Many people would have you believe that movies aren't as good as they used to be. In addition to dismissing all the great films that have come out in the past few decades, that attitude discounts some of the most intense, bizarre and captivating performances audiences have ever been privileged enough to watch. No method has been untried by both older actors really discovering themselves and newer talents capable of shaking up everything we expect from a performance.

From blockbusters to indies, there has been a surge in fantastic performances to match the experimental and exciting new direction American movies are headed. Here are the actors we'll a hundred years from now, giving the 20 Best Acting Performances of The Last 5 Years.

Philip Seymour Hoffman - The Master (2011)

When Philip Seymour Hoffman tragically ed away in 2014, film fans took it as a loss as personal as that of a relative’s. We felt we knew Hoffman. He had opened himself up to us time and again in some of the greatest films of the modern era. How could someone so gifted, open and beautiful have been so tormented and kept it from us?

Of course those with gifts are all too often burdened by problems that their most ardent irers can’t begin to understand. Hoffman’s most enduring work may be that of the title character of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, an incendiary cult leader who, whatever his faults, really does have empathy for his followers (specifically Joaquin Phoenix’s disturbed Freddie Quell). Hoffman does breath-taking work as a man of incurable appetites, whose only weakness is a desire to be loved for who he is, something his followers can’t give him.

He had a lot of great work ahead of him when he died, and The Master showed that there was no more lovable and acutely smart a screen presence in the 21st century.

Lupita Nyong'o - 12 Years A Slave (2013)

She may have won the Oscar for Best ing Actress, but when her part of the story ends, 12 Years A Slave may as well end, too. The movie is more about Solomon Northup’s (Chiwetel Ejiofor, also excellent) relationship to the many women in his life than it is about his specific nightmare, and Lupita Nyong’o’s Patsey is the one who represents what slavery did to the soul of a still-young nation.

Her performance is shockingly committed, pulled in every direction by what she wants, what will ease her suffering, and what is “right.” In a cast full of seasoned actors doing career-best work, newcomer Nyong’o managed to make the biggest impression. Her final scene, in which she’s reduced to a blurred image over Northop’s shoulder, is one of the most devastating moments in modern cinema. It only works because we’ve spent so much time getting to know Patsey, in what has surely to be one of the great debut performances.

Leonardo DiCaprio - The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

Wolf of Wall Street is almost too much movie. Three hours of the whirlwind highs and desperate lows of one of the world’s most charming, sadistic criminals is sort of like cocaine for the eyes and ears. It wouldn’t work if not for Leonardo DiCaprio fully giving himself over to the part of Jordan Belfort, a man who treated money like pieces in a game only he knew how to play.

Investing this horrible man with the confidence of apparent invulnerability - like Daffy Duck, he always gets back up - DiCaprio is the most electrifying he’s ever been. The boyish face that America fell in love with is still hidden under all the pills and abuse and he knows it; manipulating both his duped clients, friends, family and the audience into believing he knows what he’s doing. A manic tour de force from an actor throwing himself madly into a character part Patrick Bateman, part Jerry Lewis.

Hailee Steinfeld - True Grit (2010)

When the Coen Brothers’ True Grit took home an Oscar for best lead actor, it was a case of right film, wrong performance. Sure, Jeff Bridges’ gruff, blustery Rooster Cogburn is one of the actor’s most memorable characters, but the best work in the film was done by 14-year old newcomer Hailee Steinfeld.

Steinfeld belongs to a class of young actor (think Robert Pattinson in The Rover or Emma Watson in The Bling Ring) who appear able to completely kill off anything about oneself but what a given character requires. Mattie Ross is a perfectly realized character, a girl with no sense of humor who believes in the tangible facts of humanity. Steinfeld’s every word and gesture is completely honest and guileless, and she never for a minute wavers in her mission or her manner. She’s given only stellar performances since her Oscar snub, but it would take an awful lot to make us forget Mattie Ross.

David Oyelowo - Selma (2014)

After doing time in everything from The Paperboy to Interstellar, David Oyelowo was finally given the lead in a major film to display his chops. In Ava DuVernay’s vibrant, sweltering Selma, Oyelowo plays Martin Luther King better than any previous interpretation of the character, or at the very least, a more uniquely humane version.

