Midway through the A24 film “Sing Sing,” Divine G, an incarcerated man played with poise and panache by Colman Domingo, appears before a parole board. Divine G is the leading light of a prison theatre troupe, part of a real-life program called Rehabilitation Through the Arts. “It’s something I’m very proud of,” he brags. “So, are you acting at all during this interview?” his skeptical inquisitor asks. Divine G’s face slowly falls. “Actually, that’s not the intention of acting,” he stammers. “Acting is just to, you know, process.” But he knows his cause is lost.
Domingo’s was one of many performances that struck me this year, whether on the stage or screen. In “Sing Sing,” he acts alongside actual veterans of the program, including Clarence (Divine Eye) Maclin, who participated in more than two dozen shows during a seventeen-year stint at Sing Sing. Watching Maclin seize the screen, you couldn’t possibly equate acting with lying; his performance is the ultimate form of truth-telling, because it shows how he learned the tools to reveal himself to us.
New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
Looking back on a year’s worth of bravura turns, I thought about destiny: how a performer may wait for years to meet a golden moment. Usually, that doesn’t involve a prison term. But it may mean a character actor toiling in bit parts before getting an Oscar nomination in his mid-fifties, as Domingo did in January, for “Rustin.” Or a singer-songwriter whose début single, after thirty-five years, reincarnated into an unlikely country hit. Timing is everything. This year brought us Zoe Ziegler, at age twelve, playing the watchful, wary protagonist of “Janet Planet,” and June Squibb, at ninety-four, as the daredevil heroine of “Thelma.”
Below are ten performances that broke through the noise of this fractious, tumultuous year. They span disciplines and styles, from confessional drama to helium-balloon farce, from movie-star charisma to porcupine-like prickliness. The usual caveats apply: I consumed a lot, but not everything (catch you in 2025, “Industry”), and no list of ten can encompass everything that was worth watching. But these performances cheered me, provoked me, ensorcelled me, and helped me, you know, process.
Tracy Chapman at the Grammys
The country singer Luke Combs had a hit last year with his twangy cover of “Fast Car,” Chapman’s star-making ballad from 1988. In February, both singers duetted on the song at the Grammy Awards, where Combs’s version was nominated for Best Country Solo Performance. All this raised questions. Was the song, as uncategorizable as Chapman herself, really country? Or only when a good ol’ boy from North Carolina sings it? For five and a half blissful minutes, none of that mattered. Chapman was back, her locs speckled with white, her voice as lucid and knowing as ever. Combs gazed at her with fanboy reverence as they traded lyrics that told a poignant story of working-class dreams chased and squandered. (“Maybe together we can get somewhere.”) The duet gave the impression—as fleeting as that joyride in the fast car—that one great song could bridge America’s divisions. Even Taylor Swift was on her feet, singing along.
Honorable mention: When Céline Dion materialized beneath the Eiffel Tower, to close the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics with a rousing rendition of “Hymne à l’Amour,” she looked and sounded resplendent. It was all the more triumphant after a documentary had laid bare her struggle with stiff-person syndrome, a rare neurological disease.
Mikey Madison in “Anora”
Maybe you hadn’t caught Madison in the FX series “Better Things,” or had only vague memories of her roles in “Scream” or “Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood.” But no one who sees Sean Baker’s film is likely to forget her. As a mouthy Brighton Beach stripper who takes up with the spoiled son of a Russian aristocrat—only to marry him, attract the attention of her father-in-law’s hapless thugs, and fight and kick and scratch her way to some kind of freedom—Madison takes this crowd-pleasing caper in her jaws and doesn’t let go. With her Brooklyn drawl and indomitable attitude, her Anora is someone you can’t dismiss, a tough cookie who won’t shut up when commanded. In the film’s stunning finale, she reveals the wounded heart beneath the grit. Like Anora, Madison made herself unignorable. At twenty-five, she’s now a top contender in the Best Actress race.
Honorable mention: In “Anora,” Madison is flanked by two outstanding young Russian actors: Mark Eydelshteyn, who plays her mop-topped paramour (I’m still laughing over his naked back flip), and Yura Borisov, as a henchman with surprising soul.
