10 Great Movie Performances (No One Ever Talks About)

To be completely fair, Charlize Theron did receive a Best Actress Golden Globe nomination for her astonishing performance in Jason Reitman's dark dramedy Young Adult, yet given how the film and the performance quickly fell off the radar thereafter, you'd barely know it.

Theron plays Mavis Gary, a garden variety trainwreck of a human being - a 37-year-old alcoholic ghost writer who returns to her hometown in the hope of winning back her happily married high school boyfriend (Patrick Wilson).

Theron takes a potentially cartoonish character trapped in a state of arrested development and makes her unexpectedly relatable, tapdancing on a tonal razor's edge as she renders Mavis both pitiable and weirdly charming.

It's tough to make a blatant a**hole this likeable, but she pulls it off splendidly. Furiosa's great and all, but this is arguably the finest performance of Theron's storied career, and one that absolutely merits far more attention than it's ever received.