From the Fourth Row!

I have already talked about the best male acting performances of the year so far. Now its time to discuss the best female performances of the year so far and those I’m looking forward to in the coming months. A movie I talked about in the best actor blog was A Place Beyond The Pines and I’m gonna talk about a great maybe, the greatest performance of her life, that is Ava Mendez. It is a movie dominated by great male performances. She does a phenomenal job being a single mother who has gone through a very difficult ordeal involving her baby’s father and a police officer.

Other great performances I’ve seen this year I would like to talk about are from Octavia Spencer an Oscar winner for The Help, Amanda Seyfried, Oprah Winfrey and Kate Blanchet also an Oscar winner for portraying Kate Hepburn in The Aviator. In Fruitvale Station Octavia Spencer plays the mother of Oscar who is on a path of trouble and bad luck. She has limited screen time but when she’s on screen she give a powerful performance in a very sad and tragic movie. Amanda Seyfried portrays Linda Loveless in Loveless. A you may know she is considered the first porn star and had become famous for one movie called Deep Throat. Seyfriend play this women as very damaged and lonely so she end up in this seedy world of porn. Not usually one of the better actresses in Hollywood, Seyfried shows her vulnerability in this role. Oprah Winfrey has been out of the acting game for a while so it took a lot of persuading for Lee Daniel’s to get her to play the part as the wife of Cecil Gaines in The Butler. She has to deal with a lot of turmoil surrounding her sons and husband. She ages just like her husband does and goes through all the physical changes as well. Through everything Oprah shows she is still on her game and turns in an amazing performance sure to garner an Oscar nomination. The last but certainly not the least great performance I have seen this year is from Kate Blanchet. She plays Jasmine a women torn from her ritzy lifestyle in New York City and forced to live with her sister in San Francisco in Blue Jasmine. Blanchet has rarely been this vulnerable in any role she has played. She tares down everything in her sole to show how miserable and unhappy this character is. Woody Allen it seems is able to get these kind of stripped down performances from his actresses in recant years.

Other performances I’m looking forward to are from Naomi Watts in the bio pic about Princess Diana called Diana, Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence both look like they could give outstanding performances in David O’Russell’s American Hustle and Emma Thompson in the story about how Mary Poppins got made into a movie where she portrays the author of the original book in Saving Mr. Banks. The Counselor has to female performances I’m looking forward to and those are from Cameron Diaz and Penelope Cruise.

It has been a relatively slow year so far for great female performances but, you can be certain some great performances are gonna come out of the woodwork.
Dan Skip Allen