In honour of Frame Rated’s 10th anniversary, this list compiles the 10 greatest performances from the years 2015 to 2025 (so far). This highly subjective list celebrates the transformative power of acting, where a character can suddenly feel like a real person, a heroic figure, or a nightmarish villain through a committed portrayal, which is only fitting for a publication marking its 10-year anniversary that has been celebrating the transformative power of cinema since its inception.

2015 :  David Thewlis in Anomalisa

Voice acting remains severely under-appreciated, whether by film fans, critics, or awards bodies. In the case of Anomalisa, its characters’ physical presentation is done through stop-motion, where actors are only responsible for making their performances believable through the sounds they utter. On the one hand, this means they do not have to focus as much on their facial expressions and physical movements, but if anything, that just makes it even more difficult to succeed in their goal of endearing their character to us (or making them repellent if that’s what is required).

Charlie Kaufman’s animated film is held up by three brilliant performers: David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Tom Noonan. But it’s Thewlis’ lead role as the depressed and desperately lonely David that is this film’s emotional centre. A middle-aged customer service expert who travels to Cincinnati for a business convention, David is a deeply unhappy man. He’s also condescending, self-pitying, narcissistic, and cold towards his loved ones, yet his pain is so acutely delivered through the veteran actor’s voice-over work that you cannot help but feel for him. Anomalisa lives or dies on whether this protagonist can be related to, with Thewlis knocking it out of the park in that regard as a man who wallows in misery and longs for something, anything, to wrench him away from that feeling.

2016: James McAvoy in Split

It takes a fearless performer to inhabit a role like the villain of M. Night Shyamalan’s Split, who has dissociative identity disorder and inhabits over a dozen identities. There are so many of them that to even name the different identities that James McAvoy portrays in the film would take an age. These include—but are not limited to—a nine-year-old boy, a deranged nun, an effeminate fashion designer, and a cold, calculated stalker. The boundaries of age, gender, and sexuality are regularly transcended in this commanding performance. Once you settle into the rhythm of Split, it becomes crystal clear which identity the actor is embodying at every moment. It’s not just a testament to McAvoy’s emotional range, but the fact that he’s a master at using physicality in his roles, that makes this such a memorable portrayal of multiple personalities.

the florida project

2017: Bria Vinaite in The Florida Project

Many of my favourite moments from Sean Baker’s best film (so far), The Florida Project, are when the story hones in on what Halley (Bria Vinaite), the young mother of protagonist Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), is feeling. Two in particular stand out: when Halley wants so badly to reconcile with her friend, only for her brashness and tough outer shell to result in her assaulting this other woman, and as she watches Moonee eat breakfast and silently contends with the fact that both of their lives will drastically change very soon. Halley is brash, obnoxious, aggressive, annoying, a terrible tenant, and quite often a bad mother, yet lovable all the same, not just because of Vinaite’s charm, but for how she makes this flawed character feel like an entirely different person in these quiet, raw moments.

hereditary

2018:  Toni Colette in Hereditary

One of the more egregious Academy Awards snubs in recent years, Toni Collette’s agonising portrait of a grieving mother is so relentlessly morbid that it almost feels too harrowing to be contained within one performer. Charting the decline of a family as they must reckon with their guilt, hatred, and suffering in the wake of an unimaginable tragedy, Hereditary might be bleak, but it also has a remarkable amount of empathy for these characters. Without Collette’s scene-stealing performance tying it together, the film as a whole would be so much less emotive and sorrowful.

the assistant (2019)

2019:  Julia Garner in The Assistant

Julia Garner is one of the finest performers of the last decade, whether she’s able to elevate bad movies (i.e. Apartment 7A) or is so instrumental in a film’s success that you cannot imagine anyone else in the lead role, as is the case in Kitty Green’s feature directorial debut The Assistant. Garner could make reading the phone book look interesting, a necessary quality in a role where protagonist Jane carries out mind-numbingly boring, repetitive tasks in an office environment. Lurking just beyond Jane’s office space is a film producer capable of inspiring paralysing fear in his employees, where the slightest of infractions can lead to relentless bullying. Set over the course of a single day, Garner’s performance is a masterclass in portraying a normal person gradually having their spirit eroded by an unjust system, a toxic work culture, and predatory behaviour.

the father (2020)

2020: Anthony Hopkins in The Father

Anthony Hopkins’ acting masterclass in Florian Zeller’s The Father is one of only two performances on this list that won an Oscar. Often the Academy Awards give their wins based on previous snubs or to recognise a body of work (Leonardo DiCaprio for his lead role in The Revenant, or Martin Scorsese for his direction in The Departed), but in this particular case it’s far from being a legacy award. It will be considered blasphemous for some readers to utter this given the actor’s phenomenal performances in films like The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Remains of the Day (1993), but it’s his role as Anthony in The Father that is Hopkins’ crowning achievement.