He captures King’s cadences (that musicality he got from his years as a preacher) and dignity while adding deep, affecting reality to what could have been an impression. The King of Selma is a man with a conscience more powerful than any police baton, and his fight to balance his inner feelings with the needs of a public against a wall and running out of options. A wonderfully savvy turn from a perennially underrated star.

Ann Dowd - Compliance (2012)

There is no tiptoeing around the stark grotesquery of Compliance. It’s an incredibly difficult film to watch, and even more nightmarish to consider the events from which director Craig Zobel took inspiration. But the film must be seen, if for no other reason than Ann Dowd’s unbelievable naturalistic performance. Dowd plays a manager at a fast food restaurant who receives a phone call from a man who insists he’s a police officer. She follows every absurd thing she asks of him because she believes in authority, which after all, is what makes her good at her job.

Everything from her walk to her little facial tics when the requests become outlandish and invasive suggests that Dowd really is this woman and that she believes in the boundaries of the world she inhabits. A stunning piece of character work that makes your sympathize with someone who couldn’t see past their stubborn insistence in a rational order to the world.

Ralph Fiennes - The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

In Wes Anderson’s world, everything is ordered, neat, symmetrical and pleasing to the eye. Everything but the deliberately abrasive characters at its center. There was no more delightfully asymmetrical a protagonist in all of Anderson’s world than Ralph Fiennes’ Gustave H, the proprietor of The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Fiennes bristles through each of Anderson’s divinely upholstered environment,s living by a strict moral code and never letting a hair out of place. He’s a man guided by a love of decadence and a belief that great service should be repaid with confidence and loyalty. Gustave H’s clipped diction and unflappability eventually reveal a depth of feeling he wouldn’t ordinarily make plain. Fiennes has proven his bonafides as a dramatic actor time and again over his decades long film career, but his comedic gifts aren’t praised nearly enough. He carries this splendid movie nimbly and ably.

Isabelle Nélisse - Mama (2013)

Frequently, when people aren’t scared by a horror film, which for too many people is the genre’s only function, they don’t reward any of its other merits. So not only did Mama, a remarkably well-crafted movie, not get its due as art, its three central performances were basically written off.

Jessica Chastain is typically excellent as an aimless goth dealing with unexpected motherhood. Megan Charpentier is absolutely brilliant as the eldest of the two children Chastain comes to shepherd. But it’s Isabelle Nélisse who handily walks away with the film. As feral infant Lilly, Nélisse gives an astonishingly accomplished rendering of a creature more animal than human.

She was 9 at the time of filming and communicates lifetimes of instinct and experience, slowly realizing that being human means dealing with unplanned contradictions that arise in the heart. Because this astonishing piece of work was given in a film that didn't scare enough people, Isabelle Nélisse was robbed of her justly deserved accolades. Lilly is a jaw-dropping creation.

Benicio Del Toro - Sicario (2015)

Benicio Del Toro has always been an intense actor, demanding your attention like a modern day Robert Mitchum. In Denis Villeneuve’s unbearably tense Sicario, Del Toro is a sly puppet master. His apparent distance from everything is revealed to be a strategy to remain a step ahead. Del Toro is like a wolf in hibernation, choosing to seem asleep so that prey walks by without fear. His intelligence is hidden behind half-closed eyelids and a calm demeanor.

This is his strategy, to keep his poker face while he navigates a cursed, lawless world until he’s exactly where he wants to be. Though he’s ed quite ably by Emily Blunt and Josh Brolin, doing superlative work, Del Toro’s shadowy third wheel gives Sicario bite and proves once more why he’s one of our most important actors.

Jennifer Lawrence - Winter’s Bone (2010)

Jennifer Lawrence has been given much bigger, more showy roles since her start - winning an Oscar for her work in David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook and acclaim for her enormous turn in the same director’s American Hustle - but Jennifer Lawrence’s best acting remains the subtle, lived-in work she did as Ree Dolly, the hero of Debra Granik’s marvelous Winter’s Bone.

Effortlessly communicating the world-weariness of someone used to disappointment (despite not being old enough to buy cigarettes), Lawrence was clearly already a star. No one’s asked her to repeat the magic she makes in Winter’s Bone, which is a shame because as fun as her wild work in Russell’s films has been, Ree Dolly is such a marvelously fine-tuned character and it would be great to see her go in for small details again. She’s really good at expressing inner life quietly.