best film:  The Big Lebowski. It is almost always a great sign for an actor when their best film lines up with their best performance. The Big Lebowski is a comic masterpiece that ranks amongst not only the best all-time comedies, but the best all-time detective films, films in the 1990s and works in the Coen brothers canon. That is saying something. Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) is the closest contender. From the opening of the Blue Danube on the Harvard lawn to roller stake dance set piece rolling around with Steadicam – this is an ambitious work.

  best film:  The answer to the question of Gary Oldman’s best film is still Oliver Stone’s greatest example of phantasmagoria – 1991’s JFK. But, Mank (2020) aids Oldman’s cause and it is in the mix (along with The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises) just below JFK. Sid and Nancy is also much more than just Gary Oldman levitating - as far as an acting performance is concerned - and it is that. This is Alex Cox’s finest hour behind the camera with the splashes of graffiti and garbage art, a tinge of surrealism (including the happy ending)

  best film:  Scarface (the 1932 version with Howard Hawks at the helm of course) is superior to I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang - enough at least to emerge here as Paul Muni’s best film.  The opening act of Hawks’ film, so atypical of his normally quiet directorial approach, is so audacious. This is the best of the early 1930s prohibition era gangster films (beating out Little Caesar and The Public Enemy) from the two years prior with Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney respectively. Muni does much of the heavy lifting in Scarface after Hawks’ daring

  best film:  It was the Coen brothers 2013 film Inside Llewyn Davis (where Oscar Isaac plays the titular Llewyn) over Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011) until Isaac’s big 2021 came along with both The Card Counter (by a rejuvenated Paul Schrader) and Dune (Denis Villeneuve).  The Coen Brothers' film remains one of their very best – and Isaac’s two (2) 2021 films both landed in the top five (5) of the 2020s thus far.   best performance:  It is not his debut, but Oscar Isaac is a revelation in Inside Llewyn Davis. This is a young Al Pacino

  best film:  For any actor that has a significant role in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane - like Joseph Cotten (Cotten plays Jedediah Leland – a big part) – that is going to be the answer here. Cotten surrounds Kane with The Magnificent Ambersons, The Third Man – both in the 1940s, and then Heaven’s Gate decades later in 1980. Cotten’s uncredited role as a coroner in Touch of Evil is not quite meaty enough to warrant a real look here. The second tier behind these masterpieces includes Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. Cotten gives the second-best acting performance

  best film:  This all depends on whether one considers Samuel L. Jackson’s pit stop of a performance as Stacks in Goodfellas (which beats out Pulp Fiction by an eye lash) to have enough to it to count for this category. Pulp Fiction feels like the right answer here. There is no shortage here of other contenders – Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing a film is another film with Samuel L. near the top of the all-time best films – giving Samuel L three (3) films in the top fifty (50) of all-time in total counting Goodfellas.  

  best film:  Benicio Del Toro has a half dozen films spread about the last four decades that warrant deliberation here. His star was still on the rise in 1995 when he played Fenster in The Usual Suspects. Dr. Gonzo was a chance for both he and Johnny Depp to show off - these are big performances in Terry Gilliam’s bizarre drug fueled circus of a film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Steven Soderbergh's two toned formal masterstroke Traffic (2000) is both his peak and Del Toro’s. Del Toro kept the momentum going in the early 2000s with

  best film:  Tatsuya Nakadai currently has fifteen (15) archiveable films and it is almost easier to mention the few (The Thick-Walled Room, Black River) that are not among the best of their respective year. This leaves a whopping thirteen (13) films, if one considers the three sections of The Human Condition as separate films, left to at least consider in this category. Seven Samurai has be thrown out right away. Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 epic is a masterpiece of course, but Nakadai’s contribution is miniscule. That helps clear up the question only slightly of course – but enough to

  best film:  Tom Hanks was perhaps the preeminent movie star in the 1990s. Now that there has been more than a little bit of distance between Tom Hanks' best stretch of work – easily his best film from that decade is Saving Private Ryan. Steven Spielberg’s 1998 World War II spectacle is both jaw-dropping cinema (particularly the Omaha Beach sequence) and a model of superb screen writing and acting.  Since the 1990s, two other films in Hanks' filmography give Spielberg’s film a run for its money - Sam Mendes' 2002 film Road to Perdition and Wes Anderson's 2023 entry Asteroid

  best film:  Persona.  Persona does not feature Gunnar Björnstrand’s best performance by a long stretch – from an acting standpoint Persona is all Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann – and frankly, Björnstrand’s Mr. Vogler character is not overly memorable. Of the many films with the great Swedish master Ingmar Bergman, Björnstrand appears in five masterpieces (The Seventh Seal, Winter Light, the aforementioned Persona, Autumn Sonata, and Fanny and Alexander). So, going beyond his rather pedestrian contributions to Persona, Björnstrand is center stage in Winter Light, and his contribution to The Seventh Seal is rather significant as well.  

  best film:  The task of ranking the best films with Harvey Keitel in them, means trying to argue for or against either Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver or Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. The last iteration of the best 500 films of all-time list gave Tarantino’s film the edge by just two slots (ranked #30 vs. Taxi Driver at #32). These two masterpieces are so close in quality that it is not worth debating which one is superior – but just appreciating their greatness. Keitel plays the Scar role (an update on The Searchers) in Taxi Driver – even saying

  best film:   La La Land is an easy masterpiece that sits atop the list of Ryan Gosling’s best films. Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 is not far off and the back to back pair of Nicolas Winding collaborations, Drive (2011) and Only God Forgives (2013), are near the top as well. Derek Cianfrance may not make as big a splash as Damien Chazelle or Refn – but his Blue Valentine (2010) featuring Gosling should not be forgotten either.   best performance: La La Land. Being in a film this good does not happen often for actors. Gosling is charming,