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TELLURIDE, Colo. — Having spent another Labor Day weekend in the high-elevation mountain town where it’s possible to see early brewings of another Oscar season, we depart not with movies in mind but, as it happens, some especially strong turns by actors animating the whole of their projects. Leaving aside titles that already debuted at Cannes and Sundance (including “Pillion,” “The Secret Agent,” “Sentimental Value” and “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”), here are six performances you’ll be hearing about in the months ahead.
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Jessie Buckley, ‘Hamnet’
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When Jessie Buckley’s Agnes first appears in “Hamnet,” she’s curled up inside a log, her red dress a striking contrast to the green landscape enveloping her. The locals say Agnes is the “child of a forest witch” and she is indeed extraordinary: an able herbalist, beekeeper and falconer. Agnes grabs your attention and you can see why a young William Shakespeare (an excellent Paul Mescal) feels like he has been hit by a thunderbolt when he meets her. Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s celebrated 2020 novel, Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet” is a tender, fictionalized account of how Shakespeare and Agnes fall in love, raise a beautiful family and then grapple with a gut-wrenching loss. Buckley’s presence just jumps off the screen. Agnes starts as a primal feminine force and then becomes a wife and mother possessing a fierce love for family, a love that will be sorely tested. Buckley has been building an impeccable resume the past few years. To name but a few of her titles: “Wild Rose,” “Women Talking” and “The Lost Daughter,” the 2021 movie that earned her an Oscar nomination. It all feels like it was leading to “Hamnet.” Buckley’s searching, searing turn seems destined to be lauded countless times these next few months, a performance that is as impossible to ignore as the character she plays. — Glenn Whipp
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Billy Crudup, ‘Jay Kelly’
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It’s a tough assignment to drop into a film for just a couple of scenes, create a complex character and single-handedly spark the protagonist’s emotional unraveling. In Noah Baumbach’s sharply etched portrait of the pitfalls of fame, Billy Crudup more than rises to the challenge. Even alongside George Clooney, playing the aging screen icon of the title, and Adam Sandler as Kelly’s weary confidant and manager, it’s Crudup’s brief but blistering appearance that cuts the deepest. As Timothy, an old acting school buddy of the Clooney-esque Kelly, Crudup brings a mercurial intensity to a pivotal early scene that begins with warmth and ends in rage. What starts as a nostalgic reconnection over drinks between two men who once chased the same dream quickly curdles, as Crudup’s long-simmering resentment boils over, erupting in bitterness and violence. Among the scene’s daunting challenges: He has to deliver a weeping, Method-style reading of a restaurant menu. “I read this and was like, ‘Dude, that’s a very hard thing to do!’” Crudup recalled at a post-screening Q&A of his character’s compressed but volatile emotional arc. For a consistently compelling actor who has somehow never been nominated for an Oscar, it’s a reminder of just how overdue that recognition might be. — Josh Rottenberg
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Jacob Elordi, ‘Frankenstein’
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Guillermo del Toro may love his monsters too much — so much that they barely function as monsters. That doesn’t make them invisible. His passion project arrives, chockablock with design and speechifying, but Jacob Elordi’s quiet presence pulls focus. He’s an actor who seems to specialize in exposing the underbelly of idols, be they the wealthy brats of “Saltburn” or the King himself in Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla.” His Creature takes a long time to show up — not in a shower of lightning sparks but almost out of Victor Frankenstein’s dreams, standing at the foot of his bed — and you immediately appreciate Elordi’s strategy of going small. Elordi takes over the telling of his tale, often running counter to the presentational grandiosity that a new “Frankenstein” would seem to require. The movie would come close to ringing hollow without such committed intimacy and, as it was with some of the exquisite work of frequent Del Toro collaborator Doug Jones (“Hellboy,” “Pan’s Labyrinth,” the amphibian in “The Shape of Water”), Elordi extends the filmmaker’s tradition of finding something deep and recognizable in the alien. — Joshua Rothkopf
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Linda McCartney, ‘Man on the Run’
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Morgan Neville’s “Man on the Run” documents Paul McCartney’s attempt to launch a solo career following the breakup of the Beatles in 1970. Watching the film, you have to wonder if he could have done so without his wife, Linda, by his side. Critics savaged McCartney for including Linda in Wings, a choice that was made, we learn, while they were lying in bed one night. Fancy joining the band? Sure. Why not? Paul intuitively knew he needed Linda, not to mention the fact that her mere presence (along with their kids) made life on the road more fun. When thinking about the great performances I saw at Telluride this year, Linda immediately came to mind because as we see her prominently featured in a wealth of never-before-seen archival footage, she is never for a moment “performing.” She is wholly, unabashedly herself, unbothered by what anyone thinks. Stella McCartney posits in the movie that her mom’s singular style — minimal makeup, Bohemian wardrobe — influenced women musicians who followed. Linda would have probably shrugged at the suggestion. She was just Linda McCartney. — Glenn Whipp
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Jesse Plemons, ‘Bugonia’
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Jesse Plemons is never one to chew scenery. Even when handed a role that edges on madness, he doesn’t go big. Instead, he goes deep, building tension quietly from the inside out. And in Yorgos Lanthimos’ uncategorizable, darkly comic sci-fi thriller, Plemons — reuniting with the director after playing three characters in last year’s “Kinds of Kindness” — delivers one of his most riveting performances yet. As Teddy, a rumpled, reclusive beekeeper convinced that a pharma CEO (Emma Stone) is an alien from the planet Andromeda, Plemons channels paranoia, grief and righteousness into something both absurd and unnervingly sincere. The “I do my own research” archetype could easily veer into “SNL” sketch territory but he plays it heartbreakingly straight, creating a chillingly familiar portrait of a man lost in an algorithmic maze of internet rabbit holes and desperate for clarity in a world that no longer makes sense. Teddy enlists his younger cousin Don (Aidan Delbis, an autistic first-time actor in a mesmerizing turn) to help him abduct Stone’s steely executive, drawing him into the mission in a misguided effort to protect him. Even as things spiral into chaos, Plemons (a 2022 supporting actor Oscar nominee for Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog”) roots the performance in a warped but recognizably human emotional logic. The result captures the anxious, conspiratorial spirit of 2025 with eerie precision, proving once again that Plemons doesn’t need to raise his voice to deliver a performance that speaks volumes. — Josh Rottenberg
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Jeremy Allen White, ‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’
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It would be a mistake to say that Jeremy Allen White excels at doing nothing. His nothing is a lot of something. (“If you’re just staring at a wall and you don’t have anything going on, the camera will know,” White told us at Telluride. “The audience will too.”) He’s made a signature out of his interior moments on “The Bear” and White’s take on the film’s tremulous, uncertain Springsteen — pre-”Born in the U.S.A.” and searching for authenticity — is a triumph of transition, the actor shifting his style to a big-screen format that doesn’t always do well by thoughtfulness. White pulls off the concert scenes fine, but it’s the process-centered stretch in the middle of the movie that will leave you rapt: a trip to a New Jersey library in late 1981 to research the killer Charles Starkweather; a late-night home viewing of the movie “Badlands”; moments of lyrical introspection and suburban acoustic strumming, accompanied only by the plunk of a four-track portable studio. The resultant album, “Nebraska,” is one of the ’80s most hushed accomplishments and it took an actor of White’s confidence to make that inward journey compelling. — Joshua Rothkopf
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