MOVIES: Best of 2007 -- supporting actress

As is often true in this category, several of my picks -- especially among my runners-up -- were the best things about movies I didn't much like. The winner was a very easy choice.

The runners-up:

• Taraji P. Henson, Talk to Me
• Kristen Johnston, Music and Lyrics
• Anna Kendrick, Rocket Science
• Melissa McCarthy, The Nines
• Sigourney Weaver, The TV Set

The finalists:

• Saoirse Ronan, Atonement -- Surely the hardest role in the film. As the young Briony, Ronan has to balance her great intelligence with a near-total lack of wisdom, her understanding of what she sees from her window with her unwillingness to accept what she sees. She doesn't make a false step; it's a strikingly assured performance from such a young actress.
• Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone -- I've said it many times: One of the keys to being a great actor is the willingness to be hated, and Ryan certainly has it here. She's such a disaster of a woman -- drug addict, alcoholic, incompetent parent -- that you almost find yourself hoping they don't find her missing daughter
• Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton -- I'm somewhat perplexed by the great acclaim for the movie as a whole, which I thought was a skillfully made potboiler, but not much more than that. No qualms about Swinton's performance, though; she's fabulous as the insecure attorney for an evil corporation. The scene in which she's frantically rehearsing her lines for an upcoming press conference is particularly fine work.
• Kate Winslet, Romance & Cigarettes -- Director John Turturro is trying to sustain the wildly overheated emotions of a great 3-minute pop song for the length of a movie, and most of his actors aren't up to the task. Winslet, however, gets the tone perfectly right all the way through. Her Tula is magnificently trashy and flamboyantly vulgar; Winslet's performance is hilarious, a gem of perfect control.

And the winner:

• Jennifer Garner, Juno -- At first, Vanessa is a cartoon character, the standard uptight yuppie, and Garner gets all of those nights precisely right. She's perfectly cast; I always like Garner best in roles where we get to see that tightly wound surface gradually crumble. It's a performance that feels out of place for a while, because she's the one character who is not tossing about the witty banter. But gradually, Garner brings out Vanessa's humanity, and she's asked to do so in scenes that could come across as terrible sentimental cliches (the mall scene, for instance, where she says "hello" to Juno's stomach). We come to realize, right along with Juno, that one needn't be a pop culture maven to be a decent, sincere, and even fun person.