, but never in the exact same way. The breadth of contradictory human emotions shown to us by these 25 performers reminds us not to discount any experience, no matter how strange or ordinary.

25) Camila Mendes – Do Revenge

Boisterous, knowingly sardonic, and exactly the right fit for the film she’s in, Camila Mendes’ performance makes even the most familiar tropes seem brighter and sharper through impressive comic timing and charisma for days. But she also never loses sight of her character’s fear of the high school food chain, and she wears Drea’s mean girl persona like a protective shield.

24) Hong Chau – The Menu

Appearing in a criminally small role for her talents, Hong Chau nevertheless steals The Menu from the entire ensemble through stoic, intense menace and a wonderfully dry sense of humor. The film unfortunately doesn’t fully let us in to this fearsome maître d’, but the little hints of history and desperation she injects into the character are enough to leave you wanting so much more.

23) Jenny Slate – Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

A nasal, overly cutesy voice shouldn’t be this moving—and certainly not this capable of dispensing wisdom—but Jenny Slate’s Marcel captures an elusive sincerity that one would’ve thought only existed in early YouTube shorts. Slate’s performance manages to contain every emotion a lost child would feel at once, while also carrying a wistfulness far beyond this little shell’s years.

22) Rasti Farooq – Joyland

As a joyous, independent woman whose light is muffled out by her well-meaning but rigidly traditional family, Rasti Farooq builds Joyland‘s most tragic arc practically in the background. The longer the film goes on, the more Farooq begins to play Mumtaz’s spark like madness—but always with the defiance of somebody who knows she is bigger than the box others put her in.

21) Sara Klimoska – You Won’t Be Alone

Even if her character shapeshifts throughout You Won’t Be Alone, whenever the film returns to Sara Klimoska’s confused, wild animal stare, you’re reminded just how strongly she grounds all these other, different faces. Klimoska starts and ends the movie only ever really imitating human behavior, but what changes in her is an acceptance of her mistakes and a resolve to keep doing better.

20) Eden Dambrine – Close

No child deserves to feel the guilt that weighs down on Eden Dambrine’s character. And with his silent suffering and abrupt spikes of emotion, you begin to feel worried about Dambrine himself and how much he might have internalized the shame of hurting one’s closest friend. The only outlet young Léo has is physical exertion, a false barrier of masculinity that crumbles every single time.

19) Justin H. Min – After Yang

Quiet, contemplative, and always kept at a distance from the audience, it’s a miracle that Justin H. Min’s soft-spoken android can stir such deep feelings just by looking at us. Yang is an eternally curious and accepting confidante, who Min infuses with so much warmth from generations of compounded loss. We project what we want onto him, and he returns the gaze with love.

18) Denis Ménochet – The Beasts

Stern and physically imposing, Denis Ménochet doesn’t seem like the sympathetic hero in a small-town, foreign countryside. And the actor understands this perfectly, making Antoine both victim and aggressor with seemingly no line between both sides. As he goes toe to toe with his threatening neighbors, Ménochet’s softness and his reckless determination make us second-guess him, too.

17) Ram Charan – RRR

The year’s greatest superhero is played with terrifying, Terminator-esque ruthlessness and aw-shucks brotherly compassion by Telugu superstar Ram Charan. As a soldier policing his own people, Charan lets every bombastic set piece feel like an added weight on his character’s soul. He is, at turns, blinded by revenge, coldly calculating—and joyously nimble when dancing the Naatu.

16) Justin Long – Barbarian

Justin Long turns in 2022’s best comedic performance, arriving right in the middle of this mysterious horror triptych with appalling levels of arrogance and ignorance—and all for the better. Every one of his perfectly timed lines and panicked reactions provides needed relief, while also making things more dangerous for the people around him out of his character’s pure stupidity. A scream king.

15) Sandra Oh – Turning Red

That rare piece of celebrity voice casting that pays off, Sandra Oh puts her entire red panda spirit into a character that easily could’ve been a one-note mom. Equally funny and frustrating, her Ming equates overprotectiveness with affection—reflecting a deep trauma that Oh extracts with so much soulfulness. This is an actress capable of shrinking and expanding with anything you give her.

14) Mia Goth – Pearl

So broadly does Mia Goth play this childlike Southern farm girl (and future serial killer) that it becomes genuinely unsettling. Pearl believes she lives in a movie, which is really just a series of delusions masking a profound fear of abandonment. Goth knows this, and she gets two of the wildest acting challenges of the year to prove it—an eight-minute monologue, and a prolonged, demented smile into camera—which she pulls off flawlessly.

13) Cate Blanchett – Tár

Lydia Tár is driven entirely by her own ego, having bent herself out of shape to fit into the world of classical music. And Cate Blanchett makes us put in the work to see this: through a steely demeanor and hubris made to look like genius, she crafts a near-impenetrable character who’s constantly scrubbing away at every imperfection. It’s a portrayal so authentically un-flashy that you would swear Blanchett was playing somebody real.

12) Kerry Condon – The Banshees of Inisherin

As the men of The Banshees of Inisherin push each other away in the most emotionally unintelligent ways, Kerry Condon’s Siobhán holds everything together. There’s an urgency to her performance that the others don’t have, as Condon lets the character’s love for this island wrestle with the feeling that she has to leave if she wants to live. Siobhán is weighed down by everyone’s seemingly minuscule problems but she cradles them closely as well.

