The 12 Best Acting Performances at Sundance 2013

7. Hadas Yaron, Fill The Void
It’s always tough to cast a lead role that has a small number of lines. Acting in silence is perhaps the most difficult acting of all. It helps though, if your actor has the huge, marvelously expressive eyes of Hadas Yaron. As Shira Mendelman, the youngest daughter of the Orthodox Israeli family in Fill the Void, she’s able to capture all the confusion, excitement and anxiety of a girl slowly becoming a woman, mostly with just her facial expressions. And when grief comes, she adds a palate of purples and grays to her performance that shades everything in its glow. It’s an exciting performance from a new talent.—Michael Dunaway

6. Casey Affleck, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints
Playing a charismatic escaped convict hell-bent on reuniting with his wife, Casey Affleck delivers another performance loaded with grand and small gestures that linger in the memory. Since he and his co-lead, Rooney Mara, spend so little time on screen with one another, it’s important that their early scenes make a big impact. Affleck makes sure they do just that with a virtuoso performance in the opening shot, as his character chases and romances his woman in a long single take.—Jeremy Mathews

5. Robin Weigert, Concussion
Concussion’s plot has the potential for a rather trashy shock film: A middle-aged mother whose wife never has sex with her becomes a high-class lesbian prostitute. But Robin Weigert’s performance captures all the nuance of Concussion’s smart screenplay. She conveys compulsion, pleasure, shame and guilt, often at the same time.—Jeremy Mathews

4. Matthew McConaughey, Mud
When Matthew McConaughey first appears on the screen as the title character in Jeff Nichols’ Mud, he’s come out of nowhere and subtly makes his presence known to the pair of boys exploring the island as if it’s no big deal that a man is living in a boat that’s been tossed into a tree by the last hurricane. The audience has every reason not to trust this character—a wanted murderer on the run who’s involving a couple of kids in a dangerous plot. But McConaughey offers such a complex performance that you never know what to expect from Mud. In a movie full of great performances from Reese Witherspoon, Ty Sheridan, Ray McKinnon, Sam Shepard and Michael Shannon, McConaughey stands out—and even keeps his shirt on through most of the film.—Josh Jackson

3. Julie Delpy, Before Midnight
There’s a hilarious sequence in Richard Linklater’s fantastic Before Midnight where Julie Delpy’s Celine teasingly (or perhaps not so teasingly) suggests that Ethan Hawke’s Jesse would prefer her to be a vapid bimbo, and she imitates one, curling her hair and adopting a Marilyn Monroe tone, mouthing inanities. It’s a very funny bit, but it’s also a bit of cognitive dissonance to see Celine, who we’ve come to know so well over three movies, even pretending to be so flighty. The same could be said for Julie Delpy herself; it’s not until you see her subverting that bombshell eprsona that you fully appreciate the position she’s come to occupy in cinema—beautiful, yes, but also tough as nails, potent, not one to suffer fools gladly (or at all). And there’s so much more to Delpy’s subtle performance here; while in the first film (Before Sunrise) she was wise far beyond her years (and far beyond Hawke’s Jesse), and in the second film (Before Sunset) she was a neurotic mess in obvious need of saving, here, as a middle-aged woman, she’s learned to cope with her life better. She probably even does actually have a lot more peace than her mid-thirties self did. But there are still major issues lurking deep inside, and Delpy deftly plays them without ever completely bringing them to the surface. Hawke is wonderful in Before Midnight, btu Delpy turns in one of the best performances of her storied career.—Michael Dunaway

2. Shailene Woodley, The Spectacular Now
If The Descendants didn’t already prove Shailene Woodley is a force to be reckoned with, The Spectacular Now certainly does. Woodley embodies young love’s innocence, hope and fragility. Playing the shy, smart love interest of Miles Teller’s hip drunken teen, she dominates every frame she’s in with sweet hesitations and a nervous smile.—Jeremy Mathews

1. Michael B. Jordan, Fruitvale
It’s sometimes a chicken-and-egg question, separating actors’ roles from their performance strengths. Did we fall in love with Michael B. Jordan because he played Wallace in The Wire and Vince Howard in Friday Night Lights? Or did we fall in love with those characters because of something inherent in Jordan himself (or in his performances)? Either way, it was a brilliant choice to cast him as the lead of Fruitvale as Oscar, the young African American man killed by subway police in Oakland on New Year’s Eve 2009. The film is based, of course, on a true story, which gives it even more resonance. More than anything else, though, Jordan is a near-perfect embodiment of the unrealized potential of a young life cut down too soon. Because he’s so effortlessly charismatic and earnest, we’re in love with him before he even speaks a word. We don’t even hold the bad choices Oscar makes against him; it’s so obvious that he’s struggling to build a life better than the one that his background would seem to dictate. We know what’s coming at the end of the film, so there are no surprises. We just spend Oscar’s last day with him, and largely because of Jordan’s performance, he lives, and matters to us. Jordan immediately catapults himself into the Oscar conversation.—Michael Dunaway