It’s time for the Jay annual top performances list. It’s a habit that I am keen on preserving as years go by, even though some years are more difficult than others. In 2025, there has been a cacophony of good performances. Actors and actresses of all races, ages, cultures, backgrounds, and varying levels of fame have delivered excellent performances across the films they starred in. There has been the subtle decay of Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Teyana Taylor’s wild energy in One Battle After Another, Joaquin Phoenix’s broken masculinity in Eddington, Emma Stone’s continuation of playing hot freaks in Bugonia, and Paul Mescal’s tormented genius in Hamnet. But it will always be my habit to pick only 10 performances that left me breathless, enamored, or aroused. My picks vary from pure acting genius to movie star rizz on the big screen, and I try to include as many overlooked performances as possible.
- Josh O’Connor – History of Sound
Unfortunately, this swan song of a WWI American ballad failed to attract the attention of critics and audiences, which is highly unfair. Oliver Hermanus’s yearning piece of music, masculinity, and latent desires has captured two powerful performances from two of the best actors of this generation in Hollywood, Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor. But I don’t consider a performances list complete unless I add O’Connor in particular to it, because his acting choices are director-oriented and brave. He challenges everything, even his peers’ relentless seeking of the spotlight and the most coveted projects. And, as David, he is cocky, flirty, slightly arrogant, and harboring a deep sadness that seeps through his skin as he blows cigarette smoke in Mescal’s face. O’Connor may not be the chameleonic actor of the generation, he brings out his O’Connorness into every role he plays, but with his shy personality, and his turn as characters that are dangerously delicious and completely different from his subdued truth, he captures the attention in every role he plays.
- Joel Edgerton – Train Dreams
There’s something about the fractured masculinity that Joel Edgerton portrays in Train Dreams that is both sweet and heartbreaking. It’s an elegy to the façade of the American dream and the futility of the man’s burden. Edgerton plays Robert Grainier, a railroad construction worker struggling to understand the meaning of life after a personal tragedy that shakes him to his core, yet he never finds that elusive truth. Edgerton captures that existential core of a tormented character, a simple man with a head full of questions, but, expertly, director Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar (Sing Sing will forever hold a special place in my heart) don’t offer easy answers or resolutions to his turmoil. Edgerton, as Grainier, immerses himself in the skin of a man so complex that his layers are like an onion, yet as invisible as an alien skin There’s a scene where Grainier loses hope of finding his wife and child, breaking down as every muscle, pore, and molecule inside Edgerton begins to shake with the catastrophic realization. A performance nothing short of brilliant.
- Jacob Elordi – Frankenstein
Jacob Elordi is the surprise of this award season. His poetic performance as The Creature in Guillermo del Toro’s tale of absent fathers and abandoned children, a.k.a the latest Frankenstein adaptation, Elordi proves that he has mastered the craft. He separates his physicality from his inner child, creating a strange domineering figure of brokenness and fragility, a role that no one would be meant to play but him. Yes, he played a brilliant dark Elvis in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, and a sultry seductive rich playboy in Saltburn. But nothing could’ve prepared audiences for what he delivers here. He is a poet among his peers. A galvanizing giant of an energy receptor. His tenderness and his rage are both contained within a precise thermometer, and this is why his performance deserves all the awards and accolades that it will receive. The young Australian heartthrob is also ready to give his take on the tormented, begrudging Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, and after his genius interpretation of The Creature, every role he plays will command attention and fuel anticipation.
- Ana Sophia Heger – She Rides Shotgun
It is always tricky with child actors. There have been multiple great performances from children this year in film. Jacobi Jupe in Hamnet, and Nina Ye in Left-Handed Girl delivered performances that blew everyone away and deserve all kinds of award recognition. But it’s Ana Sophia Heger that delivered the best child acting in this turbulent, hectic season. And strangely it’s in a small, low-budget American thriller titled She Rides Shotgun. Nick Rowland directs this adrenaline-fueled action thriller, and while it’s not an Oscar-deserving masterpiece, the performances are top-tier. Whether Taron Egerton, Heger, or Odessa A’zion in a small but scene-stealing performance. But without Heger, and the complex array of emotions that show on her face, altogether at once, or one after the other, this movie wouldn’t have stuck in my memory the way it does. Heger plays Polly with every trick up her sleeve. Her childish haunted eyes, and her attempts to put on her big girl shoes and bury her trauma leave me heartbroken and rooting for her survival against all odds.
- Jessie Buckley – Hamnet
This year’s top performances list can’t be complete without the Queen of this year’s performances. Jessie Buckley portrays a complex side of femininity, the witchy kindness of the feminine spirit. The soul of the earth, the mother, the lover, and the griever. Her performance is a mosaic, a constellation of feelings. She portrays grief with the same mastery she showcases passion. The scenes when she is giving birth, or immersing her fingers in the dirt with her children, are as powerful as the scenes when she holds her babies for the first time, or going through all the monstrous stages of grief over losing a child. It is obvious that Buckley will be reaping all the awards as Agnes, and deservedly so. I have a thing for Lawrence’s wild and unhinged performance as Grace in Die My Love, but Buckley is a planet eater, she devours while Lawrence claws her way through the wall. Both are talented actresses playing complex and vibrant women, but Buckley’s Agnes is equally as kind as she is rapturous. That, in itself, is acting genius, purified.
