Photo © 2001 Lions Gate Films

Halle Berry — Monster's Ball Why You Already Knew Her: Most likely in one of her two most visible and least challenging personas: the comely but uninteresting "babe" in comedies like Boomerang or family fare like Race the Sun, or as the even more gratuitously doe-like fashion plate in blockbuster fare like X Men, the risible Executive Decision, or last summer's Swordfish. Halle—may I call her Halle?—has attempted to do more specific, character driven work before her revelatory performance in Monster's Ball, but except for her Emmy-winning role in the HBO film Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, few of her "serious" projects got much exposure. Where to Go Next: Losing Isaiah—This 1995 drama, one of her more compelling dramatic outings, again finds Halle (as in Monster's Ball) as a financially and emotionally under-equipped mother under stress: this time, she is a recovering drug addict attempting to win back the custody of a baby she left for dead. The suburban white couple who adopted the child are played by Jessica Lange and David Strathairn, and once the situation reaches the courtroom, the opposing lawyers are played by Samuel L. Jackson and his real-life wife, LaTanya Richardson. As you're probably divining, the top-notch cast are more than equal to the script's potentially rich examination of interracial adoption. The ending is such a copout that Lange herself denounced the film, but there's plenty here to remember—not least of which is Halle Berry's strong work as a troubled woman trying hard to prove she's gotten better.

Judi Dench — Iris Why You Already Knew Her: If you've been watching the Oscars at all in recent years, she's been unmissable, nominated in four of the last five seasons, for her supporting roles in Shakespeare in Love (her single win so far) and Chocolat and her leading work in Mrs. Brown and now Iris. Also a fixture of British television and of the stage on both sides of the Atlantic, Judi's a hard dame to ignore. And yes, that's her as M in the last few James Bond pictures. Where to Go Next: Look Back in Anger—But Judi isn't in it, you object! True, but since so much of her on-screen film work is already so high-profile, it's intriguing to watch a performance directed by Dench—in this case, a 1989 Thames Production (again, that's British TV) that debuted Stateside on VHS once its leads, Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson, became a big splash in American moviehouses. The Ken-Em marriage didn't hold up, of course, and frankly, I'm not sure Look Back in Anger does either; despite its frequent toutings as the seminal work of the postwar British theater, John Osborne's dramaturgy consists of several long, tirade-y monologues for which the non-speaking characters, despite the naturalistic setting, improbably sit and suffer through. Getting as close to Jimmy and Alison Porter as a TV camera allows is perhaps closer than we need to be—but if you're compelled by the amazing economy in Judi's own acting style (subtle physicality, dexterously forceful handling of language), it's illuminating to see how the Dame's directorial hand has elicited a comparable style from this very capable cast.

Photo © 2001 Miramax Films

Photo © 2001 20th Century Fox Pictures

Nicole Kidman — Moulin Rouge Why You Already Knew Her: Because she was on every magazine cover, every TV talk show, and every gossip rag in 2001. Because she's spent over a decade moving from little Australian films (Flirting), into undistinguished blockbusters (Batman Forever, Days of Thunder, The Peacemaker), and finally began a string of nearly uninterrupted auteurist ventures (To Die For, Eyes Wide Shut, Lars von Trier's forthcoming Dogville) that have landed her, at last, in Oscar's good graces. Oh, and I heard she was married for a while. Where to Go Next: The Portrait of a Lady—Jane Campion's 1996 adaptation of Henry James' first perfect novel (he wrote more!) is not exactly a minor film within Kidman's filmography, but both the picture and its star performance have been so unfairly dismissed that it always deserves a second look. People who complain that Nicole's Isabel is too willful and then too teary, or that Osmond is too obviously a cad, or that the film sees all of its characters as roiling sexual malcontents should read the book and prove why this film isn't thematically loyal. And people who don't like talking beans should lighten up. Extra grabber: interesting sexy/stuffy turn from Viggo Mortensen, now a star as The Lord of the Rings' Aragorn.

