"It is a well-known claim of actors, oft attributed to the British stage star Edmund Kean but probably originated by some schlub pounding the dirt in a Greek amphitheater around the time Lysistrata had its premiere: dying is easy, but comedy is hard. As much as this deathbed classic is a Hollywood truism, there is apparently something even more difficult than peerlessly nailing a comedy role and that's getting any recognition for having done so. Of the 10 lead performance nominees at this year’s Academy Awards, seven of them bent over backward to keep their audiences from cracking a smile. (The eventual Best Actress winner delivered laugh after unintended laugh in her very serious turn as a bat-shit ballerina.) Even my own list of favorite performances, male or female, is heavily weighted toward searing dramatic turns. Yet year after year the performances that land at the top of my list are usually comedic in nature. (I’m thinking of Anna Faris in The House Bunny, Steve Martin in The Man with Two Brains and Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, to name but just three.) With all due respect to Michele Williams, Annette Bening, Lesley Manville and Hailee Steinfeld, only one actress this year was able to convince me, if she were to somehow hijack Doc Brown’s DeLorean and travel back to the golden age of Hollywood screwball comedy, that she could be dropped, as is, straight into competition with the high-speed royalty of the genre for all the best and brightest roles. And I’ve little doubt not only that Emma Stone could hold her own, but that she would have the likes of Carole Lombard, Marion Davies, Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne and Jean Arthur looking over their shoulders when they weren’t scrambling to take her out for drinks.
In Easy A Stone effortlessly proved she had the stuff real stars are made of. In the real world, or at least in my high school, Stone's Olive Penderghast would have had every boy with a lick of sense at her feet. But here she’s nerdy and boyfriend-less (the movie’s most outrageous conceit), North Ojai High's heiress apparent to the spirit, if not the legacy or fate of Hester Prynne. Olive finds herself the object of salacious rumors, in part self-perpetuated, which result in her becoming the go-to girl for unconsummated, wholly fictitious trysts meant to prop up the reputations of her supposed partners, desperate geeks one and all. Of course the rumors go wildly out of control and Olive, in best-defense mode, embraces her nouveau-slutty persona, with results that are predictably outrageous but less predictably hilarious, and even at times painful. This young actress holds the screen without ever breaking a sweat—she’s in practically every scene of her movie, just like Oscar-winner Natalie Portman. The difference is that there’s no doubt Stone means to make us laugh.
In addition to effortless and natural appeal, Stone has got a real movie smart-ass’s way around a sharply written turn of phrase, or a squinty-smudgy smirk-mock laugh, displayed without turning the screen a red-headed shade of mean a la Molly Ringwald. (Maybe it’s her slight lisp that keeps her barbs from cutting too deep or seeming elitist.) But she can also handle the sweetness in the teen comedy recipe without feeling the need to put everything in collagen-inflated quotes or brush off the currents of love coursing through her relationship with her only-in-the-movies family in appeasement of the movie’s mockery-ready ideal demographic. Even her looks are appealingly off-kilter; her freckled nose crinkles up to meet those pale green eyes, which are spaced slightly further apart than the manual recommends and offset by her fiery red mane; and all of her features settle into a repertoire of quizzical looks, sharp glances and artfully arched eyebrows that suggest bemusement and the pursuit of the cleansing power of humor as the most potent intellectual defense against shallow high school hostility.
One thing Stone is not is a flavor-of-the-moment cutie pie. No, she’s a tart meringue, and on the strength of Easy A she’s fully ready to take on all comers for now and the foreseeable future. Like Faris, with whom she shared screen time in The House Bunny, Stone is built for the kinds of showcase vehicles that Hollywood forgot how to make 50 years ago. (With all due respect to the late, great Jane Russell, if someone ever decides to do a remake of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes there would be no need to go through all that messy auditioning and interviewing-- just give these women the ship and watch ‘em cruise.) It may be that Stone never gets another role like Olive-- her ascendance into the rebooted Spider-Man franchise bodes well for her profile, Q rating and checking account, but it’s unlikely to produce the sort of combustible energy she radiates in Easy A. As she becomes a star, I’ll eagerly await the career fulfillment of the kind of intelligence she’s displayed in her choices so far and continue to hope she remembers that anyone can take the money; it’s comedy that’s hard, and nothing worth doing comes easy. The glint in Emma Stone’s green eyes tells me that she’s ready to roll up her sleeves and get to work." - Dennis Cozzalio
"At first glance, the title of Mike Leigh’s Another Year obviously refers to the growing season of the garden tended by Tom and Gerri (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen) through the course of the movie – a metaphor for hope, life, and the joys of growing old as part of a loving couple. As the film develops, however, Tom and Gerri are slowly replaced as the film’s focus by their friend Mary (Lesley Manville), an unhappy woman heading into middle age with a dead-end job, a futile love life, and a drinking problem. As we pay attention to Mary’s not-very-quiet desperation, the film’s title reveals a painful irony – while Tom and Gerri’s year is full of rewarding careers and dinners with friends and loved ones, Mary’s year careens from one disappointment to the next, with no end in sight.
