Best female lead performances of the decade

As a continuation of our best performances of the decade rankings, we will now look at the Best Female performances of the 2010s. This list follows the criteria we set for the best male list, but we did have to make a few adjustments. For instance, for the male list, we had a category for popular icon performances as well as action performances. Since the former consists mostly of superhero movies and there are so few female-led superhero films, it’s kind of impossible to compile a list for female iconic and superhero performances. While there are notable standouts from categories like action (e.g. Charlize Theron in Mad Max, Rebecca Ferguson in the Mission Impossible films), their performances are not as outstanding as the ones from other categories on this list and it would also be slightly out of place to put them on this list. So, while the categories work to diversify our list, we have to make sure not to limit our list by it. The following is hopefully a diversified but fair list of the best female leads of the past decade.

We start our list, like last time with a comedic performance. And there is a lot to pick from. We could pick the classic ones like Kristen Wiig in Bridesmaid, or Melissa McCarthy in Spy. But we are also tempted by actresses who mix in some genuine drama into their comedic performances, like Anne Hathaway in Colossal. But the greatest performances in comedy work happens to be one which builds complex characters. The jokes don’t just end with chuckles, but with a greater understanding of who the characters are. For that, Hailee Steinfeld in The Edge of Seventeen would’ve been a great pick, but we have to give it to Olivia Coleman who stepped up as the Queen herself.

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15. Olivia Coleman as Queen Anne in The Favourite (2018)

Coleman might be the first and only possible choice for this category. She blew her competitors out of the water, in a complete landslide fashion. From the moment she stepped onto the screen, her character – already the larger-than-life queen Anne – became the most powerful scene-stealer of the entire decade. Whether she’s laughing, or crying or manipulating, she’s conveying so much under the veil of being funny. It’s a performance that kind of hides its comedic nature. You’re laughing at her because she doesn’t know how ridiculous she is. But again, you never know where her character stands. It’s one of those situations where the comedy obscures the drama, giving it even more impact once it hits.

Next up, we have romantic performances. This category is a bit harder to decide because of the various types of performances within it. You can be very classically romantic, an approach was taken by Kiki Layne in If Beale Street Could Talk. You can be a bit cheeky and comedic like Constance Wu in Crazy Rich Asians. You can also fill the screen with affection and romance like Sally Hawkins does in The Shape of Water. But we think the decade’s best performance comes from a film showing how love runs out. The spot goes to Michelle Williams in Blue Valentines.

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14. Michelle Williams as Cynthia “Cindy” Heller in Blue Valentines (2011)

This performance shows a sense of realism for which Williams is known but only recognized once she does it alongside Casey Affleck. Williams finds in Derek Cianfrance a filmmaker who’s willing to explore love from its beginning to the very end. And she delivers a brutal performance that shows the multi-faceted nature of romance in all its glory, not leaving any bits out. It is harrowing to see her build a character out of disparate pieces of a love story. Each moment she is on the screen illustrates how easy it is to fall in love but how hard it is to remain in love.

The next category is the most difficult one for us to rank. And that is horror. As opposed to the two other categories we remove, it is remarkably easy to find great female performances in the horror genre. It is interesting that females are more prevalent in films where they are supposed to be the victims. Don’t get us wrong, playing victims is super hard. Anya-Taylor Joy was amazing at this in The Witch. Emily Blunt shows the reverse of victimhood – survival – in A Quiet Place. Both Florence Pugh and Essie Davis show the power of grief as represented in horror. But the best performance for us is one that shows victimhood and intimidation. And we might go with Lupita Nyong’o literally playing hero and villain in Us, but Toni Collete edges her out in Hereditary.

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13. Toni Collette as Annie Graham in Hereditary (2018)

Toni Collete’s Annie is the most scared but also the scariest part of Hereditary. Starting out as an already unsettling presence, and a portrait of an ill person, she slowly devolves into the most threatening part of the film. A huge part of the fear inspired by the movie comes from us not being able to trust any of the characters completely. So aside from conveying grief, she also conveys some genuine threat. Collete does this in both her dialogue delivery and facial expressions, crafting a performance that in itself feels like an experience.