- Olivia Taylor Dudley – Abigail Before Beatrice
The most difficult performances are those with heartbreak at their core, and Olivia Taylor Dudley’s Maddie/Beatrice is fractured, sad, wounded, shaken at her core, and messy. To play a character with a stolen identity, a cult survivor in all her scary gaslit vulnerability and delusion is no easy task, even for veteran actors of the finest caliber. It’s no easy task to portray humiliation, sexual submission, and lack of sense of self on screen, Dudley perfectly portrayed a lost woman, who easily uses sex to gain approval and admiration from others after being brainwashed in a cult by a heinous predator to use herself as a fabric for others to sew and shape into whatever form they please. What’s even more interesting about this film is the tragic sapphic relationship that was born in captivity between Maddie/Beatrice and Sarah/Abigail (Riley Dandy). The scenes between both of them are magical, and they wouldn’t have worked without Dudley’s eyes shining with mad devotion and infatuation, both with Dandy and their cult leader.
- Delroy Lindo – Sinners
No one in the entire film industry does it like Lindo. He’s massively talented, combining bitterness, rage, and the demonic claws of addiction as he plays Delta Slim, drinking himself to exhaustion and decay, playing his harmonica and bantering with the Smokestack twins. It’s a performance that shines out in a film with a massively talented and impressive cast, and with the opulent tricks up every actor’s sleeve in this epic about music, vampirism, obsession, and survival in 1930s Clarksdale, Mississippi, it’s an impossible task to pick a favorite performance out of the wonderful characters that Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, and Wunmi Mosaku play. Despite him getting almost zero award recognition, something inside me reveres what Lindo has done here. It’s not easy gaining sympathy when he’s a sweaty, drunkard, foul-mouthed old man who wastes his musical talent, just to get a few coins to spend on booze. But Lindo gives dimensions to the character. He is not just a thief and a drunk, but a rebel against oppressive systems and societies which are -of course- predominantly white.
- Jennifer Lawrence – Die My Love
I don’t think I loved a movie as much as I loved Die My Love this year. There’s a case for crazy women unraveling onscreen that makes a movie immediately more desirable in my eyes. When it comes to crazy women, Jennifer Lawrence plays them best. She unravels like a ball of yarn, layer by layer, her deadpanned stare, her fits of rage, her outbursts of violence and self-harm, all of her wild chaotic energy revealed in one scene after the other. J-Law doesn’t slow down. She is merciless with herself and her spectators. She subjects herself and the audience to all kinds of emotional and psychological horrors, and she’s not even starring in horror movies. Her dramatic roles are chaotic, panic-striking, and self-indulgent. Lynne Ramsay’s toxic romantic drama has Lawrence playing everyone’s least favorite woman on screen. She is the moral opposite of Agnes in Hamnet, she’s not sacrificial, she’s greedy, sloppy, lacks that encompassing maternal side, and displays a lack of affection for everyone in her wake except her child, whom she loves in her wild, feral way, not what is expected of her. To be all of those traits and still beloved -at least by me- is a testament to Lawrence’s excellence as an actress.
- Austin Butler – Caught Stealing
He may be the dreamiest, most handsome of the generation, but he has shown more than once that his acting is top-notch, and his choices are far from what his looks may dictate. Butler has once again proven in Caught Stealing that he was born for the Hollywood leading man game. While his career has taken a turn for the big-budget, Hollywood flashy projects with a list of upcoming action films, it is obvious that Butler is paving the road for dominating Tinseltown. On screen, he is always dangerous and smoldering. As Hank Thompson, Butler gets down and dirty, looking like he always smells of barf, booze, and unwashed hair. He perfects the performance of a vulnerable, broken, hunted man, a deer in headlights caught in the throes of murderous bloodsucking criminals of New York’s underbelly. He has another interesting portrayal this year in Ari Aster’s Eddington, a supporting role that Butler again makes unforgettable, but as Thompson, Butler gets a chance to showcase his rich emotional inventory in its full potential.
- Cosmo Jarvis – Inside
Cosmo Jarvis is the rare actor that doesn’t have his public persona outshine his performances. That’s why I walk into every film he’s in blindly, expecting nothing, and he never fails to surprise me. The Charles Williams’s directed prison drama, Inside, is a claustrophobic, dramatic masterclass in acting, writing, and reenacting an oppressive environment like prisons. In it, Jarvis plays Mark Shepard, a character hard to describe. Mark is by every means awful, horrible, despicable, but heartbreakingly mad. A convicted sexual predator, he is truly kind to Mel, who is surprisingly within the context of the prison walls, the person I felt was the bad guy of the story for betraying someone who has taken him under his wing. It’s a complex situation but Jarvis is an excellent actor, and that’s why he creates that conflict within his character, making him both repulsive but also sympathetic. It’s one of those rare moments where the humanity of despicable people shows on screen, and it’s very well-made that one can’t argue with the reasoning behind a sympathetic portrayal of a detestable human being like Shepard. In his religious rants, Shepard both quotes the Bible and speaks in gibberish and the scene is both ridiculous and tragic.
