Leonardo DiCaprio: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

3. Calvin Candie - Django Unchained (2012)

As mentioned, DiCaprio has been great for a long time, but the last five years or so, starting from Shutter Island and the simply magnificent Inception (which didn't make the cut because, while an amazing film, is not as reliant on his performance) has been a pretty incredible run of form (with one notable slip, but more on that later). Coming in the middle of this run is his performance as Calvin Candie, the despicable slave owner in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained. The film really picks up when we get to his ranch - Candyland - and you truly start to realise that while Candie is a charming man, he's also an immensely cruel one. He absolutely dominates the movie from there on, and is utterly captivating every moment he's on screen (it's no real surprise the film takes a dive in the final half hour or so, once he's out of the picture). He delivers the line of the entire movie, and even cut his hand during a scene and continued on without a second thought. Again, going back to films that could have won him an Oscar, the Best Supporting Actor should've been his for this role, and yet he wasn't even nominated.