Now we move on to the double categories of performances based on real people. The first of these categories focus on presenting real people we might have heard of but are unlikely to have a large impact on history. Here, the performances focus on the experiences of a person’s life. We can probably go with Charlize Theron as Megyn Kelly, Amy Adams in Big Eyes or Jennifer Lawrence as the titular Joy. But for this category, Margot Robbie’s highly underrated performance as Tonya Harding takes the cake.

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12. Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding in I, Tonya (2017)

This complex performance never generates any genuine Oscar buzz and that has always felt like a mystery to us. Not only is this the best performance Robbie has given in years, but it is also honestly one of the greatest efforts to paint a picture of a complex person. How do you make a human out of a person who has been defined by one moment? You show her life as it truly was and explore all the ugly parts she faced growing up. Robbie plays Harding perfectly at each of her life stages. The detail of the performance goes down to the vocal and the posturing. The movie also has a tongue in cheek element where it tries to deconstruct the narrative just as it is being presented. And they achieve that mostly because Robbie’s mock-interview framing device is some of the best performance in the film itself. In this sense, her performance simply makes the movie.

So, what is bigger than a Biographical performance? Well, a historical performance. When you watch Meryl Streep plays Margaret Thatcher, or Felicity Jones play RBG or Saoirse Ronan plays Mary Queen of Scot, you’re dealing with entirely historical legacies. Unlike the previous category, you’re painting an image of something that seems more like a person. And most of these performances try to humanise the characters. Our pick goes a different route.

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11. Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy in Jackie (2016)

Portman’s performance is somewhere in between an imitation and a deconstruction. She is playing Jackie Kennedy both as an enigma, a figure and a human being. You find it hard, from time to time to comprehend exactly how she feels. It’s this sense of looking at a human being, at their most transparent and yet seeing nothing but the expectations we had projected and refracted all over the place. A lot of people will say that Portman reached her peak in Black Swan, but for our money, it’s in Jackie that she turns in her greatest performance to date.

Since we had to add two new categories, we settled on looking at heroines because they are close to the categories that were cut out. We create two categories of heroines arbitrarily but also because these two performances truly deserve a spot on this list. The first category of heroin is those that work mainly to survive or to succeed. This is Sandra Bullock, Kim Taeri and Hailee Steinfeld in Gravity, The Handmaiden and True Grit respectively. But if we’re talking rustic individualists trying to survive in a harsh world, we can do a lot worse than Jennifer Lawrence’s breakthrough performance.

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10. Jennifer Lawrence as Ree Dolly in Winter’s Bone (2010)

It might seem strange that in a career as illustrious as Lawrence’s, it would be her first performance that really encapsulates her skill as an actress. In Winter’s Bone, Lawrence lets her character take over her persona. It’s something we haven’t seen from her since her Oscar win in 2012. Watching this movie, you cannot tell that you are watching an actress. The emotional authenticity of the performances makes it really easy for the audience to root for the character. The internal intensity, a sense of malaise towards the society around her and a disquieting determination to save her family come together to create one of the most memorable heroines of the past decade.

Another type of heroine is what we would call the social heroine. These are the heroines who do not need to save herself and therefore focus her effort on helping others. This is Carey Mulligan in Suffragettes. It’s Jennifer Lawrence again in The Hunger Games trilogy. For more real-life examples, Jessica Chastain and Rachel McAdams in Zero Dark Thirty and Spotlight respectively. But none of them quite beat the simplistic yet emotionally driven performance of Brie Larson in Short Term 12.

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9. Brie Larson as Grace Howard in Short Term 12 (2013)

There seems to be a pattern here when it comes to critically acclaimed actresses like Lawrence and Larson: their best performances often come when they are least aware of their ability to perform. In Short Term 12, Larson plays a social worker in a group home for troubled youth. Her character is unendingly likeable. She manages to channel a sense of passion and conviction representative of the social workers who dedicate their lives to helping others. She has also had to channel an inner pain that seems to be bubbling just below the surface. Larson is very adept at portraying this duality of being a shoulder for so many to lean on but also hiding a deep vulnerability. Her pain is hidden beneath the surface of the mundane. It’s nothing short of a real-life superhero.