Sissy Spacek — In the Bedroom Why You Already Knew Her: She was one of America's most prolific and celebrated actresses for about a ten year span between 1976, when she announced herself to the world as Carrie, and 1986, when she earned her most recent Oscar nomination for the god-awful Crimes of the Heart. All this "comeback" rhetoric notwithstanding, Spacek's done excellent supporting turns in recent films like Affliction (see below) and David Lynch's The Straight Story—but it's still her mid-'70s to early-'80s stuff for which she's best known, and justly fêted. Where to Go Next: Raggedy Man—Made in 1981, just after Spacek won her first Best Actress Oscar for Coal Miner's Daughter, this fantastically detailed, quiet drama was too tiny a film to show up on many people's radars. But Spacek, under the first-time direction of her husband Jack Fisk (David Lynch and Terrence Malick's art director), gets to exude a little more spunk, sexuality, and overt emotion than repressed-wife roles in higher-profile work like The River really accommodated. The concluding events have been too heavily foreshadowed by the preceding hour, but the atmosphere of small-town life and unshowy evocation of a 1940s Texas town are memorable. And for once, Eric Roberts isn't playing a villain—that job is left up to the guys who later became "Larry" on TV's Newhart and the creepy insider-informant who follows Julia around in Erin Brockovich.

Photo © 2001 Miramax Films

Photo © 2001 Miramax Films

Renée Zellweger — Bridget Jones's Diary Why You Already Knew Her: As somebody's sweetie-pie, either in winsome movies like Jerry Maguire and The Bachelor or in real-life clinches with Jim Carrey and George Clooney. Zellweger has actually countered that sunshiney image to excellent effect in darker films like The Whole Wide World and, in my favorite of her performances, One True Thing. The twinkly and troubled sides of her persona were combined last year to Golden Globe-winning effect in Nurse Betty. Where to Go Next: A Price Above Rubies—Again, I need to reiterate that these pictures are not necessarily total artistic successes, but the point is that they reveal intriguing new dimensions in the performers. Both halves of that caveat apply double to Boaz Yakin's 1998 drama, in which Zellweger plays a Brooklyn-bred Orthodox Jewish woman who realizes she doesn't enjoy being a mother, doesn't love being married to the neighborhood's most ascetic student of the Torah, and is willing to let her brother-in-law rape her in turn for the offer he extends of working outside the home in his jewelry store. Eventually, the sister starts doin' it for herself, extending to a possible affair with a black man she meets through work. Whatever the film's problems, and eventually there are several, Zellweger ain't one of them: like many members of the eclectic cast (Christopher Eccleston, Julianna Margulies, and Edie Falco, to name a few), she acquits herself remarkably well as a Hasid, just as she proves (well before Bridget) that she can carry a picture all on her lonesome.

Photo © 2001 Universal Pictures

Russell Crowe — A Beautiful Mind Why You Already Knew Him: Love him or hate him, Crowe has quickly achieved such stature as a star, an actor, an ersatz guitarist, and a sometime bully-boy that no one's excused from having an opinion about him. The string of films that carried him to this level go like this: L.A. Confidential, The Insider, and his Oscar-winning turn in Gladiator. True, the movies have declined in quality as time has gone on, but for my money, the level of acting hasn't dipped at all—a claim which encompasses his sturdy work in the better-than-you-heard Proof of Life with Meg Ryan. Where to Go Next: Proof—I would have suggested the gay-themed 1994 Aussie dramedy The Sum of Us, in which Russ is embarrassed to introduce his boyfriends to his too-supportive dad, but that would be cheating, since I already pitched it last year. I thought about offering up the 1995 cyber-thriller Virtuosity, since the casting neatly parallels the Bad Russell-vs.-Good Denzel dynamic of this year's Best Actor race, but the film itself is abysmal, only for the die-hards. What these two films had to recommend them was a dose of Russell smiling, taking it easy, lightening up from the sturm-und-drang of his later work, but the same can be said of Proof, Jocelyn Moorhouse's compelling 1992 whatzit that might be a thriller, a romance, a character study, or all three, but it's definitely about a blind man who loves to take photos and ask friendly strangers to describe them to him. (The lead is played by Hugo Weaving, another Rings alum: he's the Elf leader, Elrond.)

