Rachel McAdams
Mean Girls

Who had the better role in The Wizard of Oz: Billie Burke as Glenda the Good Witch or Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West? Burke got to play sweetness and light, dress in a beautiful gown and speak in musical tones. But Hamilton was the one we watched, as she whooped, squawked, cackled, plotted and connived. Evil, when properly put on, has striking cachet. A pity that so few actors really master the art of playing heavy. Actresses in particular rarely get to exercise that truly black heart. And to do so in the context of girl-on-girl cruelty that doesn't smack of male-fantasy lesbianism? Well, there's no doubt that Tina Fey's nimble script supported Rachel McAdams, but McAdams made the role of teenage terror Regina George all her own. With steely eyes and daggers just barely hidden in each command she barks, McAdams formed a one-woman clique, personifying the authentic high school horrors that Mean Girls was all about. — Martin Scribbs

Tracy Ullman
A Dirty Shame

Has anyone ever won an acting award by starring in a John Waters movie? Well, why not? Do you think Meryl Streep would eat a dog grumpy off the sidewalk? Could Dame Judi Dench be a straight-faced ventriloquist for a Virgin Mary dummy that keeps yelling "full of grace"? Think Jodie Foster could exude the withering malice of a family values fascist, skewering the liver from a rude beatnik in the men's room? John Waters takes his actresses to depths of vulgarity far beyond the point where most Hollywood prima donnas would implode. If you watched 2004's largely neglected A Dirty Shame, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Tracey Ullman once against showed a massive amount of chutzpah playing Sylvia Stickles, alternately a prissy prude and a brain-damaged sex addict. The hokey pokey at the nursing home turning erotic was the best laugh of the year. Not a great movie, but a fantastically funny performance worth some real recognition. — Martin Scribbs

Naomi Watts
I Heart Huckabees

Playing smart and deep is easy. Hey, Ashton Kutcher almost pulled off being a genius neuroscience student in The Butterfly Effect. But Jude Law and Naomi Watts put on a clinic in playing shallow in I Heart Huckabees. Starting out as a ditzy, appearance-obsessed model deep in denial of her need to be pretty, Watts works her way through existential crises to become that most unworkable of hippogriffs, a model stuck on authenticity. The best part is that even the touchstones of her authenticity — wearing a bonnet, eating fatty foods, making commercials with stark, brutal honesty — are themselves mostly surface affectations. Watts sells the role and makes the marriage of high and low comedy work. — Martin Scribbs

Naomi Watts
We Don't Live Here Anymore

When you look more closely at Naomi Watts' Oscar-nominated performance as Christina in 21 Grams, you can see that Alejandro González Iñárritu's nonlinear trick editing obscures some glaring flaws. Watts is borderline histrionic, shrieking and crying and fucking with abandon for much of the movie. Perhaps the film's chopped-up narrative doesn't allow for Christina to be complex, or perhaps she's simply substituting operatic overacting for character development. She's like Tea Leoni in Spanglish, had that character been played for tragedy.

We Don't Live Here Anymore is a much quieter movie, in terms of story (no sex with her husband's killer), narrative (no post-modern statements about fate and chance in the editing) and acting. In 21 Grams, Watts shrieked her orgasms like an over-zealous porn star. Here, she carries on her affair on blankets in the woods, in the backseat with the windows rolled up, and with a hand over her mouth in the hallways. Watts plays Edith, who in turn plays many roles: concerned mom, desperate housewife, betraying best friend, and reckless sexpot. Watts threads Edith's personas with an undercurrent of selfishness and self-absorption. She tries to act like a practical house mom even when she knows she's destroying her family behind their back. She practically flaunts her affair, while inextricably pretending that no one will think of the possibility. And she carries on her friendship as if no one knows she's cheating with her best friend's husband. Watts imbues Edith with a certain pretense and immaturity so, when her contradictions converge and she finally breaks down, it's completely believable. She doesn't throw a tantrum; she just cries, less out of guilt for what she's done but because she can't get out of it this time. And yet, Edith pretends to be dignified by running off with the kids because she cares about her family - the one she just destroyed.

Watts pulls this off in the same way she played Mulholland Drive. She slips into skins so convincingly: One moment her blonde hair and high cheeks are like sunshine, the next her lithe body is an object of desire. Throw a sweater on her; she's picking up her girls at soccer practice. Corner her, and she bursts into tears. She's a chameleon, and in the right role, she can sort through these separate masks and find just the right one. Playing opposite this great cast, most notably Mark Ruffalo, makes her job easier, but We Don't Live Here Anymore shows that when given space, she can measure a character. Watts is one of the sexiest actresses in Hollywood, no doubt, but as with her best friend Nicole Kidman, her body of work doesn't have to revolve around her body. — Stephen Himes

Fenella Woolgar
Bright Young Things

It's often hard to separate the dancer from the dance, and that's certainly the case with Fenella Woolgar's Agatha in Bright Young Things. Agatha is nearly peripheral to the story (as adapted by Stephen Fry, from Waugh's "Vile Bodies") but she is in fact the central figure in the eponymous circle of London decadents. It's not quite clear whether she draws the other hedonists to herself with her ditzy charisma, or holds them in the field of her black-hole heart. She's not malicious, but she's a poster-girl for F. Scott's "vast carelessness." I suspect Agatha looked like a great role on paper: She gets great clothes and masquerades, mordant wit, drunken effervescence, cocaine mania, a turn as champagne-fueled race-car driver and a case of Kierkegaardian despair when the aesthete's life withers under her own intelligence. (She's nearly as Protean as Naomi Watt's astonishing turn in Mullholland Drive.) Woolgar, largely unknown to American audiences, got her training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts; she has the chops to pull it all off, and makes a character who could easily be an irritating twit, but ends up the best part of the picture.— David Essex