Richard Gadd in “Baby Reindeer”
The Scottish comedian premièred his autobiographical solo play at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, in 2019, and later won an Olivier Award for its run at a small theatre in Shepherd’s Bush. This April, a Netflix miniseries adaptation, which Gadd created, wrote, and starred in, became a phenomenon. Come fall, Gadd won three Emmys. The series braids his experiences as the target of a cheerful stalker, Martha, while bartending at a London pub, and as the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of a male mentor. (A few months after it premièred, the “real Martha” sued Gadd for defamation.) What made the series so captivating was Gadd’s ruthless self-excavation, which exposed not just the pain he’d endured but the pain he’d inflicted. At times, his performance seemed almost too raw—particularly in one scene, of a standup gig turned public meltdown—but that rawness gave the series its potency.
Honorable mention: As Martha, Gadd’s co-star Jessica Gunning walked a tricky line between merriness and madness. She could be exuberant one minute, intimidating the next—but never so monstrous that we lost sight of her humanity.
Cole Escola in “Oh, Mary!”
Having followed Escola for years on the downtown cabaret scene, I was no stranger to their impish charms. (Sorry, Cole, this is the third time I’ve called you “impish” in The New Yorker.) But what a joy to see this singular comedic talent become the toast of Broadway, thanks to their tour de force as a boozy, stagestruck Mary Todd Lincoln. Part Charles Ludlam, part “I Love Lucy,” the show opened on Christopher Street in February and became the hottest ticket in town—even Spielberg showed up—then moved uptown over the summer, as Escola spread delightful lunacy wherever they roamed (including a spectral appearance at the Met Gala and a ride atop a flamingo at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade). Escola’s brazenly ahistorical Mary Todd is one of those devilish comic creations, such as Jiminy Glick or Pee-wee Herman, that seems less invented than sprung free, never to return.
Honorable mention: Another Broadway powerhouse playing a spotlight-hungry diva: Nicole Scherzinger, the former Pussycat Doll who plays Norma Desmond in Jamie Lloyd’s revival of “Sunset Blvd.” When she blasts out Andrew Lloyd Webber’s power anthems, declaring that Norma is back and ready to be worshipped, we have no choice but to stand and obey. Just stay away from her Instagram account.
Jean Smart in “Hacks”
Smart has been on my list before, but what can I say? Each season of “Hacks” has made her character, Deborah Vance, more delicious, more complicated, more real—I have to remind myself that she’s fictional and not an actual standup legend I saw on a VHS tape of “Comic Relief” in 1986. In the Max show’s third season, Deborah is finally on the verge of snatching her lifelong dream—a late-night chair—but first she must confront how the world has changed, and how it hasn’t. “I can’t be woke. I’m exhausted,” she screams in the thrilling penultimate episode, after her problematic early material starts circulating during a campus visit. The exhaustion runs deep, as does her elation a few scenes later, when she finally gets her wish. Smart is a gift in this role. Keep throwing Emmys at her!
Honorable mention: Hannah Einbinder, who plays Ava—Deborah’s millennial friend, rival, and crutch—is not to be outshone. This season gave her rich moments as both betrayed and betrayer. For a dose of Einbinder as herself, check out her standup special on Max, “Everything Must Go.”
Andrew Scott in “Ripley”
In Steven Zaillian’s riveting Netflix miniseries, shot in sumptuous black-and-white, the Irish actor landed his juiciest role since his mid-career breakout, as the “hot priest” on “Fleabag.” Scott’s Tom Ripley was a clean break from that of Matt Damon; instead of a petulant pretty boy seized by envy and lust, this Ripley was older (Scott is in his late forties) and scarier, a lonesome manipulator with a murderous gleam in his eye. Zaillian, hewing to Patricia Highsmith’s novel, emphasized the sheer labor—often tedious, sometimes comical—involved in covering up a life of homicide and fraud. Scott gave the character a perverse sense of craft, plus the occasional flourish of satisfaction. In a long lineage of Ripleys, he killed it.
Honorable mention: As the mustachioed inspector hot on Ripley’s trail, the Italian actor Maurizio Lombardi was a standout, especially in the show’s final moments, when he realizes how badly he’s been outfoxed.
