Top ten Movie Performences

1. Brad Pitt for The Tree of Life, Moneyball and Happy Feet Two

    
Forty-eight on Dec. 18, he still hears the music of dreamboat squeals from his fans. Now an alto chorus of critical approval has joined the Brad Pitt symphony.In The Tree of Life he plays Mr. O'Brien, a demanding father of three boys; he loves them but is unable to express it, barking out commands, because that's what a father does, when he wants nothing more than to hold them and be held in their esteem While Pitt poured his considerable star quality into playing Beane, he also got results as the film's producer, spending years coaxing the adaptation of Michael Lewis's best seller through many rewrites and three directors (finally settling on Bennett Miller). What actor this year could equal the man who has everything?

2. Michael Fassbender for Jane Eyre, X-Men: First Class, A Dangerous Method and Shame

   

"Michael Fassbender" doesn't have quite the marquee zing of "Brad Pitt." But the handsome German-Irish actor, who came to the art-house world's attention three years ago playing Bobby Sands in Steve McQueen's Hunger, outgunned Pitt with four remarkable performances in films released this year.But in McQueen's Shame he plays a character — Manhattan office worker Brendan — who is new and unknown. In a blazing exhibition, Fassbender reveals the desperate urges of a sex addict, seeking anonymous release while denying himself human contact. Would any man want to be him? Could any woman resist him? So we'll be seeing a good deal more of this Mensa heartthrob, though perhaps not as much as in Shame.

3.  Woody Harrelson for Rampart

   

For eight years the blithely innocent bartender on Cheers, Woody Harrelson has matured into an actor of wide, weird range. As a media-savvy psycho in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, a porn king fighting for the First Amendment in The People vs. His career topper may be playing Dave "Date Rape" Brown, an LAPD detective in director Oren Moverman's dark adaptation of a James Ellroy storyThey become Dave's partners in crime, and Harrelson's willing, eager pawns.

4. Michael Lonsdale for Of Gods and Men

  

How would saints behave in hell? The French monks ignore government warnings of unrest; their lives mean less than their mission. The 80-year-old actor — son of an Englishman and a French-Irish woman, and known as Michael or Michel in movie credits — played Hugo Drax in the Bond film Moonraker and the Abbot in The Name of the Rose but is familiar to international audiences as a droll, saturnine figure in films directed by Luis Buñuel, Alain Resnais, Joseph Losey and Marguerite Duras.  He brings equally compelling conviction to creatures of the devil or the Lord.

5. Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan for The Trip

    
There are few deadlier rivalries than comedians trying to one-up each other. The Trip, directed by Michael Winterbottom and condensed to feature length from last year's six-part BBC series, is ostensibly the record of a journey to English Midland restaurants that Steve Coogan took with friend and fellow actor Rob Brydon. "Anyone over 14 who amuses themselves by doing impressions," Coogan harshly observes, "needs to take a long, hard look in the mirror." Yet the two instantly do dueling Michael Caines: Coogan emphasizing Caine's nasality, Brydon the lower, slower diction that comes from decades of "all the cigars and brandy.Their badinage provides an immediate and lasting kick as well as the spectacle of two champion word warriors at the top of their game.

    6.Meryl Streep for The Iron Lady

    

When people say Meryl Streep is a great actress, they mean grand actress — one who calculates her moves, her makeup and her accent, and then turns up the thespic volume until her character risks becoming caricature. But given a famous woman to play, Streep eerily locates the voice, face and soul: of Julia Child in Julie & Julia and, with startling acuity, of Margaret Thatcher in this biopic. Smartly written by Abi Morgan (who co-wrote Shame) and directed by Mamma Mia!'s Phyllida Lloyd, the film spans nearly the complete life of Britain's first female Prime Minister, from her youth as a greengrocer's daughter through Oxford and her early years in the Conservative Party (when she is played by Alexandra Roach). This time, grand is great.

7.Octavia Spencer, Viola Davis, Emma Stone, Jessica Chastain and Bryce Dallas Howard for The Help

   
Women aren't offered many strong movie roles — unless those roles are all in one movie. And the film doesn't have to be perfect: in an ensemble morality play like The Help, the characters can be drawn in broad, swift strokes, so that the heroines and harridans are instantly distinguishable For our purposes, forget the bizarre equation of Skeeter's publishing problems with the virulent racism the maids endure and consider the varied tones the actresses achieve. Bryce Dallas Howard's pearly villainy (a spectacular reading of comic wickedness) as a Junior League Miss who could be a Klansman in a fluffy dress, and Jessica Chastain's blowsy young wife, unloved by the debs and    blundering into a liberal take on the race issue.

8.Khomotso Manyaka for Life, Above All

     

There's no explaining the magic of child actors; somehow they get the trick of communicating through their characters to the camera. Margaret O'Brien, 6 when she made Meet Me in St. Louis, was told she needed to cry in one scene; with a prodigy's professionalism, she asked, "Right eye or left?" Khomotso Manyaka was no Hollywood moppet, just a 12-year-old South African girl who had never acted, when director Oliver Schmitz picked her for the lead role in this starkly poignant drama about a family, a village and a people devastated by the AIDS plague. At the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, viewers gave Life, Above All a 10-minute standing ovation — a good five minutes, surely, for Manyaka. Now with the film on DVD, home audiences can experience the same searing emotions and sense of discovery in finding a great young heart illuminated onscreen.

9.Mia Wasikowska for Jane Eyre

    

Charlotte Brontë's heroine, a tough, sensitive soul lashed by grim fate and the torrid moor winds, has been played in movies by Joan Fontaine, Susannah York, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Samantha Morton. Offscreen, this 22-year-old Australian, who made a powerful impression as a suicidal teen gymnast in Season 1 of HBO's In Treatment and as a deadpan dreamer in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, is a friendly sort in a blond pixie cut who could pass for Michelle Williams' kid sister. But when in character, she becomes a mirror into a rich interior world.This illuminating stillness is a gift shared by few English-speaking actresses. Hollywood will do itself a favor if it writes new stories on her blank-slate face; if it finds the strength and mystery in Wasikowska that Rochester did in Jane.

10.Ameena Matthews for The Interrupters

   

Do-gooder groups, no less than Hollywood movies, benefit from star quality; and CeaseFire, the group of reformed criminals that intervenes in Chicago street disputes to prevent violence, has Ameena Matthews, a petite charisma machine in a Muslim headscarf. Her job is to stanch the impulse in some kids to go, as she says, from "zero to rage in 30 seconds." When one young man tells her he fights every day, she smiles and says, "You're too handsome to do that." The daughter of the notorious gang leader Jeff Fort, now serving a 155-year prison sentence on a domestic-terrorism conviction, Matthews channels her father's seductive eloquence into crisis management.  Addressing mourners at the funeral of a teenager who died in gang violence, she says, "We got a responsibility to bring up our community to be vibrant. Whatever it is that's going on, cease the fire, call the truce."