Sean Penn — I Am Sam Why You Already Knew Him: Hopefully you already knew him before he went all Rain Man in the unforgivably manipulative I Am Sam, though Penn's acclaim within the industry hasn't been augmented by too many hits. Fast Times at Ridgemont High still defines him for a certain generation; more recently, even his big openers like The Game and The Thin Red Line have dropped off quickly after fiercely split audience reactions. Where to Go Next: Hurlyburly—If Penn's biggest fans keep complaining that this stunning actor is at least connecting with a decent-sized audience in I Am Sam, the reasons have mostly to do with the eye-burning brilliance he has shown in harsher, less widely distributed films like this 1998 drama. Based on David Rabe's hit play, a bilious satire of Hollywood friendships and private rivalries, the cast includes such marquee names as Kevin Spacey, Meg Ryan, Anna Paquin, and Robin Wright Penn in ample roles. But Penn is the centerpiece of it all, making his character pitiful, articulate, embarrassing, and impossible to forget. And where was the Academy that year? Too busy giving acting statuettes to Roberto Benigni.

Photo © 2001 New Line Cinema

Photo © 2001 Columbia Pictures

Will Smith — Ali Why You Already Knew Him: As rapper, then as summer-movie star, Smith has been jiggy in the spotlight for almost 15 years now. Among his crowd-pleasers, the soon-to-be-sequeled Men in Black is almost certainly the best (not to, uh, alienate any Independence Day fans out there); regarding his attempts at resisting such typecasting, the best I can say about The Legend of Bagger Vance is that I'd rather have watched Independence Day again. Where to Go Next: Six Degrees of Separation—Not such an adventurous choice, since it usually gets floated out whenever someone's trying to explain how Smith proved himself eligible for such a serious, demanding role as he found in Ali. One could hardly say that Smith's central role in Six Degrees is itself a tour-de-force, and the real pleasures of this film are the expertly cut performances of Stockard Channing (an Oscar nominee in 1993) and Donald Sutherland (whom the Academy apparently hates). Still, as a troubled impostor who invades an Upper East Side penthouse with finesse and exits again with unsettling desperation, Smith at least proves that his gifts were worth exploring.

Denzel Washington — Training Day Why You Already Knew Him: His movies don't make as much money as Smith's do, but Washington has accomplished much that preceding and even contemporary black actors have had a hard time equalling. He's been nominated for Oscars on five occasions now, as much as Sidney Poitier and Morgan Freeman combined. More interestingly, he has played saints (Cry Freedom), more worldly heroes (Malcolm X), creeps (He Got Game), and a whole bunch of flawed men just trying to make it through. It's tempting to credit Washington, despite his regular forays into paycheck pictures, with the most interesting roster of solid box-office performers that any major star cobbled together over the course of the last 10 years. Where to Go Next: Devil in a Blue Dress—One of Washington's films that no amount of marketing could entice audiences into was this 1995 LA neo-noir. Presumably as a final assault on public resistance, the DVD/video cover art features a rear view of a woman in a blue satin teddy—one, I might add, who appears at no point in the movie. But watch it, I urge you, not just for the quietly psychotic performance that put Don Cheadle on the map, but for the rare glimpse of an all-black neighborhood in 1940s California and for a typically well-nuanced turn from Washington, this time playing a hesitant private eye who's only in the business long enough to make a mortgage payment on his house. He thinks.

Photo © 2001 Warner Bros. Pictures

Photo © 2001 Miramax Films

Tom Wilkinson — In the Bedroom Why You Already Knew Him: Wilkinson has been a fixture in more of the 1990s British cinema than you think. If you only remember him as the canned factory foreman in The Full Monty, think back to the stuttering theater producer in Shakespeare in Love. If you're really into the Commonwealth art-film thing, you may also know him as Minnie Driver's employer in The Governess, Ralph Fiennes' impatient father in Oscar and Lucinda, and the litigious Marquess of Queensbury in Wilde. Where to Go Next: Priest—The first movie I saw Wilkinson in was this 1994 tinderbox from Miramax, in which The Wings of the Dove's Linus Roache is a man of the cloth whose ambivalence about his own homosexuality is nothing compared to his moral dilemma about whether to reveal that a teenaged confessor is being sexually abused by her father. Wilkinson plays Roache's senior colleague in this two-priest parish, an almost wholly secularized fellow who casually carries on an affair with Mona Lisa's Cathy Tyson and encourages the new arrival to go easy on himself. The avuncular offhandedness of Wilkinson's acting is one of the key ingredients that tempers Antonia Bird's drama from giving in completely to its more hothouse-ish instincts—which is not at all to say that the whole film isn't a well-acted, ethically involving piece of work.

