In the last 10 years, A24 has become a film production and distribution company that's synonymous with quality, giving its first chances to new and promising directors, who will find great new actors who do movies that are very different from everything else on the multiplex. Those bets have been paying off, as now A24 is a brand in itself, and many of their directors and actors have become the new stars of Hollywood, earning awards and recognition.
Update August 24, 2023: It could be seen as A(ugust) 24 Day, so in honor of that, this list has been updated with even more great films from the production company that has taken the film world by storm.
A24 has a fanbase similar to that of Marvel Studios, a production company whose name alone inspires interest. Audiences who see the name A24 attached to it can likely expect something special. Here are the best performances in A24 films, ranked.
15 Brendan Fraser – The Whale
Brendan Fraser's big comeback was consolidated with The Whale. Darren Aronofsky's intimate story explores themes of depression and repressed sexuality in a man who has decided to let life go after losing everything he loves. Life has a way of throwing irony his way as a committed missionary for the New Life Church tries to save his soul. In the final days of his life, he struggles to connect with her estranged daughter and get all his affairs in order before passing away. Fraser won an Academy Award for his role in the movie, although it was a controversial film as many took issues with it, from using a fatsuit to how it depicted overweight people.
14 Morfydd Clark – Saint Maud
Morfydd Clark does a number on the audience by carrying Saint Maud alone. In the story, she plays Maud, a reclusive nurse prone to be impressionable. A traumatic event leads her down the path of Catholicism. With her skills and devotion aligned, she's charged with the hospice care of a woman named Amanda, a former dancer slowly consumed by Cancer. We explore Maud's faith as her driven obsession leads her to do whatever is needed to save Amanda's soul from eternal damnation.
13 Tom Hardy – Locke
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Locke is a movie that happens in real-time, while Ivan (Tom Hardy) is in his car on the way to the hospital for the birth of his child with a woman that it’s not his wife. During the whole movie, we only see Hardy, as his character is throwing his family life and job away to be a different father than what he had as a kid.
Not many actors could hold our attention alone for 90 minutes, but that’s the power of Tom Hardy. During the movie, his character makes 36 phone calls that change his life forever, and as such is a tour-de-force performance for Hardy (who was sick during the shooting, so they made the character ill as well).
12 Steve Yeun – Minari
In Minari, Steven Yeun plays the patriarch of a Korean family moving to rural Arkansas. After some tough times, his mother-in-law comes to live with them, and everything changes. Yeun's performance is understated and internal, as his character is trying to follow his dreams without losing his family, while trying not to show all his worries about the future.
11 Alicia Vikander – Ex Machina
In Ex Machina, Alicia Vikander plays Ava, a highly advanced humanoid A.I. Vikander’s performance shows gradually how Ava is learning more human traits and reactions as she spends more time with Caleb (Domnhall Gleeson). She goes from cold to sympathetic, from robot to almost human, creating new layers of personality and feelings every time we see her, and making us root, for once, for the victory of a robot over humans.
10 Toni Collette – Hereditary
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Hereditary, Ari Aster’s feature film debut, is one of the scariest things we’ve seen in a cinema ever. And that’s in big part because of Toni Collette’s Oscar-worthy performance. What starts as the story of a grieving mother and a creepy kid becomes something much more dangerous and scary, where Collette shows us all kinds of raw emotions: anguish, rage, desolation, suffering, and disdain, giving us a performance that still haunts us in our nightmares.
9 Anya Taylor Joy – The Witch
The Witch was one of the best horror movies of the 2010s, and in a big part, that's because of Anya Taylor-Joy's performance. She starts with a kind heart, just wanting to help her family, but as the movie goes on, and she keeps getting accused of witchcraft by her village, and even her family, she starts to give up and accepts the darkness. We believe the whole transformation because of Taylor-Joy's performance, the first of her career, and Robber Eggers' direction in a movie with an incredible ending.
8 Mahershala Ali – Moonlight
Moonlight tells the story of a young, gay Black kid in three important moments of his life. It’s one of the most romantic LGBTQ+ movies of all time and one where Mahershala Ali’s performance as Juan leaves a mark. Ali creates a character full of contradictions and hard truths.
