Every year, moviegoers are guaranteed to see, at the very least, a handful of performances that blow them away and linger in their minds. Unlike some years, though, 2024 has featured an even wider array of memorable performances than usual. The typical end-of-the-year award contenders haven’t, in other words, been the only movies this year that have featured some of 2024’s best performances. It has, in fact, been a year full of stellar lead and supporting turns in genre movies both big and small.
It would be a missed opportunity to look back on this year’s best performances without mentioning, for instance, Nell Tiger Free’s spell-binding work in The First Omen, David Jonsson’s scene-stealing turn in Alien: Romulus, and Lily Rose-Depp’s transformative physical performance in Nosferatu. The same goes for Daniel Craig’s stunning turn in Queer, Saoirse Ronan’s vulnerable, moving performance in The Outrun, Yura Borisov’s standout supporting work in Anora, and even Ryan Gosling and Glen Powell’s charismatic, old-school movie star turns in The Fall Guy, Twisters, and Hit Man.
At the risk of not spotlighting other worthy contenders, though, here are the eight best movie performances of 2024.
Willa Fitzgerald in Strange Darling
2024 has been a plentiful year for incredible performances in high-concept thrillers and horror movies. That’s evidenced by several of the performances included on this list, beginning with Willa Fitzgerald’s full-body, fearless turn in writer-director JT Mollner’s fractured cat-and-mouse thriller Strange Darling. The complete nature of Fitzgerald’s role in Strange Darling is best left unspoiled for those who haven’t seen it, but it doesn’t take long for the ferocity of her work to show itself. The thriller, which follows Fitzgerald’s mysterious woman-on-the-run as she tries to escape a gun-wielding stranger (Kyle Gallner), is a Quentin Tarantino-influenced, non-linear piece of crime storytelling that rarely outgrows its influences.
The most original creation it delivers is Fitzgerald’s performance. The actress is first introduced in Strange Darling‘s opening scene as a bleeding and crying mess, and the film only asks her to go to even more physical, manic, and bizarre places from there. To say she capably does so would be an understatement. She takes a sketch of a character and turns her into a living, breathing jumble of contradictions, and it’s in Fitzgerald’s high-pitched, unrelenting performance that Strange Darling finds both its footing and — most surprisingly of all — its own twisted kind of heartbeat. It’s for that reason that the film’s climax doesn’t ultimately come in the form of a murder or a last-minute escape, but in a minutes-long, static shot of Fitzgerald that ranks high among 2024’s most striking and entrancing movie moments.
Hugh Grant in Heretic
Hugh Grant has been on an all-time run of against-type, roguish performances for, well, nearly a decade now. His ongoing second act reached a new zenith this year, though, in Heretic. The A24 thriller stars Grant as a charming but sadistic man who lures a pair of unsuspecting, young female Mormon missionaries (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) into his home before trapping them in a cruel psychological test of their religious faith. Thatcher and East both prove to be formidable screen opponents for Grant, and filmmakers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods give him plenty of meaty, often darkly funny lines of dialogue to hurl around. It is, however, Grant who anchors and energizes Heretic.
Much like another entry on this list, Grant’s performance feels simultaneously like an exciting new step forward for the actor and also a cheeky, considered look back at his professional past. Not since rom-coms like Notting Hill has Grant’s appealing, handsome charm been weaponized as effectively as it is in Heretic, a film that rests entirely on you understanding why its two female leads would decide to trust their captor as long as they do. If any actor other than Grant had been cast, you likely wouldn’t. But he is as magnetic as he’s ever been in Heretic, which gives him the chance to pick his old tools up again while sharpening some new ones. The result is one of the most purely entertaining and transfixing performances of the year — one that prevents you from ever looking away from Grant even as he goes to darker places in Heretic than he ever has before.
