One of the best acting moments in 2023 is McEwen’s, after Jean says the words “I am a lesbian” for the first time to a random stranger. A lifetime of tension deflates in a single moment, and her emotions ambush her. She physically collapses with the disappearance of all that fear, laughing, crying, shivering with the exhilaration of feeling—for the first time—what it is to be one Jean, not two. – Sheila O’Malley
Vanessa Kirby as Josephine in “Napoleon”
In “Napoleon,” a hilariously snotty portrait of a deluded tyrant (Joaquin Phoenix), inconstant lover and muse Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) has to suggest a lot about the movie’s unstable post-historic reality. Kirby has the unenviable task of indicating, in a short amount of time on-camera, that it was possible to be both seduced and appalled by Napoleon’s oafish swagger and naïve megalomania. She does, and often without saying so aloud. That’s especially impressive in a black comedy that some have received as a one-man showcase for a typically commanding Phoenix.
Kirby provides one of a few keys to the movie’s intentionally uneasy combination of drama and humor. She runs a gamut of compound emotions as Josephine falls for and then (maybe) distant from a self-styled demagogue. Because it’s one thing to watch Phoenix woo a crowd of French soldiers after his exile at Elba, but another thing entirely to see him first conquer and then quickly submit to a wife that he will also very publicly divorce because she supposedly couldn’t bear his children. It’s a pleasure to see Kirby snicker and cry helplessly when her character performs a joint speech announcing her separation from Napoleon.
As Josephine, Kirby points to the elusive truth at the heart of “Napoleon,” namely that history’s great men always sound more ridiculous and tragic when you imagine how their pathological behavior was initially received by everyone they trampled on the way up, especially their loved ones. – Simon Abrams
Franz Rogowski as Tomas Freiburg in “Passages”
No longer just the European arthouse’s best-kept secret, Franz Rogowski mesmerized the masses this year in “Passages,” Ira Sachs’ intoxicating and brutal romantic drama. Charting the combustible passions, sexual and emotional, that flare between filmmaker Tomas (Rogowski), his husband Martin (Ben Whishaw), and teacher Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), three Parisians at turning points in their lives, the film is above all else a showcase for its magnetic young stars—none more than Rogowski, who fully and fearlessly captures the inner cross-currents of pleasure, pain, and confusion at the molten core of Sachs’ ménage à trois.