Photo © 2001 Universal Pictures

Jennifer Connelly — A Beautiful Mind Why You Already Knew Her: Since the days of Labyrinth and The Rocketeer, Connelly has worked and worked to prove herself as more than a pretty face. Coulda-been-hits like Inventing the Abbotts and the visionary Dark City didn't connect with audiences, but if you hunted down last year's Oscar nominees, you caught Connelly's blistering portrayal of a listless, privileged Coney Island girl in Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream and an effective cameo as Jackson Pollock's May-December lover just before his death in Pollock. Where to Go Next: Waking the Dead—Actually, Connelly contributed three interesting performances in 2000, of which the littlest-seen was her co-starring role opposite Billy Crudup in this mournful, indifferently concluded, but highly involving romance-drama. Connelly expertly communicates the intelligence and the love, but also the impatience, of a refugee-harboring liberal whose love affair with a true-blue Republican with political aspirations is tested by more than partisan debates. The film asks lots of questions about love and guilt, love and ideas, love and self-sacrifice; if any young American actress can elicit romantic commitment from beyond the grave (or perhaps not...?), it's Connelly.

Helen Mirren — Gosford Park Why You Already Knew Her: She isn't new to Oscar, having earned a Supporting nomination (and a Best Actress prize at Cannes) for 1994's The Madness of King George. But she's doubtless much more familiar to American audiences as the hard-boiled detective in the Prime Suspect series, of which most installments are also available on video. Where to Go Next: The Comfort of Strangers—Are you a sucker for stories where glamorous, financially advantaged Britons come to their erotic and/or violent ruin in Venice? Wanna see Rupert Everett naked? If you answered "yes" (or "YES!") to either of these questions, Paul Schrader's strangely overlooked 1990 mystery can sustain you through two or three viewings at least. Perhaps the film's relative obscurity has to do with the sort of "mystery" it is: not a whodunit or a riddle, exactly, but an abandonment into aesthetic excess—beautiful bodies, beautiful city, beautiful furnishings—that is clearly orbiting around some twisted, inscrutable secret. Christopher Walken's presence in a lead role is a sure sign that we are Leaving Normal, but Mirren is even more disquieting in her way as his Canadian wife, a reluctant sadomasochist who seems to propel the film's enigmas even though we aren't seeing much of her.

Photo © 2001 USA Films

Photo © 2001 USA Films

Maggie Smith — Gosford Park Why You Already Knew Her: Even if you don't know her name, but you're dimly aware of having seen a popeyed, R-rolling British flibbertigibbet in any movie made since 1970, you have likely had the Maggie Smith experience. No stranger to Oscar, she's won twice (for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and California Suite) and has also laid claim to a whopping five BAFTA Awards. But what am I saying? You know this woman, because she went and did the Ian McKellen thing this year and popped up in a megablockbuster: as Minerva McGonagall, the popeyed, R-rolling teacher in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Where to Go Next: Washington Square—If Campion's The Portrait of a Lady (see above) is unfairly treated, Agnieszka Holland's contemporaneous adaptation of Henry James' 1881 novella barely gets noticed at all. Am I the only person who enjoyed this film immensely? Perhaps its wallflower status even within the canon of James on Film is pleasingly symmetrical with its mousy heroine Catherine Sloper, played in one of those heavily mannered love-it-or-hate-it turns by Jennifer Jason Leigh. Smith's second-tier part as Catherine's doddery aunt Lavinia Penniman may also be trying to some nerves, but it's a witty enough performance in a role that could all too easily slip from view. And speaking of slipping from view, if you blink, you Alias fans will miss Jennifer Garner's two scenes as Catherine's marrying cousin.