Aaron Pierre in Rebel Ridge
Here is a performance that grabs you by the throat and never lets go. Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) is introduced with very little power in Rebel Ridge‘s first scene, a hostile roadside arrest that ends with Terry’s bond money for his cousin being seized by a pair of white cops as an exercise in civil forfeiture. Rebel Ridge writer-director Jeremy Saulnier lets this confrontation unfold with a methodical pace that he dutifully maintains throughout the rest of the film, which follows Pierre’s Terry as he is forced into a war against a small-town Louisiana police department and its corrupt chief (Don Johnson). But regardless of whether he’s standing stoically with his hands cuffed behind his back or taking down one of his enemies, Pierre never seems at a true disadvantage.
His presence is simply overwhelming — a powerful energetic force that can be alternately empathetic and terrifying. After first catching critics’ attention in Barry Jenkins’ The Underground Railroad, Pierre gets the chance at more mainstream, commercial exposure he’s long deserved in Rebel Ridge. He doesn’t let the opportunity pass him by. Instead, he chews it up and spits it out, delivering one of the most jolting and exciting Movie Star performances of 2024. It’s been a long time since an actor has come along and elevated an action movie the way Pierre does Rebel Ridge. You walk away from it not only thrilled by the film you’ve just seen but also excited to see anything and everything he does next.
Demi Moore in The Substance
Few actors have ever confronted, weaponized, and acknowledged the power of their beauty like Demi Moore did in the late ’80s and throughout the ’90s. Before writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s astonishing body horror film The Substance was even released this past September, it was, therefore, already hard to imagine a better performer to take on its lead role than Moore. Lo and behold, the actress gives a career-best turn in the film, in which she plays an aging Hollywood star who finds her hold on the entertainment industry slipping when her longtime studio employers decide to replace her with a younger woman.
This development leads Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle to sign up for a black market drug program that requires her to share her life on a week-by-week basis with a younger version of her (Margaret Qualley) born out of her own body. Things take increasingly nightmarish turns when Qualley’s Sue becomes unwilling to cede control of Elisabeth’s life back to her. However, while Qualley takes on a more prominent role in The Substance‘s second half, Moore’s turns in the spotlight keep the film firmly grounded in her character’s painful self-hatred. Even under sometimes countless layers of prosthetics, Moore manages to give a performance that is as feral and thorny as it is deeply, achingly human and relatable. In a film about the costs of society’s vain treatment of women, she delivers the most vanity-free performance of the year — one raw and brave enough to take your breath away.
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in Nickel Boys
Director RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys is one of the boldest literary adaptations Hollywood has ever produced. Based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the film follows two young Black boys, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), who bond during their time together at a racist Jim Crow-era reform school. Rather than just adapting Whitehead’s text, Ross literally puts us in the eyes of its protagonists. The entire film is shot from the perspectives of Elwood and Turner. The first glimpse we get of Herisse’s face comes, in fact, when Elwood sees his own reflection in a bus window around 10 minutes into Nickel Boys‘ runtime. This is an unexpected and invigorating stylistic decision that very easily could have gone wrong and created a barrier between the audience and Ross’ film.
That’s not what happens, and a large reason why Nickel Boys‘ technical conceit works is Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. The actress appears early on as Hattie, Elwood’s grandmother, and it is the maternal warmth she exudes that immediately draws us into Nickel Boys‘ world and Elwood’s story. It takes a certain level of unguarded vulnerability and strength to make a cinematic act as typically self-conscious as looking straight into a camera’s lens seem natural, but those are two traits Ellis-Taylor has in spades here. She breaks down our walls, enveloping us in a caring embrace that we, like Elwood, miss while he is kept away from her. It’s her presence we always feel in Nickel Boys — even when she is nowhere to be seen.
