Adele Exarchopoulos - Blue Is The Warmest Color
Eric Ortiz Garcia - Contributing writer
This is a great, moving and daring performance. Those three adjectives go to the whole film as well.
Patrick Holzapfel - Contributing writer
Dustin Chang - Contributing writer
Kwenton Bellette - Contributing writer
Who is Adele? This phenomenal talent outperforms Lea Seydoux almost ten-fold in Blue Is The Warmest Color, and I still regard Seydoux's performance as excellent! With such realism and intensity, Adele roars to bitter life in two parts - personifying love, lust and passion, and then later heartbreak, obsession and something that simple words cannot convey.
Mia Wasikowska - Stoker
Jaime Grijalba - Contributing writer
There's a strength inside Stoker that can be atributed solely to Wasikowska's performance and Park's direction. They are the perfect match and it feels at times like a prequel of Lady Vengeance in terms of direction and performance. It's a powerful mostly mute attitude that wins with every twist and sick turn that it makes.
Ard Vijn - Contributing writer
I didn't recall much about Mia Wasikowska before seeing Stoker, but am a big fan now! This was not the easiest of roles, not just because of the unsympathetic nature of her character's acts, but also because you have to believe in her fierce intelligence for her scenes to work. And Mia Wasikowska totally rose to that challenge.
Joshua Chaplinsky - Contributing writer
This was a tough category. I haven't seen a lot of the female performances that are being touted as best of the year. Sure, Cate Blanchett was fantastic in Blue Jasmine, but she could play that role in her sleep. Stoker wasn't a film I loved, but Mia Wasikowska's performance definitely stands out amongst the "safer" performances of the year.
Cate Blanchett - Blue Jasmine
Peter Martin - Managing Editor
She is absolutely spellbinding: haughty, haunted, and broken.
James Marsh - Asian Editor
In a strong year for leading female roles, Cate Blanchett's Jasmine stands out the most. A modern day Blanche Dubois (although Allen denies this reference was a conscious one), she is utterly self-absorbed yet nevertheless sympathetic, cast adrift in a world of independence after her shady banker husband is incarcerated. Tragic, irritating, amusing, shallow - Jasmine is all these things - but in the intelligent hands of Woody Allen and Cate Blanchett she becomes real.
Paulina Garcia - Gloria
Brian Clark - European Editor
Ernesto Zelaya Minano
Ambyr Childers - We Are What We Are
Todd Brown - Founder & Editor
I struggled with this category more than any other but Ambyr Childers' performance in Jim Mickle's We Are What We Are is the one that has stuck with me the most this year.
Amy Adams - American Hustle
Jason Gorber - Featured Critic
For the woman who in last year gave me the finest performance in The Master while at the same time warming my heart with The Muppets, she completely storms through this film, a tour-de-force of snarky asides and plunging necklines.
Amy Seimetz - Upstream Color
Shelagh M. Rowan-Legg - Contributing writer
In such a cerebral film, Seimetz brings the heart. She brings a whole yet damaged character to subtle life, standing in as the 'everyman' who tries to find love and meaning after trauma. Mesmerizing.
Miyazaki Aoi - Petal Dance
Niels Matthijs - Contributing writer
Amazing film, just like Ishikawa's other work. He has a way with actors , so when one of Japan's most talented actresses takes the stage in his film you know it won't be anything less than perfect.
Brie Larson - Short Term 12
Ben Umstead - East Coast Editor
Existing on that curious precipice between adolescence and adulthood is a rare feat for any performer to undertake, even if they themselves are at that curious age. In Destin Daniel Cretton's second feature Brie Larson's turn as Grace, a young foster care facility supervisor, makes that even rarer for being so authentic and endearing. There's a fierceness and tenderness in Grace's present self that balances out a dark past and bright, if scary future. Larson, once known for supporting kid sister types has arrived as a lead with Short Term 12.
Emma Thompson - Saving Mr. Banks
Jim Tudor - Contributing writer
Greta Gerwig - Frances Ha
Ben Croll - Contributing writer
Gerwig's Frances is just so...real. She holds the screen in ways both totally professional and maddeningly casual. She's awkward and occasionally rude and very often her own worst enemy, and yet we never stop caring. She makes anchoring a film look like it ain't no thing, when the truth is anything but.
Many of the film's settings and details (the parents, as in recent films by Delpy and Dunham, played by her actual parents) are inspired by Gerwig's real life, but we never lose sight of the character for the actress. When we follow Frances breaking up, making up, fucking up, fucking off and eventually making do, we do so with an uncommon intimacy and it's all thanks to Gerwig. Also, the dancing.
Juno Temple - Magic Magic
Kurt Halfyard - Contributing writer
Juno Temple is one of the most exciting young actresses working today. Here she plays an American who is slowly unravelling in front of her Chilean hosts over a holiday weekend at the lake. She is fearless and sad, and pathetic and sympathetic all at once. Find this DVD and see for yourself.
Luminita Gheorgiu - Child's Pose
Pierce Conran - Contributing writer
Gheorgiu anchors the terrific Romanian drama Child's Pose. Like much of Romanian cinema, her performance is rooted in realism and she handily brings out the good and bad of her character, a mother to trying to save her son from jail. Her performance only becomes more layered as the film goes on.
Margarete Tiesel - Paradise: Love
Christopher O'Keeffe - Contributing writer
At times achingly vulnerable, at others grotesquely ignorant, Margarite Tiesel puts in a nuanced and extremely brave performance.
Takanashi Rin - Like Someone In Love
Patryk Czekaj - Contributing writer
Takanashi Rin's heartbreaking and subtle performance really got to me. In the fable-like, visually stunning Like Someone In Love it's not hard to feel empathy for that conflicted woman on the verge of a breakdown.
Robin Wright - The Congress
Ryland Aldrich - Festivals Editor