4. Vincent Freeman - Gattaca
Gattaca is a supremely thought-provoking sci-fi film from the mind of Andrew Niccol (The Truman Show) before he went sour and become a studio shill, with a daring premise postulating that in the future, we will be biologically engineered either for success or failure in our lives. Ethan Hawke plays Vincent, a man with a genetic heart defect who as a result has a low social standing, yet fraudently uses the genetic profile of a healthy man so that he can achieve his life goal of travelling through space. There's a quiet, sad desperation in his performance that perfectly surrenders the film's overall themes, and again, as with the prior film, Hawke's nervousness supports the material exceptionally well. While avoiding running into histrionics, Hawke delivers a smoothly controlled performance, braced between dogged determination to achieve one's goals and the fear of being rumbled for doing so.