One of the most difficult things for any actor to do is to play a character defined by weakness, passivity, and confusion without lapsing into stereotypes – the suffering saint, the hapless fool, the they-had-it-coming loser. What Manville succeeds in doing is to create a character of failure and pain without falling prey to condescension or alienation. Mary could be any one of us, and her misery is noone’s fault. She’s just another of the lonely people, not understanding what she’s doing wrong, not knowing where to go from here. And the degree of empathy and connection that Manville and Leigh provide between Mary and the audience is one of the purest, most beautiful things to discover in all of art – our simple recognition of a tortured soul." - Jeff McMahon
"Teenagers aren’t supposed to have their shit together. It’s a fact of life. As Ron Burgundy would say, it’s science.
However, if you’re a teenager growing up in the Ozarks, in a community where the inhabitants don’t seem to know the meaning of the word, taking care of your little brother and sister while your mother sits catatonic in the living room, looking for your possibly dead, meth-cooking father so you and your family won’t end up homeless, not to mention risking life and limb (both literally) just trying to locate the deadbeat son of a bitch, I guess getting your shit together would be something of a requirement.
As Ree, the 17-year-old who is forced to deal with all those aforementioned things, Jennifer Lawrence’s performance in Winter’s Bone consists of her character showing how growing up in these harshest of conditions has made her not just tough and mature, but a force to be reckoned with. She doesn’t back down as fearful relatives and neighbors tell her to quit with all the snooping around. And even when she gets brutally attacked and apprehended by the people responsible for her old man’s disappearance, her chances of making it out alive close to nil, she doesn’t become a sobbing, sniveling mess begging for her life. Her upper lip stays surprisingly stiff, telling her captors they can either kill her or help her. She actually tells them what they should do. Even when she’s bruised and bloodied, she remains the strongest person in the room. (It’s funny how magazines and other media outlets are out to show how smokin’ hot Lawrence looks in swimwear, considering she gives one of the most unglamorous performances in recent memory.)
It’s quite an impressive, resilient turn from Lawrence, who was previously known for being the resident jailbait daughter on "The Bill Engvall Show." Just as Ree is out to quietly, valiantly show she’s up to any challenge, so does Lawrence. It’s a performance that’s practically the flip side of Natalie Portman’s Oscar-winning turn in Black Swan. As Portman’s uptight, pampered ballerina drives herself batty in her quest to become the perfect lead in Swan Lake, eventually pirouetting to her own fatal demise, Lawrence’s ballsy, dirt-poor teen virtually goes through hell on earth, keeping not just a cool, brave head throughout but coming out of it sane and in one piece. Portman was really good in her performance, but Lawrence just kept it real in hers." – Craig D. Lindsey
"As good as Natalie Portman was in Black Swan, it stung to see Annette Bening passed over again in favor of a young ingénue, having previous lost - twice - to Hilary Swank. Granted, the previous two times I felt the winning performances were better and more deserving (in particular, Swank’s lacerating performance in Boys Don’t Cry easily bested Bening’s chilly housewife in American Beauty), but this time, for her rather remarkable work in The Kids Are All Right, she really deserved it.
Lisa Cholodenko’s excellent film, through its incisive yet non-showy script and lived-in performances, captured the unspoken subtleties of long-term relationships and family life, and no one in the cast excelled in their job more than Bening. As Nic, the more masculine, pants-wearing half of a committed lesbian relationship with Julianne Moore’s flighty Jules, she commanded the screen with her every scene, every line reading, every gesture. She wasn’t Hollywood Actress Annette Bening, she was Nic, and she did it without showing off. In her greatest scene (at Ruffalo’s dinner table having just pieced together the truth about Jules’s infidelity, as she silently smiles while imploding on the inside), she barely moves and doesn’t speak. She acts with her posture and especially her eyes, which shine in concert with her fake smile but more importantly reveal the simultaneous hurt, rage and disappointment tearing her apart on the inside, and it is riveting.
Her character, smart and no-nonsense to a fault but caring and fiercely protective of her family, isn’t always easy to like but is always a full-blooded, understandable human being. And one who is never at a loss to remind you that she needs your advice like she needs “a dick in [her] ass.” Well-put!" - Jason Alley
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