What’s so fascinating about this film is that, in acutely tracking the disorienting reality of someone suffering from dementia, there’s an internal logic to Anthony’s reality that makes it just as confusing for us as it is for him. Even when you know that at least some interactions you witness are not real, you want to believe this protagonist so much, and are so locked into this waking nightmare with him, that you find yourself trusting Anthony’s interpretations of the people around him, all of which is aided so much by Hopkins’ believable confusion and sorrow. This is a heartbreaking and soul-shattering film that showcases one of cinema’s finest actors on top form.

red rocket (2021)

2021: Simon Rex in Red Rocket

Simon Rex’s Mikey is a never-ending hustler in Sean Baker’s Red Rocket. Even when his former career in the adult film industry effectively shuts him out of gainful employment and the people he once knew hardly seem to care about him, he still finds ways to earn money, make friends, and fall in love. At first, you love his industriousness. Over time, it becomes clear how this quality is a horrific trait in the hands of someone as repugnant as Mikey, whose charm masks his predatory behaviour and narcissism.

Rex makes this change feel believable, where this character does not necessarily undergo any radical transformation, but simply reveals his true nature once you get to know him for long enough. You understand why people love Mikey at first, why they hate him after a time, and why it is so easy to still be endeared by his charm even when his awful traits are evident. It’s a brilliant portrayal of a struggling yet likeable everyman yearning to get by, then revealing their parasitic nature once they get the slightest hint of power, but being so damn funny that you cannot help but laugh at their folly.

2022 : Paul Mescal in Aftersun

Paul Mescal provided one of the most haunting and memorable portrayals of psychological agony that I have ever seen in Aftersun. Just like in Red Rocket, it takes time for this protagonist’s true feelings to be unearthed, except in this case it’s devastating to witness his depression and the paralysing hold it has on him. As Calum, a dad travelling to a Turkish holiday resort with his eleven-year-old daughter, Mescal is able to imbue so many of Aftersun’s scenes with deep sorrow. His feelings are perfectly clear to us, even when this struggling father puts up a valiant effort to conceal his pain from his daughter. This is a keenly realised portrait of depression and the self-loathing it engenders.

2023: Emma Stone in Poor Things

In the realm of acting, 2023 was undoubtedly Emma Stone’s year. Her roles in Benny Safdie and Nathan Fielder’s miniseries The Curse and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things are perhaps my two favourite performances of that year, with the latter serving as a fascinating reinvention of Frankenstein’s monster. As Bella, a baby born into the body of an adult woman, Stone goes from conveying the developmental ability of a newborn baby to that of an independent, forthright adult across the film’s runtime, a transformation that is seamlessly conveyed and frequently hilarious. It’s a joy to watch Bella testing the boundaries of her speech in the film’s early portion, while it takes even longer for her awkward, ungainly physicality to match up with her cognitive skills. It’s one of the most playful and boundary-testing performances I have had the pleasure of watching, making for a well-deserved ‘Best Actress’ win at the Oscars.

2024:  Cillian Murphy in Small Things Like These

If I was accounting for multiple roles to determine this past year’s best performer, Sebastian Stan would be the shoe-in, with two excellent performances under his belt (as Donald Trump in The Apprentice and a disfigured man who undergoes reconstructive surgery in A Different Man). But when it comes to honouring just one performance, there’s no finer acting to be found than Cillian Murphy’s portrayal of an ordinary man stricken with fear and guilt in response to the overwhelming power of the Catholic Church in Small Things Like These. This intimate drama takes time to fully settle into its narrative, but through its simple, delicate approach a truly absorbing cinematic experience blossoms, with a heart-stopping final sequence.

None of it would be possible without Murphy’s bleak expressions and haunted eyes as Bill, who communicates his pain so effortlessly that one has to wonder why he has not been given leading roles on par with this for decades. He actually manages to outperform his phenomenal acting chops in Oppenheimer (2023), itself a marvel for his ability to convey so much emotion without a single word being uttered. That quality is not just amplified here given Murphy’s performance, but in how sparse the film’s dialogue is, as Bill continually witnesses injustices in what initially seems like a quaint, rural setting, finding himself simultaneously paralysed by fear and guilt at every turn. You can almost hear him internally crying out to do something about these cruelties, but anyone familiar with Ireland during this time period will know that repression and social stigma cut bone deep across its population. Murphy’s eyes are bottomless pools of emotion, haunted by the past and present. It’s not just the best performance of 2024, it is the finest out of all of this list’s wonderful entries.

2025: Sophie Thatcher in Companion

We still have a little over six more months of films ahead of us before any definitive end-of-year rankings and lists should be in order, but as of right now, Sophie Thatcher’s performance in Companion is the clear stand-out of 2025. Drew Hancock’s impressive directorial debut film works best if you go into it blind, so for that reason, certain aspects of Thatcher’s acting cannot be commended here lest they spoil this experience. But I can say that it’s a tour-de-force performance that elevates this film considerably. Her physical acting, depiction of desperation and sorrow, and journey towards self-actualisation as protagonist Iris is nothing short of excellent, with some surprisingly moving scenes that would not have worked nearly so well with any other performer at the helm.