20 Best Movie Performances Of 2017

11. Sam Rockwell - Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Sam Rockwell gives a magnificent performance in Martin McDonagh's searing black comedy as Officer Jason Dixon, a flagrantly racist a**hole of a cop who proves a frequent impediment to Mildred Hayes' (Frances McDormand) quest to win justice for her murdered daughter.

In typical McDonagh fashion, though, Dixon isn't the one-dimensional cardboard cutout character he could so easily have been, and by film's end is understood by the audience as a nuanced, deeply flawed human being.

Rockwell is fantastic in both the character's goofier, dopier moments and also the scenes that call for him to get a little more real, ensuring a potentially cliched character is so much more than that.