The 5 Best And 5 Worst Movie Performances Of 2019

With acting, like any art form, quality is largely subjective. Still, there are times when a performer's work in a role is so utterly impressive that it's hard to argue against it — and times when, for whatever reason, an actor fails to bring a character to life. That's how we have awards shows dedicated to showcasing some of the best and worst movie acting every year. 

That being said, there's more to the best acting and worst acting of the year than the Academy Awards and the Golden Raspberry Awards would have you believe. For every Oscar-bait movie released in November and every schlockfest dropped in January, there are countless other films featuring great and terrible acting every year. Of course, all those choices can make it difficult to keep track of what's actually come out this year, let alone what's been the best and worst when it comes to your favorite actors and actresses. 

With all that in mind, we've assembled a comprehensive list of the best and worst film performances of 2019. From Lupita Nyong'o's bravura double performance in Us to John Travolta overacting in the worst way in The Fanatic, here's a look back at the highest highs and lowest lows of the year in movie acting.

A movie doesn't have to be good to pull great performances from talented actors. That said, a movie's poor quality can sometimes explain how even undeniably great talents can deliver some snooze-worthy performances. Case in point: Jessica Chastain in Dark Phoenix. Chastain's proven that she can inject pathos and emotion into characters with only a few scenes, which would seem to make her a perfect fit for the otherworldly alien Vuk as it tries to bring Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) over to the dark side in Dark Phoenix.

Unfortunately, while the third-act climax and script can be blamed on behind-the-scenes drama, that doesn't excuse how boring her performance in the film is. James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender still manage to show off some brief sparks as Charles Xavier and Magneto, respectively, so it's not as if the movie precludes the possibility of a good performance in a less-than-gratifying role. As Vuk, Chastain should be strange and seductive, an alluring contrast to the men in Jean's life that are trying to control her. Instead, Chastain just seems bored, delivering dialogue as if she's reading the script for the first time.

At this point, John Travolta's been in so many poorly-received and artless films that we're starting to wonder whether the actor was replaced by a less-talented doppelgänger following Pulp Fiction. If his starring role in 2018's mega-flop Gotti wasn't bad enough, he delivered another stinker in 2019's The Fanatic. The film follows an autistic man named Moose (played by Travolta) who becomes obsessed with a horror film actor. Just like Misery, that obsession soon curdles into an obsessive hate, which leads to Moose stalking and threatening his favorite star.

Even if you could get past the offensive stereotypes that Travolta uses as shorthand to communicate that Moose isn't neurotypical, the actor just can't handle playing a character that needs to be both sympathetic and sociopathic at different points in the film. In an incredibly savage review, Katie Rife at The AV Club wrote, "Travolta's performance is constructed entirely out of loud printed shirts and acting tics lifted from a community-theater production of Of Mice And Men." Maybe Travolta just needs one good film to get back on top, but The Fanatic definitely isn't it — and his performance didn't help.

M. Night Shyamalan career has had more twists and turns than an actual Shyamalan movie. From his mainstream breakout hit The Sixth Sense to the nearly universally panned Lady in the Water to his rise back to a director to watch in 2016's Split, the writer-director has had his share of ups and downs. Still, even when he was at his most down-and-out, you could still expect to see fans praising 2000's Unbreakable, a superhero origin story before the genre became the moneymaker it is today. 

Shyamalan's film follows David Dunn (Bruce Willis), a man who gradually realizes that he's basically invulnerable. Spurred by a comic book-obsessed man named Elijah Price (Samuel Jackson), Dunn becomes a vigilante before discovering that Elijah is the supervillain to Dunn's superhero. The film ends on an ambiguous note that seemed like it would never be resolved... until Dunn made a cameo at the end of 2017's Split, revealing that the two films took place in the same universe. That set up 2019's Glass, a film that seemed to promise the long-awaited sequel to Unbreakable.

The good news for fans is that it came out. The bad news is that the film itself is largely terrible, squandering the promise of Unbreakable's final moments. Glass has plenty wrong with it, but Willis' poor performance would rank high on the list. In Unbreakable, Willis played Dunn with a quiet melancholy in a reserved, almost deadpan performance. It's a fine line to tread as an actor, and in Glass, Willis misses the mark entirely. What was an internal, carefully-calibrated sadness has become a boredom so vacuous that Willis was barely mentioned in reviews of the film, despite playing one of the most important roles.

When trailers first dropped for the long-awaited Battle Angel: Alita adaptation, most of the response focused around the CGI-enhanced eyes of Rosa Salazar's eponymous cyborg protagonist. As it turns out, Salazar's performance was one of the high points of the film, and nearly unanimously praised by reviewers even in the harshest reviews. One actor who didn't fare quite so well was Keean Johnson, who played Alita's love interest, Hugo. Stephen Dalton, writing for the Hollywood Reporter, called Johnson a "charisma vacuum of white-bread boy-band blandness." Richard Roeper over at the Chicago Sun-Times went even farther, calling Johnson "boy-band cute but bland," and adding, "Alita's blind devotion to this narcissistic idiot is one of the many inconsistencies in the screenplay." It's not a good thing when you're playing opposite CGI cyborgs and purposefully inhuman and robotic characters and critics still manage to peg you as the least charismatic presence onscreen.

Even the best actors can have misfires, and Matthew McConaughey is no exception. Case in point: the bizarre misfire Serenity , which ranks near the bottom of the actor's career output — and yes, that includes Failure to Launch. The biggest problem, as pointed out by Leah Pickett of the Chicago Reader, is that "McConaughey acts like he's in a prestige drama; his intensity clashes with the pulpy narrative and its illogical contrivances." McConaughey is no stranger to turning aimless caricatures into fully fleshed-out people, but that same instinct seems to have worked against Serenity. Considering the ultimate twist of the movie — a nonsensical plot development which we won't spoil here — it might have been better for McConaughey to play the role with his tongue slightly in cheek rather than commit on the level of his time on True Detective. As Rex Reed at the Observer reported, "At the critics' screening I attended, the audience was reduced to hysterics." Maybe if McConaughey had played the role with a bit more humor, that hysterical laughter could have been the point, rather than an unfortunate side effect of an overly serious film.