20 Recent Movie Villains Who Were Instantly Iconic

20. Steven J. Lockjaw - One Battle After Another

Paul Thomas Anderson's superb One Battle After Another saw Sean Penn receive some of the best reviews of his career for his sublime, ultimately Oscar-winning performance as Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw - a psychotic military officer who spends the movie pursuing the members of the revolutionary outfit known as the French 75.

While it would've been easy for a character like Lockjaw to feel like a pure caricature, Penn infuses him with so much unsettling physicality - his facial tics, his stilted way of walking - that he becomes a more distinct, and distinctly horrifying antagonist.

It helps that Anderson writes Lockjaw with considerable shade, for as monstrous as Lockjaw is, there's also a fundamentally pathetic quality to him, that he's so desperate to belong to a white supremacist outfit that he fails to anticipate their ultimate decision to assassinate him.

In a movie packed with brilliant characters and performances, it's Lockjaw who makes the deepest impression - a villain who is terrifyingly believable and yet just ridiculous enough to laugh at.