--- title: The 10 Best Movie Performances of 2025 description: From Paul Mescal in 'Hamnet' to Jennifer Lawrence in 'Die My Love' canonical: https://time.com/7333830/best-movie-performances-2025/ author: Stephanie Zacharek article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2025-12-11T12:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-05-11T04:51:12.629Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: The 10 Best Movie Performances of 2025 og:description: From Paul Mescal in 'Hamnet' to Jennifer Lawrence in 'Die My Love' og:url: https://time.com/7333830/best-movie-performances-2025/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb08f1d27ee28db69/6998cc3d7323af422a2bd1ac/BOC-movieperf.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: BOC-movieperf og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The 10 Best Movie Performances of 2025 twitter:description: From Paul Mescal in 'Hamnet' to Jennifer Lawrence in 'Die My Love' twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb08f1d27ee28db69/6998cc3d7323af422a2bd1ac/BOC-movieperf.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The 10 Best Movie Performances of 2025 > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account.  by [Stephanie Zacharek](https://time.com/author/stephanie-zacharek/)  ## Stephanie Zacharek Film Critic Dec 11, 2025 12:00 PM UTC   by [Stephanie Zacharek](https://time.com/author/stephanie-zacharek/)  ## Stephanie Zacharek Film Critic Dec 11, 2025 12:00 PM UTC Even among those of us who believe movies are the [perfect art form](https://time.com/7333791/best-movies-2025/), movies themselves are rarely perfect. That’s where actors come in: sometimes a terrific performance becomes the heart of a picture, even a flawed one. Actors are, and forever will be, chief among the reasons we care about the movies in the first place. Here’s a sampling of the performances, including both supporting and lead, I loved best in 2025\. Actors forever! **Read more:** [_The 10 Best Movies of 2025_](https://time.com/7333791/best-movies-2025/) ## Kirsten Dunst, _Roofman_  Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst in Roofman Courtesy of Paramount Pictures A woman who falls in love with a con man is often treated as an object of pity, a person who just wasn’t smart enough to see the truth of the person standing before her. In Derek Cianfrance’s underappreciated [_Roofman_](https://time.com/7324938/roofman-review/), Dunst—as Leigh, a woman who falls for Channing Tatum’s Jeffrey, a thief and prison escapee masquerading as an average citizen—captures subtler shades of what it means to love a person who has deceived you. With her radiant, semi-guarded openness, Dunst tells us everything about what it means to trust someone implicitly; that kind of trust takes so much more fortitude, it can triumph even over deceit. ## Delroy Lindo, _Sinners_  Delroy Lindo in Sinners Courtesy of Warner Bros. Picture Lindo is just so good, without being flashy, in nearly every performance. Maybe that’s why he gets passed over, one awards season after another—his quiet consistency seems to work against him. In a just world, his superb turn in Ryan Coogler’s [_Sinners_](https://time.com/7278537/sinners-review-ryan-coogler/)would change that. Lindo plays Delta Slim, a blues pianist and harmonica player fallen on hard times, who joins forces with twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) to open a Mississippi juke joint. Lindo’s character isn’t just a fine, intuitive musician. He’s a repository of cultural memory, an elder who hangs onto all the old stories and passes them along to the youngsters who need to hear them. And he’s the movie’s steady heartbeat, sturdier and more reliable than a metronome. ## Jennifer Lawrence, _Die My Love_  Jennifer Lawrence in Die My Love Kimberly French—Obscured Pictures In the best [descent-into-madness performance](https://time.com/7287323/die-my-love-review-jennifer-lawrence/) of the year, hands-down, Lawrence plays Grace, a woman who’s just given birth to a baby she’ll do anything for; she’s also tormented by postpartum depression. But this isn’t performance-as-diagnosis. Instead, Lawrence invites us to walk along with Grace, to see things as she does, even when that view is warped. What Lawrence does here is generous, unsettling, occasionally even funny. She opens a door into one woman’s experience and we step right through—though we, unlike her, have the luxury of turning back. ## Joel Edgerton_, Train Dreams_  Joel Edgerton in Train Dreams Courtesy of Netflix In adapting [Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella](https://time.com/7334446/train-dreams-novel-adaptation-denis-johnson/), director Clint Bentley made the perfect choice in casting Edgerton as Robert Grainier, a solid working man in hardscrabble early 20th-century Idaho. Grainier may be laconic, but his heart is true: he’s devoted to his wife (Felicity Jones) and young daughter, though seasonal logging gigs take him away from home for long stretches. When tragedy strikes, he’s a man left adrift, haunted not just by events that have shattered his life, but by injustices he’s witnessed in the greater, crueler world. Edgerton captures the essence of sorrow like lightning bugs in a jar; his sadness isn’t a dark, overbearing thing, but a source of gentle, mournful light. The movie is gorgeous to look at, but Edgerton may be the true source of its incandescent beauty. ## Zoey Deutch, _Nouvelle Vague_  Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg and Guillaume Marbeck as Jean Luc Godard in Nouvelle Vague. Jean-Louis Fernandez--Netflix What strikes you about Deutch’s