George Clooney’s star power is such that it’s often easy to forget that he’s not just George Clooney, but one of the finest actors working in Hollywood. His fluidity and smooth charm goes down so easily that it’s difficult to believe he’s actually working. And therein lies his talent. In Up in the Air, Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a man whose job is to fly all over the country to tell people that their jobs are being eliminated. The character demands a combination of glibness, charisma, and low-key steeliness, which Clooney delivers, always with a glint in the corner of his eye, the familiar grin about to break out. He is a man whose job is to both win people over and put them at ease, and so he does. As Anne Hornaday wrote in The Washington Post, Up in the Air features “Clooney at his suavest” and “seems cosmically tuned to his particular key. The last time this happened was with Michael Clayton, and fans of that film know the drill: The filmgoer’s primary obligation in these instances is simply to sit back, order a drink and enjoy the flight.”

Morgan Freeman is always a commanding presence on screen. But playing Nelson Mandela, in the film Invictus, Freeman’s performance is not just authoritative but uncannily convincing—“less an impersonation than an incarnation,” as Bill Keller wrote in The New York Times. From Mandela’s shuffling gait, to his ultra-erect posture, to the way he unconsciously scrunched his upper lip, Freeman’s portrayal is as living and breathing as the man himself. But beyond the physical likeness of Mandela, Freeman gets the man’s soul, which then, in turn, becomes the soul of Clint Eastwood’s redemptive film about the unifying effects of the 1995 World Cup rugby match in South Africa. As Keller notes, “Freeman conveys the manipulative charm, the serene confidence, the force of purpose, the hint of mischief and the lonely regret that made Mr. Mandela one of the most fascinating political figures of his time.” In Rolling Stone, Peter Travers seconded this, writing that Freeman “never delivers a false note, even when Anthony Peckham’s script nudges him into sainthood. Freeman lets us see the wily politician percolating underneath Mandela’s calm surface.”

Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy—both in the 1995 BBC series Pride and Prejudice, and the chick flick Bridget Jones’s Diary—we know and love. The distinctly British, uneffusive emotions and dry, biting wit. The towering pride and gentility. The steadfastly loyal and adoring man underneath it all. But in Tom Ford’s A Single Man, based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood, Firth gave us something we’d never seen before—George Falconer, an emotionallycrumbling, gay professor whose quiet performance, and its inherent complexity, isn’t just the emotional core of the film, but, in many ways, the film itself. Firth won the Best Actor prize at the Venice Film Festival last year for the role, and he’s sure to win more acclaim in the coming months. As Michael Phillips wrote in The Chicago Tribune, “Firth is nearly always exemplary in his efforts; here, though, he opens up to new areas of artistry as well as subtlety.” In Time, Richard Corliss wrote of Falconer, “For a gentle man who’s lost his love, solitude has become a life sentence that simply must end. Firth makes that ache subtly, splendidly visible.”

In The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow’s kinetic, unvarnished war film about a group of American soldiers that detonates bombs in Iraq, Jeremy Renner plays the hot-headed cowboy who leads the team. On the outside, Staff Sergeant William James is a typical soldier: unremarkably handsome; not much of a talker; addicted to dangerous, fast thrills. But Renner brings out the surprising, multi-faceted elements of James’ character, that make him, and the film, a richly textured, and completely original, look at a war we tend to think we know enough about. In Slate, Dana Stevens wrote that Renner is “a discovery of an actor; once you’ve seen him in a movie, you go around asking people, ‘Do you know this Jeremy Renner guy? and usually, the answer is no…. After The Hurt Locker (which I without question the most exciting and least ideological movie yet made about the war in Iraq), everyone will remember Renner’s name.” The Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan called his performance “so good it feels like a gift.”