MOVIES: Best of 2005 -- actor

Far and away the strongest acting category of the year; the five performances on my runners-up list would all beat out any of the performances that made my final list a year ago.

The runners-up:

• Russell Crowe, Cinderella Man
• Alex Etel, Millions
• Ralph Fiennes, The Constant Gardener
• Joaquin Phoenix, Walk the Line
• Ulrich Thomsen, Brothers

The finalists:

• Jeff Daniels, The Squid and the Whale -- Like Joan Allen in the Actress category, an actor who's willing to be hated. Daniels plays a pompous, self-absorbed boor without ever winking at the audience or trying to separate himself from the character in any way; it's a vicious performance.
• Johnny Depp, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory -- There's great precision in the way Depp enunciates his words and tilts his head just so; it's somehow sunny and creepy at the same time. The most critically underrated performance of the year.
• Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote
• David Strathairn, Good Night, and Good Luck -- Might as well talk about these two together, as they share the same strengths. Both are accurately eerie evocations of the men they're playing, but neither is content to be just a parlor-trick impersonation; there are real people behind all of the vocal mannerisms, and both actors show us the emotions hidden behind those mannerisms.

The winner:

• Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Mysterious Skin -- The performance of the year, and the fact that it's not even being talked about during this awards season is a travesty. It's a performance of tremendous power, sad, lyrical, and complex in its dealing with the emotional effects of chid abuse. Twenty years from now, I think we're going to look back on this performance as marking the arrival of a major talent.