performance in Richard Linklater’s dazzling account of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 classic _Breathless_ isn’t how much she looks like Jean Seberg; it’s how she captures both Seberg’s thoughtful gravity _and_ her casual, swingy impulsiveness. In a movie that’s pure delight, Deutch’s performance is the cream on top. ## Paul Mescal, _Hamnet_  Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal in Hamnet Courtesy of Focus Features William Shakespeare and his wife, Anne Hathaway, lost a son named Hamnet, age 11, to Bubonic plague in 1596\. [Chloe Zhao’s _Hamnet_](https://time.com/7335407/hamnet-true-story-shakespeare-family-hamlet/)_,_ based on Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, tells the story of how a father’s grief that brought one of the world’s most famous plays into being—maybe. Though Jessie Buckley’s performance as the grieving mother is getting most of the attention this season, it’s Mescal’s turn, as a fictionalized version of the world’s most revered playwright, that carries the most power. Mescal is superb for what he _doesn’t_ show; this is a performance rippling with repressed male feeling, subtle as a fingerprint, yet as overwhelming as the ocean’s roar. ## Rebecca Hall, _Peter Hujar’s Day_  Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall in Peter Hujar's Day Courtesy of Janus Films In Ira Sachs’ [_Peter Hujar’s Day_](https://time.com/7331201/peter-hujars-day-review/)_,_ Hall plays Linda Rosenkrantz, a New York writer who, in 1974, conducted a daylong interview with the downtown photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw), drawing out details of everything he’d done the day before. He talks; she acts as a sounding board, occasionally interjecting with a question or a mild, teasing challenge to his version of the facts. But mostly, Hall’s Linda just listens, elevating a simple act into a form of cosmic communication. There were showier performances this year, but few better ones. ## Channing Tatum, _Roofman_  Channing Tatum as Jeffrey in his makeshift Toys'R'US home Courtesy of Paramount Pictures Tatum is one of our most charming performers, though it’s possible his eminent likability has worked against him: actors who don’t take on heavy-duty, serious roles are often treated as un-serious. But in Derek Cianfrance’s _Roofman,_ as [real-life thief and prison escapee](https://time.com/7314555/roofman-true-story-channing-tatum-jeffrey-manchester/) Jeffrey Winchester, Tatum gets to the heart of how near-impossible it can be to meet expectations of masculinity in modern America. Jeffrey loses one family, after turning to illegal means to keep them. When he gets a chance at building another, he’ll do anything to keep it. _Roofman_ is a comedy, but it’s an emotionally complex one: there’s so much unspoken yearning in Tatum’s performance that in the end, you can hardly bring yourself to laugh. ## Keke Palmer and SZA, _One of Them Days_  Keke Palmer and SZA in One of Them Days Courtesy of Sony Pictures Comedic performances always get short shrift at awards time, even though, as the old show-biz adage goes, dying is easier. As roommates and best friends scrambling to make the rent on their crummy Los Angeles apartment, Palmer and SZA make a [fantastically loose and loopy team](https://time.com/7274659/one-of-them-days-netflix-watch/). Their banter, dotted with frequent arguments, is a kind of ping-pong poetry. These two are having a blast and inviting us to the party. ## Ethan Hawke, _Blue Moon_  Margaret Qualley and Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics In the early part of the 20th Century, Lorenz Hart was the songwriting partner of Richard Rodgers, before the latter teamed up to write megahits with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein. Hart drank way too much; he was unreliable. Rodgers _had_ to leave him behind. But as Hawke plays him in Richard Linklater’s breezy-bittersweet [_Blue Moon_](https://time.com/7328186/blue-moon-review/)_,_ you see why the songs he cowrote with Rodgers (among them “My Funny Valentine,” “Manhattan,” and the one from which the movie takes its title) continue to haunt our funny-sad romantic dreams. Hawke plays Hart as a sadsack bon vivant, the life of the party even as his heart was cracking—but then, a heart in the process of breaking may be the purest form of energy known to humankind. Hart knew how to harness it, and Hawke captures that here. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/7333830/best-movie-performances-2025/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/7333830/best-movie-performances-2025/"},"headline":"The 10 Best Movie Performances of 2025","datePublished":"2025-12-11T12:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-05-11T04:51:12.629Z","description":"From Paul Mescal in 'Hamnet' to Jennifer Lawrence in 'Die My Love'","url":"https://time.com/7333830/best-movie-performances-2025/","keywords":["movies","culturepod"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb08f1d27ee28db69/6998cc3d7323af422a2bd1ac/BOC-movieperf.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Stephanie Zacharek","jobTitle":"Film Critic","url":"https://time.com/author/stephanie-zacharek/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb08f1d27ee28db69/6998cc3d7323af422a2bd1ac/BOC-movieperf.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"BOC-movieperf","caption":"","creditText":"","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/movies/","name":"movies"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/7333830/best-movie-performances-2025/","name":"The 10 Best Movie Performances of 2025"}}]}] ```