He is someone who can be paternal with a kid, while also selling drugs to his mother; someone who has been hardened by the drug game, but still can cry when he feels ashamed; someone who can be good and bad at the same time, and we see how that dichotomy breaks up in his last scene with the kid, Chiron. And he realizes his compartmental actions and emotions have destroyed this family. Ali won an Oscar for this twenty-minute performance, and it was more than well-deserved. In a small amount of screen time, he showed us a full life of emotions lived by his character.
7 Florence Pugh – Midsommar
Another incredible female performance at the center of an Ari Aster movie. This time it is Florence Pugh, who, in Midsommar, gives an acting masterclass. Her role as Dani is grieving, in a toxic relationship, disconnected from reality, and seeing the world as if she was underwater. During the film, she experiences fear, hate, suspicion, and sadness. So, when she finally feels supported, she breaks down, screaming, crying, and grieving, letting out everything she’s been holding inside, starting to feel every emotion while feeling relieved as she’s finally being seen. It’s a raw, incredible performance by Pugh that gives us chills only thinking about it.
6 Dev Patel – The Green Knight
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Dev Patel returned to the big screen in the ambitious adaptation of the folk story The Green Knight. The film, written and directed by David Lowery, tells the story of Sir Gawain, a nephew to King Arthur who has no grand story to tell, which is the mark of a true knight in the round table. Gawain's mother summons the Green Knight, who presents himself before the court and challenges anyone to strike him down with a single blow, but he will reciprocate the attack one year later. Gawain takes on the challenge, and his life becomes a journey of self-discovery in a realm where fantasy and magic are a reality.
5 Alexander Skarsgård – The Northman
Anyone saying The Northman is ripping off Hamlet has it backward. Hamlet is based on the Nordic folk tale of Amulet. Alexander Skarsgård teamed up with Robert Eggers to deliver a surrealistic take on Northern folklore as a young prince sees his father slain before his eyes and his mother is taken away from him. He barely escapes vowing to return one day and let the usurper feel his father's wrath. Not everything is as it seems when he finally returns, and the deepest betrayal comes from the least unexpected source.
4 Saoirse Ronan – Lady Bird
Lady Bird tells the story of a senior in high school, and her relationships with her mother, best friend, and boyfriends. Saoirse Ronan creates a real human in Lady Bird, as sometimes, acting as a normal person is the most difficult task for any actor. She shows the love-hate relationship with her mother, her self-centeredness, how she’s lovely but also cruel with her best friend, and everything in between. Lady Bird shows us, with empathy, how it is to be a teenage girl, and thanks to Ronan’s performance and Greta Gerwig’s writing and direction, they create the best A24 film.
3 Brie Larson – Room
Held captive for seven years in an enclosed space, a woman and his five-year-old son, finally escape. Room is a devastating story, where Brie Larson showed all her talent as the broken woman whose only desire is that his son doesn’t understand their dire situation. Her performance is playful, maternal, and loving with her character’s kid, but she’s also scared, and brave, dealing with depression and massive trauma once the characters get out of their nightmare, and the actress sells every emotion. It’s Brie Larson's best performance and one that earned her a well-deserved Oscar Award win for Best Actress.
2 Adam Sandler – Uncut Gems
If anxiety and adrenaline were a movie, it would be Uncut Gems. Adam Sandler’s performance as the seedy, manipulative, gambling-addicted, Howard Ratner is incredible. The actor shows all the complexities and incoherence of his character in one of those once-in-a-decade dramatic performances in a role that was made for him. The Safdie brothers told Screen Daily about Sandler: “Sometimes we would throw him two pages of dialogue over lunch and those muscles were so refined in his brain that he was able to work in new material and bring back old material that he saw maybe six drafts prior as a form of improvisation. We’re watching him on a monitor and saying, ‘Wow, this man is a genius.’”
1 Michelle Yeoh – Everything Everywhere All at Once
2022 was A24's year as they managed to take home Best Actress and Best Actor in the Academy Awards ceremony. Michelle Yeoh certainly deserved the accolades as she gave a nuanced performance as Evelyn Quan Wang and the multiple variants of the same character across the multiverse of Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. This sci-fi thriller tells a great story about the importance of love, life, purpose, and balanced family relationships.