Don’t Sleep on These 6 Performances During Awards Season - The New York Times

Here are five stellar turns that still deserve their due, as well as a sixth performance that ought to be doing even better than it is.

Here are some things Renate Reinsve does as Julie, the lead character of “The Worst Person in the World”: She switches her college major; she flirts; she dates one guy and thinks about dating another; sometimes she dances, does drugs, writes, takes pictures; she worries, more often than she should, that she is aimless.

(The film, which had a small, Oscar-qualifying release last year, will be released in more U.S. theaters next month.) Maybe that’s why I treasured this one so much, though most of that credit ought to go to Reinsve for playing somebody so specific in her unfocused sprawl that you’d think you should be able to text Julie for drinks after watching her movie.

The 52-year-old Broadway veteran has become one of our best character actors, popping up in a host of awards-season movies like “Lincoln,” “Selma” and “If Beale Street Could Talk.” He can play sly — with his raised eyebrows and shady silences, he almost stole “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” from the rest of that film’s starry cast — or solid, as when he embodied the traditionalist opposite a fiery Chadwick Boseman in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”?

I’ve enjoyed getting to know the work of the Irish actress Jessie Buckley in movies like “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” and “Wild Rose,” but at no point while watching her did I muse, “You know who she ought to play.

A young Olivia Colman!” In fact, it seems like folly for the director Maggie Gyllenhaal to even cast Buckley as the earlier version of Colman’s character in “The Lost Daughter”: Is there really enough space between the 32-year-old Buckley and the 47-year-old Colman that we’d buy them as distinct poles of the same person.

Perhaps it’s time for another look at “In the Heights,” especially if it gets more eyes on Olga Merediz, the 65-year-old actress who originated the role of Abuela Claudia onstage!

No, not for the altogether more conventional “The Tender Bar,” which just earned him a SAG nod: Instead, please nominate him for having the time of his life in “The Last Duel,” in which his randy count throws orgies, negs Matt Damon, tells ribald jokes and beseeches Adam Driver to take his pants off.

Does the movie have him using a British accent instead of a French one.

Does she see Irene’s respectable life as an upstanding Black wife in Harlem and covet what she has shunned

Or does she want to entice Irene into an in-between life where the bond between them may even become romantic

I’m still not entirely sure, because a year after watching this movie, I continue to turn Negga’s performance over to examine it from new angles