She is! I agree, definitely one of my favorite performances of the year.

Garfield walking down a flight of stairs or sitting in a boat in Silence had more depth than the entirety of Hacksaw Ridge. Issei Ogata and Tadanobu Asano also deserve recognition. Probably the best acting moment of 2016 = Ogata deflating his character.

Yeah, the Audition scene alone made it a great performance. I feel like the film was about Mia more so than it was about Sebastian, and Stone was fantastic.

Margaret Bowman as the waitress > All of them

I made this list to figure out which lead female performances deserved the nom over Meryl Streep and it wasn't very difficult:

Mel Gibson over Martin Scorsese is not surprising given the subject matter of their films, but it is oh so very wrong.

I'd gladly take out Streep or Portman. I really was not impressed by Portman's performance at all.

I missed the announcement for this, when are these lists due?

That is certainly true.

Yeah, I can definitely see that about Garfield, so I was surprised at how interested I still was given the repetitive nature of his scenes. I agree on the last third being the best part; I think the climactic scene in particular was extremely powerful, made even more so by the use of silence. Don't know how I feel…

SILENCE: An extremely long and taxing story, but it's meticulously crafted and nuanced and powerful and the ideas are so damn intriguing. Definitely an extension of the themes Scorsese has grappled with in his films over the years, and the passion in the project is evident right from the outset. There are some scenes…

Right?

SILENCE: New favorite of 2016. It's a long and taxing story, but it's meticulously crafted and nuanced and the ideas are so damn intriguing. Definitely an extension of the themes Scorsese has grappled with in his films over the years, and the passion in the project is evident. There are some scenes in this that are…

Year end film lists (unless you're a critic who has seen everything) in the first half of December have never made sense. Vote a couple weeks later and I assume La La Land would easily be in the top 10. Manchester just barely made it in.

Fair enough, though I'd argue your description of Johnson's performance is a nice fit for the style of film Ford created.

Agreed on The Neon Demon. That was an awesome theater experience; my screening wasn't that full, but still. That and Green Room were my two best moviegoing experiences of the year.

I knew I was forgetting certain movies. I wasn't too impressed with Love & Friendship overall, but the performances were excellent.

Ah, Jena Malone in The Neon Demon as well, how could I forget to give her a shoutout.

Yeah you're right, it really was Shannon and Taylor-Johnson who carried that movie. Not that Shannon doing so surprised me, but when your cast also has Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal, you expect them to be the ones to carry it.

Yeah, but you can't go wrong with picking Foster from that movie. Pine was also great.