Moving on from the heroine, we’re now looking at the tragic figures. And much like with the horror performance, there are much more here than we expected. A lot of tragedies seem to befall women. However, there are few that we think are strong enough to take the top spot. This includes the broken conceited character portrayed by Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine. There are victims of abuses like Brie Larson in Room. There are also those left behind in societies as portrayed by Wang Yu Wen in An Elephant Sitting Still. Most recently, Lynn+Lucy shows a deep ad unsettling tragedy of motherhood. However, reviewing all the performances, we have to hand over this spot to Tilda Swinton.

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8. Tilda Swinton as Eva Katchadourian in We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)

We think it’s hard to find a more complex modern tragedy than the mother of a school shooter. Swinton has to portray everything, from guilt to sadness, to disdain and to fear. She is playing a parent’s worst nightmare. It’s really one of the hardest roles to play, yet Swinton shows herself to be an intimate performer, capable of expressing individual tragedy in small expressions. Our relationship with her character in the film grows gradually from sympathy to empathy. And she does this seamlessly. If nothing else, we can say Swinton is not just a performer, but a crafter of performances.

The last type of performances is rather undefined. These are the inscrutable: performances that seem to reveal very little about the characters but still somehow evoke a sense of enigmatic solemnity. The actresses in this category often have to convey a lot with very little. When this is achieved, they can craft incredible characters like Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth Salenders. They can also have a vaguer, almost existential effect like with Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin. And while we almost picked what is certainly Johansson’s best performance of the decade, we can’t help but give this spot to Kristen Stewart.

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7. Kristen Stewart as Maureen Cartwright in Personal Shopper (2016)

In this severely underrated performance, Stewart plays a personal shopper to a celebrity. It seems like a simple role but it involves creating characters and conveying so much emotion with just a minor expression or gesture. And then, the film takes an interesting, almost fantastical turn, and Stewart has to merge the more grounded aspect of her performance with more spiritual and profound experiences. And yet, she still maintains this limited range of expression. It is absolutely captivating to watch every minute detail of her performance. It’s like watching master Hokusai himself paint on a rice grain. And to think at the beginning of the decade, Stewart was only known for Twilight.

From performances with the smallest detail, we now move on to those that paint with broader strokes. These are the Oscar-winning, dramatic, emotion-filled performances. The actresses have to pull vast quantities of energy to convey a wide range of emotions. Despite her youth, Kim Su-An musters such great energy in Battleship Island. There is the Oscar-winning turn of Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook as well as her other performances such as American Hustle. And we really hate to mention Scarlett Johansson again – this time for Marriage Story – only to snub her once more. But she barely loses the spot to Viola Davis.

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6. Viola Davis as Rose Lee Maxson in Fences (2016)

Davis’s performance in Fences is so incredible that it is more readily remembered than Denzel’s lead character. That’s how great she was. There’s not really a lot to say here, and if you want to see how she earns this spot, you can easily find the scene. Maybe more could be said about how her performance is improved by being seen as a whole. Her dramatic explosion isn’t the only great thing about her performance. It’s how she crafts her character in subtle moments, in the stolen smiles and glances. It’s the fact that her character remains submerged in a story largely occupied by others only to suddenly emerge in a fiery monologue that unquestionably, undeniably, earns her that Oscar.

Okay, so we already had Viola Davis, who was excellent at spitting a monologue. But we’d like to honour another actress who has mastered the script of the movie, while also improvising and interacting with a really great actor. She could’ve made the number 14 spot, but we don’t want her competing with such a different performance such as Michelle Williams. So, we’re putting her in this spot for her great dialogue work:

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6. Julie Delpy as Celine in Before Midnight (2013)

Delpy has been playing this character since the first of the Before trilogy came out in the 1990s. And she has gradually built a genuine character out of Celine. In this movie which basically consists of a couple talking, Delpy seems to reach a point where her dialogue delivery is completely natural. Of all the performances on this list, this is the only one where the actress masters the script so completely, that she seems to have completely transcended it.

