Vanessa Kirby

A guide to Hollywood’s biggest races

Ridley Scott’s epic about the fiery French conqueror may feature plenty of explosive battle scenes, but it’s the relationship between Joaquin Phoenix’s Napoleon and Vanessa Kirby’s Josephine that produces the real fireworks. Tracing Napoleon’s rise to power, the film centers on his obsession with his first wife, a fixation that persists even after he ends the marriage over her failure to give him an heir. Kirby has played the royal rebel before as Princess Margaret on The Crown, but here she brings to Josephine an unpredictability that electrifies every scene she’s in. During one tense dinner, Napoleon calls out her infidelity and inability to give him a child in front of everyone, but Josephine doesn’t back down. Instead, she hurls insults and food back at him with a playfulness that gives the scene a surprisingly modern edge. Kirby’s charisma, confidence, and subtle smirk make it clear that Josephine is Napoleon’s equal on the battlefield of love.

Charles Melton

When it was announced that Charles Melton, a hunk from TV’s bonkers teen thriller soap Riverdale, would play a leading role in Todd Haynes’s new film, some were skeptical. Could he really hold his own against Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore? And in such a tricky part? Melton plays Joe, the husband of Moore’s character, who first ensnared Joe when he was in middle school. With the help of Haynes and screenwriter Samy Burch, Melton brings richness and complexity to the character, sensitively illustrating what it might be like for a man in his 30s to be nearly 20 years into a tabloid-infamous marriage. In one scene, Joe has a bittersweet conversation with his son while the two sit on the roof of their home and gaze out at the world.

This is Joe at his most human: hopeful and hurt, damaged and improbably stable all at once. Despite the tumult of his adolescence, Joe has managed to become a caring and gentle adult. It’s the scene that helps give the film its crucial balance. Melton lends decency and good spirits to a movie that is, at root, about two kinds of sinister predation. He is the necessary heart of the film, broken yet still beating with remarkable capacity.

Lily Gladstone

When Lily Gladstone’s Mollie invites Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest into her home for dinner, she knows she is inviting danger through her door—and she gets a little thrill out of it. It would have been easy for Gladstone to define Mollie, an Osage woman whose family is the victim of the heinous crimes known as the Osage Reign of Terror, solely by her suffering. But in this early scene, Mollie’s confidence and sway over her husband-to-be shine through. Their flirtation is laced with her quiet barbs—when he asks her what color her skin is, she says, “My color.” She calls him a “coyote” who wants money, signaling that she knows full well that he covets her riches. And she holds her own power, telling him to be quiet so they can take in the peace of the storm outside. He’ll go on to betray her in unimaginable ways, but in that moment, under her spell, he obeys.

Barry Keoghan

In the early scenes of Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, we suspect that Barry Keoghan’s Oliver is more than he seems—a meek, middle-class boy from a dingy suburb who is way out of his element at tony Oxford. His arrival at Saltburn, the massive family estate belonging to his classmate Felix (Jacob Elordi), only amplifies his apparent awkwardness. Then, in a moonlit encounter with Felix’s sister, Venetia (Alison Oliver), Oliver finally reveals his true self. Seducing Venetia with an overwhelming show of power and charisma, Oliver unveils a side of himself that both attracts and puzzles her, initiating a public, showy sex scene seemingly designed to get them caught. Captured in tight, shadowy close-up, Keoghan carries himself with a vulpine intensity that let’s us know he’s really a hunter whose plan of attack is clearly already many steps underway. The next morning, Oliver is meek and acquiescent again, but we can never see him the same way, knowing what he—and Keoghan, who will shape-shift many more times in the film—is capable of.