MOVIES: Best of 2007 -- actor

A very weak field this year, I thought; so much so that I couldn't even fill out a full slate of five runners-up.

The runners-up I did choose are:

• Glen Hansard, Once
• Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Savages
• James MacAvoy, Atonement
• Adam Sandler, Reign Over Me

(Yeah, I said Adam Sandler. You wanna make something of it?)

The finalists:

• Josh Brolin, No Country for Old Men -- This was the performance that kept me watching the movie. Brolin's Llewellyn is both incredibly stupid and remarkably clever, and it's heartbreaking that he never comes to the realization that Tommy Lee Jones does: You can't beat Evil, so you might as well stop trying.
• Chris Cooper, Breach -- What a shame to see such fine work dumped into the first-quarter wasteland to be forgotten; Cooper and the movie deserved better. Robert Hansson never explains why he betrays his country, but as played by Cooper, he doesn't have to. It's all on the screen -- the arrogance, the wounded pride, the religious obsession -- and we know everything we need to know.
• Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood -- I am not entirely convinced by the movie's final scene, in which Day-Lewis goes a bit overboard, but the rest of the performance is so magnificent that I'm willing to forgive. Daniel Plainview is, above all else, an orator; every word is precisely calculated for its effect on the listeners. He knows how to read people, which means he knows how to hurt people, and he does so with great joy; it may be the only joy he finds in life.
• Joseph Gordon-Levitt, The Lookout -- How the hell is this guy not a huge star already? A stunning performance a few years back in Mysterious Skin, some lovely work in Brick, and now this. It's marvelously subtle work; Gordon-Levitt makes Chris's brain damage apparent not through the standard Hollywood drooling and slurred language, but in very subtle ways -- a small smile when he's able to remember a joke, the obvious relief when he hasn't screwed up a tricky situation.

And the winner:

• Gordon Pinsent, Away From Her -- Julie Christie got most of the attention, but Pinsent more than holds his own. It's Grant who's suffering, after all, as Fiona slowly fades into oblivious, and Pinsent captures every bit of that pain without ever begging the audience to pity him.