Guy Pearce in The Brutalist
It’s hard to overstate how instantly arresting Guy Pearce is in The Brutalist. The actor’s portrayal of Harrison Lee Van Buren, a wealthy man who takes an interest in Hungarian-Jewish architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody), jolts new life like a lightning rod into director Brady Corbet’s 215-minute American epic. In his demeanor and his outlook, Pearce’s Harrison is the exact opposite of Brody’s László. While he isn’t covered in any prosthetics or extensive layers of makeup, Pearce also uses his character’s perpetually squinted eyes, manicured mustache, and rough American accent to complete an act of subtle transformation within the confines of an intentionally larger-than-life character.
The effect he achieves is, to pull from one of The Brutalist‘s most obvious influences, not unlike what the late Philip Seymour Hoffman accomplishes in The Master. Both men are, in their respective cases, physically identifiable and yet transformed all the same. Corbet and Mona Fastvold’s screenplay finds countless ways, both ham-fisted and not, to convey the egotistical, shallow depths of Pearce’s Harrison, but the actor is so charismatic that you find yourself wishing nonetheless that he will prove to be better than his station suggests. It is, consequently, startling when Harrison’s true self is finally unveiled, and the sequence in which it is lands like a hammer on your chest. That is due, in no small part, to the way Pearce builds to his character’s turning point — namely, with a shift of his eyes that reveals Harrison’s squinted gaze to be not a sign of curiosity but a veil hiding beneath it an envious hunger that is utterly chilling.
Chris Hemsworth in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
For much of his career, Chris Hemsworth has only ever hinted at the delirious, unbridled creativity lurking beneath his Marvel-mandated, generic leading man persona. When Mad Max maestro George Miller tapped him to play the villainous Dementus in this year’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, though, the actor’s potential was finally unlocked. The film, a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road that plays by an entirely different set of rules, pits Hemsworth’s Dementus against Anya Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa in an epic battle of wills that spans 20 years. However, while Taylor-Joy does a commendable job stepping into the boots and metal sleeve of Charlize Theron, her Fury Road predecessor, it’s Hemsworth who runs away with Furiosa.
As Dementus, the Thor star transforms into a gravelly-mouthed sociopath whose veneer of macho, dictatorial ambition is systematically peeled away. Channeling a more unhinged energy than he’s ever been able to before, Hemsworth is a jittery, grinning menace who holds your attention every time he’s on screen in Furiosa. The film saves his shining moment for its final scene, though, a confrontation between Dementus and Furiosa in which the former asks the latter to validate both his cynical view of the world and his faith in their tragedy-formed bond by killing him how he would her. Few line readings from 2024 are guaranteed to stick in your mind longer than when Dementus half-sobs, “We are the already-dead, Little D! You… and me.” Hemsworth has, quite simply, never been better.
Mikey Madison in Anora
Mikey Madison’s star-making turn in Anora is this year’s most lauded movie performance for a reason. There simply isn’t another big-screen turn from 2024 that matches the power of what Madison does in writer-director Sean Baker‘s latest film. The actress stars in Anora as Ani, a stripper who meets and marries the young, rich son (Mark Eydelshteyn) of a Russian oligarch and comes closer to achieving her dream of financial security and easy romance than she may have ever thought possible. Her fantasy-come-true is quickly endangered, however, by the re-emergence of her husband’s parents and their U.S.-based enforcers, the latter of whom kidnap Ani and demand that she help them annul her own marriage.
Anora begins as a Pretty Woman-esque rom-com, quickly transforms into a screwball comedy, and then finally arrives in its final minutes at a more somber and reflective place. The one constant holding its three, distinctly shaped acts together is Madison’s performance. As Anora‘s brash, hardened-yet-naïve lead, Madison captures not only the pain of feeling your dreams slipping through your fingers but also the struggle of trying to keep yourself together even in times of shattering heartbreak. It’s a performance that manages to be just about everything at once — quiet, loud, deluded, clear-eyed — and it’s one that so thoroughly transcends the limits of Anora‘s two-dimensional presentation that you end up feeling every moment of elation and twinge of despair that Ani does when she does. Madison doesn’t just make your heart skip a beat but pulse in time with hers. There is no greater feat an actor could hope to achieve onscreen.