11) Max Eigenmann – 12 Weeks

In 12 Weeks, Max Eigenmann creates a fully realized, rough around the edges portrait of a modern woman who juggles countless roles but is still scrutinized for the choices she makes over her own body. You can sense every impulse running through her character’s head as she weighs, in real-time, the value of her dignity against a moment’s peace. It’s an endlessly surprising performance, with great moments of both strength and weakness.

10) Jenna Ortega – The Fallout

Before her mainstream breakthrough in several horror projects, Jenna Ortega turned in her best work in the most realistic on-screen portrayal of a traumatized Gen Z student we’ve gotten yet. Dryly sarcastic, speaking in acronyms, and lazily sprawling her limbs across every surface, her Vada struggles to hold on to any sense of normalcy after a horrifying tragedy—by being a goof and drifting into every new distraction. As a portrait of denial and delayed shock, hers is one for the books.

9) Ronnie Lazaro – Kapag Wala Nang mga Alon

Easily the most disturbing performance of the year, Ronnie Lazaro’s cop turned deranged evangelist-murderer arrives in this Lav Diaz film like a Twin Peaks villain. Diaz forces us to watch him dance and preach and unwittingly(?) kill people in long, uninterrupted scenes and Lazaro milks the opportunity with glee. His is a psychology that might be too scary to try and analyze: remorseful, self-righteous, and self-destructive all at once, with his body following totally independent forces. He is flat-out terrifying.

8) Lee Hye-young – The Novelist’s Film

It can be difficult to stand out in the static, stage-like frames of a Hong Sang-soo film, but Lee Hye-young knows exactly how to pull a scene’s energy toward herself while still sharing it with her co-stars. As the titular novelist, she seems to alter the very composition of Hong’s blocking by sharply rebuffing those who try to steal the spotlight and remaining open and curious to everyone else. And in her silent moments you see her yearning for some new expression for herself, uncertain but thrilled by the possibilities.

7) Kim Si-eun – Next Sohee

If we were to measure performances by how real they seem, then Kim Si-eun might’ve given us the year’s best work. As a feisty teenager reduced into a husk of her former self by a predatory call center, the total despair that settles within Kim almost feels like a cause for concern. As Sohee is blamed for the exploitation she tries so hard to push back against, the spring in her step drags to a halt, and she begins to believe her own embarrassment. There’s such an acute focus to her anguish that feels entirely plausible.

6) Paul Mescal – Aftersun

Paul Mescal may only be playing a memory of a young father seen through the mind’s eye of his daughter years and years away, but he allows every possibility—even those shown to us without explanation—to make sense within a larger portrait of grief and failed promise. Mescal’s Calum attempts to dance around the “real” problems that he thinks his daughter shouldn’t worry about. So when she does confront him with the maturity he lacks, he never knows how to respond: as an equal, as a superior, with love, with shame.

5) Gabriel LaBelle – The Fabelmans

A coming-of-age performance that feels so definitive that you forget he’s supposed to be playing a teenage Steven Spielberg, Gabriel LaBelle’s turn in The Fabelmans should guarantee his status as a movie star. He is as charismatic as any classic leading man, with intention loaded into every syllable and an independent spirit that tries to charm every stubborn adult in the room with him. But LaBelle’s best work is when Sammy is lost in the process of shooting and the magic of the edit, where he not only finds himself but realizes with a profound sense of heartbreak that cinema is going to show him truths he never wanted to see.

4) Dolly de Leon – Triangle of Sadness

Standing head and shoulders above an international ensemble of actors, Dolly de Leon commandeers Triangle of Sadness by its third act and brings to the film a complexity and depth of emotion it had been sorely missing up to that point. The smugness with which her Abigail begins to exercise power over her wealthy, marooned companions is satisfying, but even at the very end it’s clear that she’s still being forced to make the difficult, dehumanizing choices. In the last few minutes of the film alone, de Leon mixes bloodlust and scorn with the knowledge that she’ll probably hate herself forever after all this, unable to recognize herself.

3) Ke Huy Quan – Everything Everywhere All at Once

Everyone has already talked about how Ke Huy Quan is at turns disarmingly wholesome, badass, and romantic in the multiple roles he plays across various universes. But what has kept him near the top of my list is the quiet, almost imperceptible sense of self-loathing and disappointment that drives his performance from the very beginning. You can see it in the small, silly ways he tries to keep his family afloat, in the way his eyes practically beg his wife to rekindle their long burnt-out flame. Every version of Waymond has no real control, but every version makes the decision to believe something good exists outside their own shortcomings.

2) Tang Wei – Decision to Leave

A performance meant to mislead at every turn, Tang Wei rises to the challenge that director Park Chan-wook has laid out for her, balancing several entirely different parts throughout this twisty investigation. Under her unflinching gaze, every scene demands to be read repeatedly in different ways: as innocent, romantic, sinister, or even comic, depending on which aspect of this performance you want to focus on. But underneath everything is a sort of death wish—an attitude of giving oneself up to destruction, but knowing that surrendering on her own terms means that she holds the power over the way her story is told and remembered.

1) Park Ji-min – Return to Seoul

In her very first acting job, visual artist Park Ji-min gives the performance of the year. It’s not just that her Freddie transforms several times into wholly different people over the course of a decade, it’s that Park consistently gets us to believe that her character has grown, before pulling out the rug from under us.

You would think that meeting and gradually developing a relationship with one’s biological father would stir something within, but Park shows us, fascinatingly, that Freddie hates the taste of it. There’s a sad, sad satisfaction she exhibits in building people up before pushing them away. And in one scene where she laughs haughtily—almost robotically—at an email from her father, there’s a doomed resignation in her eyes that tells us how little is left within her. I still haven’t stopped thinking about it.