10 Actors Who Gave Their Best Performances In Movies Nobody Saw
Everybody slept on these incredible career-best performances.
We all have our favourite actors and our favourite performances from those actors, but keeping track of an actor's entire career, sometimes encompassing over 100 performances, isn't always easy.
As such, every so often a great movie performance - the best work of an actor's career, even - can end up buried amid their filmography.
The reasons for this are myriad, though it's most often due to said film failing to connect with a mainstream audience, and also therefore struggling to find much footing with awards voters.
As a result, these masterful performances, each worthy of major awards consideration if not the damn gong itself, have largely flown under the radar and been ignored by all but the most conscientious of film fans.
Though the actors have certainly appeared in higher-profile work and perhaps even won Oscars for other roles, these are their one truly essential performance you absolutely need to have seen.
And considering the power of these performances, whether full-throttle intense or impressively restrained, they'd have to do something insanely special to deliver something better in the future. Wait and see...
10. Oscar Isaac - A Most Violent Year
It truly is one of the Academy's great failings that J.C. Chandor's scintillating 2014 crime drama A Most Violent Year wasn't nominated for a single Oscar, especially not for lead actor Oscar Isaac.
Isaac, basically channelling the energy of '70s-era Al Pacino, gives a masterful performance as Abel Morales, a small business owner who struggles to expand his company amid the violent and expensive costs of doing business.
Perhaps the uncommon restraint of the performance, depicting a man desperately striving for legitimacy in a world that actively rejects it, caused the film to miss with awards voters and audiences alike.
Despite strong reviews, it recouped barely half of its $20 million budget at the box office.
Isaac became a considerably higher-priced commodity in the years that followed by appearing in Star Wars, though despite his fine work in that franchise and films such as Ex Machina, Annihilation, and Chandor's own Triple Frontier, he's never got close to matching the brilliance of his turn in this movie.