Review of the Decade - Film (Female Performances)

The big debate around female parts in cinema is that there just aren’t enough strong, leading roles for women, and this list contains four supporting roles, and six leads. Despite this argument, which doesn’t look like going away, the decade has seen the emergence of some of Hollywood’s greatest talent in years. I have unfortunately not seen enough foreign actresses performances and so they are notable by their absence, but Julie Delpy, Sophie Marceau, Monica Belluci, Isabella Huppert, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, Maggie Cheung, Marion Cotillard, Deborah Francois, Franke Potente are just some of the actresses working outside Hollywood that have impressed.

10. Kate Hudson

Almost Famous

(2000)

Kate Hudson falls into that cateogry of potential great actresses that fell into below par romantic comedies from which she may never recover. Thankfully we will always have Penny Lane, a role Hudson made her own, and one which should, based on her performance have launched a decade of great performances. She is sexy, vulnerable, seductive, childish, charming and had a profound affect on me when I first saw Almost Famous - a term which aptly seems to apply to her now more than ever.

9. Q'orianka Kilcher

The New World

(2005)

I almost hope to never see Q-orianka in a film again. Her role is so beguilling, so hynoptically beautiful that you leave the cinema believing Malick must have plucked from the past; that she could very well be the actual Pocahontas.

A rare performance from a rare talent, she even manages to out act both Christian Bale and Colin Farrell.

8. Julianne Moore

Far From Heaven

(2002)

Todd Haynes love letter to the melodramas of Douglas Sirk has at its heart and powerful, heart wrenching performance from Julianne Moore as the wife of a homosexual man, whose affections for the black gardener ostricise her from her family and community.
Julianne Moore is, in many ways an actress cast from an earlier generation, and her other, similar role in The Hours demonstrates her ability to battle the emotional turmoil in a repressed society that still saw a woman's place as in the home, and a loyal wife.

7. Julia Roberts

Erin Brockovich

(2000)

This may well be the last great performance of an actress who at one time was the most well paid, and famous actress in the world. As her star has waned in the past year, this film now stands as a monument to what could have been a gloruous decade for the once Pretty Woman. Roberts has never been so commited, sensing the potential for awards, and the Oscar she picked up was wholly deserved.

6. Nicole Kidman

Dogville

(2003)

At the turn of the century, Kidman's career seemed to be going nowhere, an actress more famous for being Mrs Cruise, than for being a great actress. A series of roles, of which this was the pinnacle, demonstrated a technician at the top of her game, and the rare emotion, the setless film forced, allowed Kidman to show why she is one of the finest actors working today.

5. Cate Blanchett

The Aviator

(2004)

The greatest actress that ever lived playing the Kathryn Hepburn. Like her role in I'm Not There, there just isn't another actress alive who could portray the tour de force that was Hepburn. Blanchett imbues the role with a frivolity and vulnerability rarely shown in Hepburn's performances and would have made the great actress herself proud, which is some compliment

4. Laura Dern

INLAND EMPIRE

(2006)

Playing essentially three versions of herself, it could have been easy for Dern to get lost in the labyrinth that was INLAND EMPIRE. Instead she displays a range of acting, and commitment to the role unlike anything she has achieved before. Dern becomes the pillar which holds Lynch's imagination down, and the performance is even more magnificent when you learn Lynch didn't have a script. Dern so effortlessly gives herself over, becoming a conduit for Lynch's mystery and the personification of the films meditations on the female.

3. Ellen Burstyn

Requiem For A Dream

(2000)

I first fell in love with Ellen Burstyn in the wonderful Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. In Requiem For A Dream her role is a sub plot yet, its this story, of an aging widow, desiring to be a contestant on her favourite TV show, who becomes addicted to weight loss drugs in an attempt to achieve her dream, which packs the emotional wallop, as you see her succombing to the addictive, hallucinatory powers of prescription medication - the only real victim in this story.

2. Cate Blanchett

I'm Not There

(2007)

There is only one actress alive who could pull off being a man, an possibly the most iconic man on the 20th century. Outacting the 5 other actors playing versions of Dylan (Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Ben Whishaw, Richard Gere and Marcus Carl Franklin), Blanchett performance is astohishing and should have earnt her an Oscar. Poltraying Dylan at his most famous, and most similar to the real man, this is one of the rarest, and engaging, performances you'll see in this decade, or any other.

1. Naomi Watts

Mulholland Drive

(2001)

There's no real point raving about Watts' career defining role in David Lynch's bizarre, nightmarish surreal drama. Instead just watch her audition scene in the film. Not only is an example for all budding actors how to play the enotion not the line, its also serves as the benchmark for acting this past decade. Watts has demonstrated in the past decade, an ability to take powerful, gut wrenching performances and making them about more than the performance. She never shows off, and can look astonishingly beautiful yet unassuming at the same time. A talent which is rare for leading ladies, especially in this day and age.