Marisa Tomei — In the Bedroom Why You Already Knew Her: If you didn't see Tomei in My Cousin Vinny, you're missing a tiny treat. If you didn't know she won an Oscar for Vinny over a conglomerate of Masterpiece Theatre types, there's a whole lotta jokes and rumors you haven't been getting for about a decade. And if you don't know what I'm talking about when I say, "She was Denise and Jaleesa's first roommate on A Different World," you are too young to be reading this site. Where to Go Next: Unhook the Stars—In a way, it's a parallel performance, because again Tomei is the distraught mother of a small child, perpetually enervated by the comings and goings and piggishness of her hubby. But where In the Bedroom steers that premise into High Serious waters, this Gena Rowlands vehicle opts instead for lovable pluck—muted pluck, but pluck nonetheless. It's not as bad a tradeoff as you think: no one decides at the end of Unhook the Stars that the answers to all the plot threads lie in a handgun. And Tomei, rattled and blond-streaked, holds up well against Rowlands, still one of the reigning queens of the screen, even when she's in her plushy, Acting With Children mode.

Photo © 2001 Miramax Films

Photo © 2001 Miramax Films

Kate Winslet — Iris Why You Already Knew Her: I can't think of the name, but there was this movie a few years ago with a giant boat. Where to Go Next: Jude—What continues to amaze about Winslet is how one stars in by far the biggest moneymaker of the modern era and still slides into character part after character part in these small, spiky films. True, her coltishness can get a little precious when, as in Sense and Sensibility, the overall comic tone is a little too broad. And yes, some of her daringest ventures, like Jane Campion's Holy Smoke! are almost confrontational in their offbeatness (though I'm a fan). Jude delivers the best of Kate in a picture that deserves her, knows what to do with her, and has something for almost any viewer. In this Thomas Hardy adaptation, filmed in between Sense and Titanic, Kate once again strong-arms a period drama into a recognizably modern idiom without upsetting the integrity of the piece—but this time, the dramatic stakes are always much higher when either she or her husband (Christopher Eccleston, also Renée Zellweger's costar in A Price Above Rubies) decides to flout convention. For instance, the fact that her husband is also her cousin is, safe to say, Flout #1. Don't watch Jude if you're heading too any happy parties afterward...or, maybe, only watch Jude if you're heading for a party afterward. Either way, don't miss it: truly terrific stuff.

Photo © 2001 Miramax Films

Jim Broadbent — Iris Why You Already Knew Him: Like Tom Wilkinson, Jim Broadbent has probably been right under your nose for a while now, only we Yankees have been too preoccupied to notice. His comic stylings animated Enchanted April and Bullets Over Broadway, and he was sublime in 1999's Oscar-winning Topsy-Turvy. This year alone, Broadbent supported three of the nominated Best Actresses: Dench in Iris, Kidman in Moulin Rouge, and Zellweger in Bridget Jones's Diary. Surely the movie where he has sex with Halle Berry on her living room floor isn't far off? Where to Go Next: The Crying Game—Again, as with Wilkinson, I'm selecting the first time I became aware of Broadbent—as the bartender who tries several times to alert Stephen Rea's character that the woman he's coming to visit isn't...well, you know. And if you do know, you may be one of those shady figures who thinks The Crying Game is ruined because you know its big secret. If so, or if that's all you remember of the film, Broadbent isn't the only hidden treasure you'll (re)discover. There's a lot going on here—in terms of Irish politics, race categories, and tests of faith—that you're bound to overlook if you're too focused on the shagging stuff.

Ethan Hawke — Training Day Why You Already Knew Him: He was the one in Dead Poets Society who didn't kill himself. He was the one in that updated Great Expectations that almost made you kill yourself. He was the one in that updated Hamlet who gets himself killed. He's the one who gets accused of always playing a similar guy. He was the one in Gattaca who was trying not to get himself killed, and did so by playing a similar guy: in other words, by taking Jude Law's fingerprints and his pee. (One way to do it, I guess.) Where to Go Next: Reality Bites—Remains, in many respects, the definitive Ethan Hawke role, just as it should have some claim as the definitive Winona Ryder, Janeane Garofalo, Ben Stiller, and Steve Zahn roles. The fact that this movie, directed by Stiller, still can't get no respect—even after its cast have moved on to the grander entertainments of Oscar nominations, awards-show hostings, Soderbergh flicks, and shoplifting indictments—strikes me as a minor travesty, since so much of its screenplay has transcended its 1994 idiom and remains on-the-floor hilarious. Garofalo's monologues about Melrose Place and Ryder's connection with a phone psychic are just two high points on the comedy side; Hawke's ability to play a total layabout prick and still have you rooting for him to fall in love is one of its subtler triumphs.