The Cast of “His Three Daughters”
Azazel Jacobs’s Chekhovian chamber drama, which came to Netflix in September, boasts a trio of impeccable performances. Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen, and Natasha Lyonne play sisters awaiting the death of their father, who goes unseen for most of the film, at his drab Lower East Side apartment complex. Under the weight of anticipatory grief, a clash of siblings unfolds: Coon is the put-upon control freak, Olsen (blessedly freed of Marvel duties) is the conflict-averse domestic goddess, and Lyonne is the pot-smoking black sheep. All three craft detailed characters, but I was especially struck by Lyonne, who didn’t disguise her idiosyncrasies—that cigarette-stained voice, that downtown edge—but reconfigured them for a woman who’d been repressed into near-oblivion. With an unforgettable eleventh-hour appearance by Jay O. Sanders, as the dying patriarch.
Honorable mention: “Conclave,” which follows the chaotic selection of a new Pope, also had a stacked ensemble, led by Ralph Fiennes, as a cardinal straining to keep the Popemobile on track. His crackerjack co-stars include John Lithgow, Stanley Tucci, Lucian Msamati, Carlos Diehz, and Isabella Rossellini, as a nun on a mission.
Glen Powell in “Hit Man”
If there was anything that pop-culture pundits could agree on this year, it was that Glen Powell is a movie star. It had been a while since “star power” had been so breathlessly invoked; Powell even had the name of a classic Tinseltown heartthrob, like Tyrone Power. His rapid rise felt like an anointing—where did this guy come from all of a sudden?—but hard to begrudge after seeing him in Richard Linklater’s comic thriller. Powell plays a dweeby professor who starts working undercover with the New Orleans police and discovers his inner showman, donning disguises and juggling identities. Powell’s off-the-charts charisma was evident, but so was his menace and screwball timing. “Hit Man” came out in May, between Powell’s roles in the holiday rom-com “Anyone but You” and the summer blockbuster “Twisters,” establishing him as a leading man for all Hollywood seasons.
Honorable mention: An overnight leading man of another kind, Brian Jordan Alvarez created and starred in the FX sitcom “English Teacher,” as a deadpan gay high-school teacher dealing with entitled parents and addled Gen Z-ers. Then there are Alvarez’s demented online videos; I’m partial to his alter ego T. J. Mack’s ode to splashing.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste in “Hard Truths”
Mike Leigh’s latest film is a character study of a curmudgeon, a middle-aged Caribbean British woman named Pansy, who can’t seem to make it through any interaction—a chat with her son, checkout at the supermarket, a dentist appointment—without getting into a nasty squabble. You wouldn’t want to cross paths with Pansy in reality, but on film Jean-Baptiste infuses her with a roiling inner life, with results that are funny and sad and ultimately unresolved. The world is just difficult for some people to navigate, and Pansy might as well be the patron saint of grouches. The film is Leigh’s first collaboration with Jean-Baptiste since her Oscar-nominated role in “Secrets & Lies,” from 1996. The reunion, unlike Pansy, is a happy one.
Honorable mention: Zoe Ziegler plays another barbed soul, Lacy, in Annie Baker’s film, “Janet Planet.” The difference is that Lacy is eleven. Unlike many child actors, Ziegler doesn’t have a trace of cuteness or artifice. She’s gawky, observant, and entirely real.
Demi Moore in “The Substance”
Throughout her career, Moore has put her body front and center, pushing its limits and playing with its iconography, whether in boot camp (“G.I. Jane”), writhing against a pole (“Striptease”), or nude and pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair. That was the nineties. Now Moore is north of sixty, an age when female sex symbols are supposed to fade into stardust. So perhaps no one but Moore was better suited to anchor Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror fantasia, in which she plays an over-the-hill actress and fitness guru who takes a Faustian path to rejuvenation. Fargeat’s film, which co-stars Margaret Qualley as Moore’s dybbuk-like younger incarnation, somehow combines “Death Becomes Her” with “The Fly.” It’s usually inane to call actors fearless, but there’s bravery in Moore’s baring of cellulite and self-loathing, in her unflinching embrace of the grotesque.
Honorable mention: Why chase eternal youth when you can kick ass in your nineties? In “Thelma,” June Squibb plays a granny who gets conned out of ten thousand dollars and vows to face down her scammer. Squibb got her first Oscar nomination at eighty-four, for “Nebraska.” As it turns out, she was just getting started. ♦
