An Annette Bening Top Ten
Friday, November 3, 2023 at 9:00AM 
Remember that week when Taylor Swift's concert film phenomenon and Martin Scorsese's elegiac latest dominated the conversation? It's hard to believe, but more pictures hit theaters along with those big titles. Indeed, some came full of Oscar hopes – look at NYAD. Directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chain, the sports biopic enjoyed a qualifying theatrical run before hitting Netflix today, hoping to guarantee its entrance into the awards race. Above all other categories, Best Actress should be the primary objective, with Annette Bening vying for Hollywood's favorite golden trophy once more. Will she secure her fifth Academy Award nomination? Time will tell.
Let's recall some of her best work of yesteryear to celebrate a great actress's return to the race. Here are my top ten favorite Annette Bening performances…
First up, some honorable mentions are in order. Though she's only in one scene of Postcards from the Edge, Bening excels at playing a sexually open friend to Streep's Carrie Fisher stand-in. She's similarly stunning in Bugsy, where she met future husband Warren Beatty, igniting the screen with fiery chemistry from the first moment their characters cross paths. The American President is another romantic highlight from that decade, while Danny Collins represents a later return to the milieu. Finally, though she offers no surprising reinterpretation of the part, Bening is an excellent fit for The Seagull's Irina, ending the picture on a high note of terrified realization.
With those matters out of the way, it's time to dive into the list proper. As in previous personal top tens, the films are unranked, presented in chronological order.
VALMONT (1989) Milos Forman
Only a year after Stephen Frears delivered the definitive adaptation of Chordelos de Laclos' Dangerous Liaisons, Milos Forman arrived with a new take on the material. As his Amadeus follow-up, the picture returned the Czech Oscar-winner to an 18th-century context, though the tonalities are much different to that 1984 Best Picture champion. Tone is the main reason Frears' film never seems in direct competition with Valmont, each project aiming for wildly different registers best exemplified by their leading ladies. While Glenn Close is a vision of Ancien Régime venom in the '88 drama, Annette Bening tackles the role with bouncy anachronism and a contemporary theatrical twist.
Through her, we get to reconsider the text as a sex farce, all cackle and self-amusement, erotic playfulness coming before any considerations of period authenticity. However, the actress can sour just as easily when it comes time to it, rendering all that sweet sexy fun into pure acid. Playing up the Marquise de Merteuil's viciousness with as much glee as she showed her joy, Bening guides the audience through the movie's tragicomic metamorphosis. So much so that, by the time the credits roll, one gets the impression she had a better grasp of Forman's reinterpretation than anyone else on set. In other words, she understood the assignment and then some.
Valmont is available to rent and buy on Apple TV and Amazon Video.
THE GRIFTERS (1990) Stephen Frears
Decades before she would portray Gloria Grahame, Annette Bening dipped her toes into the other actress' legacy when she played Myra Langtry in Frears' Jim Thompson adaptation. It's difficult to overstate how much this character exists in a continuum with other film noir vixens, a Hollywood tradition perpetuated with a sardonic edge. She's in dialogue with the cinematic past as much as she unravels late-20th-century blonde bimbo stereotypes, weaponizing everyone's assumptions of who Myra is, what she represents. Playing the fool with calculated shrewdness, Myra is always two steps ahead until she isn't.
And yet, her arc isn't defined by ultimate tragedy since Bening is always ready to foreground the folly before the femme fatale fatalism. Her giddiness to sink her teeth into the role bleeds into Myra herself, always prepared to partake in coquettish play-acting, her grin dripping with self-regard and finger-licking contentment. She's a delicious concoction, and we feel both actress and character are savoring every moment they get to exist within the fantasy. Still, for how transparent Myra's con may be, there's an enigmatic quality Bening never fully abdicates, keeping a part of this woman for herself, safely hidden behind scammy smokescreens.
The Grifters is streaming on Paramount Plus, Showtime, and Fubo TV. The film is also available to rent and purchase on most major platforms.