Photo © 2001 Warner Bros. Pictures

Photo © 2001 Fox Searchlight Pictures

Ben Kingsley — Sexy Beast Why You Already Knew Him: Playing those extremely nice men in Gandhi, Schindler's List, and TV's recent movie version of Anne Frank. It's not as though Kingsley hadn't been bad before Sexy Beast (he's no teddy bear in Bugsy, another Oscar-nominated part), but until 2001, we always assumed he'd be mostly remembered for his saintly moments. Where to Go Next: Death and the Maiden—Truth be told, the fact that Kingsley's oeuvre can encompass sadistic badness and preternatural goodness registers with me more as a tendency toward polarizing extremes than as the emblem of vast range. But if ever Kingsley's range has been tested, it was in Roman Polanski's corker of a film adaptation of Ariel Dorfman's hit play. The plot centers around three characters and the possibility that Kingsley's doctor, during a now-ended terrorist regime in an unnamed South American nation, performed crimes of rape and torture on the body of Sigourney Weaver's agorphobic. Weaver is good, maybe a bit too strained in her haunted fierceness. It's the showier role, but you wouldn't know it from the master class in imperceptible shadings that Kingsley is putting on, for Weaver and for us. It's because of him that the film thickens, instead of merely exploits, the open possibilities of its thriller plot.

Ian McKellen — The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Why You Already Knew Him: McKellen, like Judi Dench and the late Nigel Hawthorne in the same decade, is an outright institution of the British theater who suddenly got the will in the 1990s to take over the movie screen. For a long time, his screen parts came no bigger than his dandyish cameo in Six Degrees of Separation (see above), but after the twin triumphs of Richard III (1995) and Gods and Monsters (1998), he's barely left our sight. And unlike most Class-A thespians who drops into crud like X-Men, McKellen exudes the impression that he's having a whale of a time. Where to Go Next: Bent—Sorry, then, to spoil all the fun, but Martin Sherman's play about the impressment, torture, and execution of German homosexuals during the Holocaust still hasn't reached the consciousness of as many American audiences as it should. McKellen starred in the original stage version in the late 1970s, and he was once the lover of Sean Mathias, who directed the film adaptation. In truth, McKellen's only here in a cameo—the principal role is played, indifferently I think, by Clive Owen of Croupier and Gosford Park—but the work itself is a major pendant in McKellen's theatrical career and a rightly affecting piece of storytelling besides.

Photo © 2001 New Line Cinema

Photo © 2001 Columbia Pictures

Jon Voight — Ali Why You Already Knew Him: Actually, if you only know Jon Voight from Ali, you probably wouldn't recognize him in anything else. His three iconic performances as abused innocents in Midnight Cowboy, Deliverance, and Coming Home (Best Actor, 1978) were the summits of a whole tradition of Voight-as-Nice-Guy roles (think Conrack). The 1990s saw two unexpected side careers emerge for Voight: that as the leather-faced father of Angelina Jolie, never sitting at her Globes table, and that as a grotesque heavy in instantly disposable dreck like Anaconda and U-Turn, a Sean Penn movie even worse than I Am Sam. Where to Go Next: Runaway Train—The last time Voight was nominated for an Oscar was in 1985, when he lost to William Hurt but nonetheless won an unanticipated Tough Guy trophy as the hothead escaped convict in Andrei Konchalovsky's surprisingly philosophical action thriller. Don't get scared off by the "philosophical" part; if you don't want to think about the Sartrean Huis Clos resonances, you don't have to. You don't even have to recognize that Runaway Train is based on an unused Akira Kurosawa screenplay, if even that proximity to Art Filmdom is off-putting. If all you want is a riot-inducing, rail-riding, digit-crushing, head-pounding roar of the Speed variety (but a decade before Speed), then rent, rent away!