Best of 2013: Lead Actor

Best Actor

• Bradley Cooper for American Hustle, for emanating qualities of overconfidence, hot-tempered eagerness and misguided intentions that are barely contained or aware of themselves, equaling his SLP performance in tonal acrobatics while achieving a generous rapport with his castmates.

• Oscar Isaac for Inside Llewyn Davis, because it's hard to imagine the film clicking as strongly as it does without his presence, bearing a lifetime's worth of (self-induced) misfortune and using sharp, eclectic forms of comedy and pained human detail to inch Llewyn towards his weary reckoning.

• Hugh Jackman for Prisoners, for hinting at helplessness but displaying pure animalistic veneer in the wake of tragedy, most especially when the plot piles on absurdities, and for providing a smart deconstruction of the Dutiful Avenging Family Man trope and of his own persona.

• Matthew McConaughey for Dallas Buyers Club, for also boiling down the essential components of who he is as a performer, but showing us what his career has the potential to be, packaging newly rejuvenated charisma, physicality and perceptive character detail into a bonafide star performance.

• Isaiah Washington for Blue Caprice, for a smart adherence to unsettling instability amongst Moors' elliptical construction and unpleasant moods, conveying a man with an odious persecution complex who has a very strong possibility to mold a directionless kid into a dangerous human being.

How appropriate that I publish this list on Father's Day since four of the characters that the actors portray are fathers, though I don't actually remember whether its even mentioned that Ron Woodruff has a daughter or not in Dallas Buyers Club (which he did in real life). I know his paternity wasn't as vital to the story as Isaac's, Jackman's, or Washington's.

Honorable Mentions start with the young Conner Chapman in The Selfish Giant, who's constantly challenged to fluidly fluctuate between being pugnacious and generally caring (sometimes within the same scene), and having to have his entire world come crashing down around him while staying in the naturalistic hew set up by his director; and Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave, who is key to providing the film an understated conduit for empathy and lending nuance to McQueen's hyperbolic style, showing us the ways in which he learns to keep his head down over the years and the utter devastation he exudes with his reluctant involvement in scenes like the whipping scene. These two were fighting tooth and nail for those fourth and fifth slots, but are just as laudable regardless of their unfortunate omission.

Honorable mentions continue with Israel Broussard, who shows sweet elation to his new friends' acceptance and blind desperation to please them in The Bling Ring; Vincent Lindon, who serves as an emptied-out sexual and cerebral embodiment of the mythic, rock-nosed noir hero in Bastards; Joaquin Phoenix, who handles against-type tasks so deftly in Her, like the natural amiability he shows around Amy, the daffiness he lets loose during the first-date scenes between he and Samantha or how measured and revealing he makes scenes like the lunch with his soon-to-be ex-wife; Mads Mikkelson, who  has to work around a jerry-rigged script to provide an honest characterization of a man who's lost everything in the otherwise turgid, The Hunt; Bruce Dern, who does everything in his power to keep Woody from feeling one-note, adding a myriad of colors to his shame, humor, and aloofness amidst Nebraska's cajoling of easy gags and empty ranking of characters; Paul Eenhorn, who imparts This is Martin Bonner's title character with solitary reticence, and who avoids the lazy routine of viewing his religious crutch in a sneering, judgmental eye, painting his observer-reactor with wisdom and lust for life just waiting to shine through; Ali Mosaffa, who manages to make the twisty but faintly revealing nature of The Past's plot and character dynamics compelling, laying out a complicated history with Marie and a rich specificity in those promising opening scenes and warm approachability during the lunch with his stepdaughter; Miles Teller, whose charming turn as a wise-ass but intoxicatingly friendly high-schooler in The Spectacular Now transcends the surface teen alcoholism PSA and finds ways to earn our concerns and sympathies for the track that Sutter is going down; Ethan Hawke, who continues to make Jesse an endearing but slightly insensitive "roosterprick", constantly catching himself with his foot placed firmly in his mouth, even in his later, more weathered years in Before Midnight; and Tom Hanks, who starts off at one level as the cipher-ish titular captain in Captain Phillips and lets the entire film build to some of his most emotionally stripped-down moments than we've ever seen from him in the cathartic release of the film's ending.