Gary Oldman's 10 Greatest Movie Performances - Ranked

While Oldman has enjoyed a superlative career as a screen actor for the majority of his career, he came up on the stage and retained a love for treading the boards that he was able to indulge in Tom Stoppard’s unusual 1990 Shakespearean comedy, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.

The film follows the titular Hamlet bit players in a story told concurrently with that of their parent play. They skirt around the action of Hamlet, getting up to their own hijinks and musing on life. Oldman stars as opposite frequent collaborator Tim Roth.

It’s worth seeing as a curio more than anything else - Stoppard, who directs, is primarily a playwright, and it shows in his unvarnished visual style - but seeing Oldman chew on heavy duty dialogue such as this is worth the price of admission alone.

Oldman’s ‘90s would see him take on movies of increasingly large scale, so this serves as one final chance to strut his theatrical stuff. While it likely can’t compare to seeing the actor as a young, hungry thespian in the flesh, it stands up as a superb performance.