The next category is also created only for the female actresses. For some reason – this might be archetypal – but there seems to be a market for likeable, unique character performances by various actresses. And yes, a lot of the performances listed above are great at creating characters. But the ones listed here seem to be especially good at showing characters as they move through a journey, basically a coming-of-age performance. This is Aubrey Plaza in Ingrid Goes West, it’s Desiree Akhavan in Appropriate Behaviour, and it’s Marion Cotillard in Before Midnight. The initial winner of this category was actually going to go to Greta Gerwig as Frances Ha, but turns out it’s her disciple that snatches the spot:

(Image credit: Brian Baumann Movie Reviews)

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4. Saoirse Ronan as Eilis in Brooklyn (2015) and Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson in Lady Bird (2017)

Okay. Yes. You caught us. We’re cheating. And we’re completely justified in doing so. No actress in this past decade is really as good as Ronan at creating characters. We didn’t even have a chance to mention her performances in Hanna or Little Women. Consider this spot more as a celebration of Ronan’s entire filmography. You cannot watch a movie with her in it without being totally encapsulated by whatever character she’s portraying. In Brooklyn she plays an Irish immigrant with such an intimate sensibility, you’d think she came out of that era. And then she did a complete 180 to portray Ladybird is one of the greatest coming-of-age performances we have ever seen. Ronan is great and it genuinely baffles us that she hasn’t received her first Oscar when most other actresses here have gotten theirs.

As we approach the end of the list, we want to honour another great character performance: Amy Adams. There is so much in common between Ronan and Adams, and if we have to rank the greatest actress of the past decade, it’d probably come down to these two. So, what to pick for Adams? She was amazing in The Fighter and completely lost in her character in American Hustle. We already mentioned Big Eyes, but well, Nocturnal Animal shouldn’t go unmentioned either. Adams’ filmography is indeed filled with great performances, but hands-down, her best performance must be in Arrival.

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3. Amy Adams as Louise Banks in Arrival (2016)

While Ronan is amazing in her character performances, we think Adams goes just a bit further in Arrival. She explores the innermost fear and anxiety experienced by the characters. In various moments, you have to understand her so completely that you would accept the many twists and turns in the film itself. There is a sense of existential transformation conveyed by Adams’ performance as her character goes through not just a life-changing but also a world-changing event. It is one of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it performances. It is so brilliantly done that to explicate why it is so good would ruin it entirely. And also, spoilers.

Now for number two and one on this list, they are more or less interchangeable. Oddly enough they came from movies of the same year, so this pair have always been competing. The number two spot is being ceded to the performances that portray the mundanity of everyday life. It’s a portrayal of real people of life as it truly is. Immediately we look to Patricia Arquette in Boyhood and Elsie Fisher in Eighth Grade, for portraying motherhood and girlhood so realistically. Marion Cotillard portrays the economic hardship of workers in Two Days One Night and Leila Hatami as an Iranian wife in A Separation. All of these are great, but no one beats Sakura Ando in Shoplifters.

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2. Sakura Ando as Nobuyo Shibata in Shoplifters (2018)

Ando’s performance does a trick that many actors and actresses try to do but often fail. They play their characters straight and low and allow the realism of the performance to creep onto the audience. For half of the movie, Ando is just a really likeable character. And you keep liking her more and more with each moment of emotion tugging your heartstring a little closer to your side. By the time you’re out of the cinema, you feel like crying for her. The effect of her performance is like a slow-acting toxin. It takes time but the effect is long-lasting and real.

Finally, we come to the transcendental performances. When our human characters come to face forces greater than our own lives. When a sense of existential dread flows along and mixes of fleeting happiness and glee. Rooney Mara hands in an excellent one in A Ghost Story, as did Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina. Haley Lu Richardson and Natthakarn Aphaiwong both use their silence to convey their confusion and awe at their place in the world. But if there is one performance that truly brings us to a spiritual emotional journal, it’s going to be Yalitza Aparicio in Roma.

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1. Yalitza Aparicio as Cleo in Roma (2018)

At a surface, it seems odd that the top spot would come from a completely unknown and inexperienced actress. We don’t know if acting is some kind of talent rather than practice but Aparicio makes a good case in its favour. This is a performance that is filled with raw energy because the actress is not maintaining her image. There is a sense of natural character portrayal that you can’t get anywhere in any other performances. No other actress manages to do what Aparicio does to us, slowly making us break down while also being in complete awe. This is a breath-taking performance by a new actress, who, if she is interested, might see her career take off very soon.