MARS ATTACKS! (1996) Tim Burton
Annette Bening is always formidable at playing the cat that ate the canary, but she's equally adept at breaking the mold. That's the basic dynamic of her work in Burton's spoof of midcentury sci-fi, where she is a casino boss' hippie wife in the midst of an alien invasion. Taking full advantage of her picture's loopy stylings and ideas, she explodes over the screen, all glitzy glamour, before shattering in hysterics and transcending them further into enlightenment. Each step in her evolution feels earned, though there's never a betrayal of Mars Attacks!'s essential silliness. As ever, she gets what her director's going for better than anyone else in the cast, elevating the exercise above commonplace pastiche into something far more inspired.
Mars Attacks! is streaming on Amazon Prime Video. You can also find it available to rent and buy on most big platforms.
AMERICAN BEAUTY (1999) Sam Mendes
Unlike AMPAS, I'm not especially fond of American Beauty beyond its pristine form, masterful lensing holding hands with a perfect Thomas Newman score. Its political views smell iffy to me, their articulation clumsy and the elicited provocations ringing hollow with time. Because of that, it's remarkable how the cast rises above the material's pitfalls, with Bening doing the most impressive feat of spinning straw into gold. Her Carolyn Burnham is systematically indicted by the narrative, and her on-screen husband, flattened into a strident stereotype that's frankly beneath this actress' talent. And yet, Bening perseveres.
With the script constantly cajoling her into playing a suburban harpy, the actress repudiates those notions, plundering Sam Mendes and Alan Ball's satire in search of depths that wouldn't be there if not for her doing. In cold technical terms, Bening sharpens every ounce of humor in the character's cruelty and the cruelties set upon her, a marvel of timing and coloring between lines. Then, one must acknowledge her go-for-broke energy, whether breaking down in the face of a failed real-estate sale or spewing vitriol on the dinner table. It's a powerhouse performance, memorably riotous and closer to Oscar gold than Bening has ever been.
American Beauty is streaming on Netflix, Paramount Plus, Hoopla, and DirecTV. It's also available to rent and purchase on most services.
BEING JULIA (2004) István Szabó
Bening's career started on stage, and those origins have been apparent ever since she first stepped in front of a movie camera. It's in her bearing, her penchant for playing up emotions to the cheap seats, a stride of old-school maximalism, and vocal techniques that feel calibrated for auditorium projection. None of this is necessarily negative, nor does it mean that the actress can't forego those strategies when the project demands it. However, it means that some of Bening's best big-screen work happens when filmmakers hone on her performing specificities, letting them erupt through roles fit for such expression and narratives that can support them.
Szabó's stubbornly antiquated Being Julia finds Bening let loose to chew as much scenery as she damn well pleases, playing a theater diva delving into an affair with a younger man bound to end badly. A performer performing through life, she's a storm of artifice pratfalling into honesty, a lie that tells uncomfortable truths of self-delusion and self-destruction. The superficiality of some more frivolous passages feels purposeful in Bening's hands, setting up a crescendo of melodrama that explodes during a delicious finale. Imperious and mad, she makes an art out of public humiliation and, somehow, convinces the audience to root for Julia at her most vicious.
Being Julia is available to rent and purchase on Apple TV, Amazon Video, Google Play, Youtube, VUDU, DirecTV, and the Microsoft Store.
RUNNING WITH SCISSORS (2006) Ryan Murphy
Watching Bening work her way through Ryan Murphy's fascinating and deeply flawed Running with Scissors is to witness a master negotiator of tone at the height of her powers. Her usual propensity for unearthing her script's ironic verve manifests, once again, while being counteracted by a willingness to go full-bodied earnest, bruising and painful. She's incredible at forcing human reality into a camp fizz, playing provocation with bitter directness, thus providing a soul to a picture in desperate need of one. Like Nathaniel pointed out in his own Annette Bening top ten a few years ago, Warren Beatty once called this his wife's best performance. While I don't necessarily agree, the sentiment is understandable, backed by a formidable, Oscar-worthy piece of work.
Running with Scissors is currently streaming on Tubi. You can also find it on most of the big platforms.
THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT (2010) Lisa Cholodenko
Bening's fourth Oscar nomination – to this day her last – came for this spirited Sundance dramedy where director Lisa Cholodenko whittles away at the actress' stage-bound technique, her bigger-than-life presence, and grande dame stylings. What's left is Annette Bening at her rawest and most disaffected, reaching for a level of naturalism that's revelatory. So much of her work here relies on underplaying, preparing the viewer for the kiss of betrayal and a woman's ultimate collapse. Realizing her wife has cheated on her during a dinner with their children's sperm donor father, she's a miracle of silent anguish.
Later, when confronting Julianne Moore, her line delivery is shattering. All these years since first watching The Kids Are All Right, I can still hear Bening's "Did you take a nap too?" resounding in my head. It's astounding work, loose when needs be. It can also be pointedly stiff and micromanaged, revealing the broken compartmentalization of a woman trying to make sense of a situation she never once thought she'd be in. Resolute and shattered but also warm, her next move is never entirely clear to us, with Bening surprising at every turn. Watching it in the context of the actress' career, one gets the sense of a veteran artist willing herself to new challenges, tireless and inspired.
The Kids Are All Right is streaming on Pluto TV. The film is also on most major platforms, where you can buy or purchase it.
THE FACE OF LOVE (2013) Arie Posin
A woman loses her husband in a seaside tragedy. Years later, still in the depths of grief, she spots a man who looks just like him, stalks the stranger, and eventually falls into a love affair predicated on the ghost of another. The scene is set for sudsy melodrama, but Bening handles the material like the most fragile of treasures, gentle and caring, making sense of a desperate soul falling into all the wrong choices. Through the actress, the spiral of senselessness is recognizable, the widow's plight so viscerally felt it hurts to watch. The picture isn't nearly as remarkable as its leading lady, mind you. Nevertheless, she thrives as she so often does.
The Face of Love is streaming on Tubi, Kanopy, and the Roku Channel. You can also find it on Apple TV and Amazon Video, available to rent and purchase.
20TH CENTURY WOMEN (2016) Mike Mills
There's an imperative barrier between the audience and Bening's beguiling Dorothea. Much of the film depends on reckoning with the fact we'll never fully know another person, no matter how much we love them or how close we are to them. One must accept and look beyond the tragedy until one sees the wonder in the limitation. That aspect would trip many a performer, but not this tremendous thespian. Bening makes Dorothea multi-dimensional and real, funny as fuck, full of keenly observed ambivalences, and a penchant for feminist cum parental self-examination. Through it all, Bening keeps a semblance of mystery without jeopardizing sentimental clarity. It's a dash of contradiction in the warm creation – a miracle.
20th Century Women is streaming on Max, Paramount Plus, Kanopy, and DirecTV. You can also find it on the other big platforms, available to rent and purchase.
FILM STARS DON'T DIE IN LIVERPOOL (2017) Paul McGuigan
Leave it to Annette Bening to tackle a by-the-numbers insight-less biopic-like drama and escape cliché. Going back to the Gloria Grahame influence of her early work, she plays the Old Hollywood star without capitulating an inch to mimicry, preferring to approach her as a character rather than a historical figure. And so, Bening hones on the self-consciousness of someone who's always thinking of how she's perceived, how she's silently compared to a past self that's frozen unchanged on the silver screen. Her physicality is marvelous, her chemistry with Jamie Bell even better. While it's hard to recommend McGuigan's film as cinema, it's a remarkable acting showcase.
Film Stars Don't Live in Liverpool is available to rent and purchase on Apple TV, Amazon Video, Google Play, and Youtube.
What about you, dear reader? What's your Annette Bening top ten?
Reader Comments (12)
I love that you listed Mars Attacks! She is having so much fun in that loopy movie.
I love Annette Bening, but unfortunately some of these films (Being Julia, Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool, Running With Scissors) only contain flashes of what could have been...she hasn't worked with good enough directors for as rarely as she works.
I don't care for American Beauty and consider her best performances The Grifters and 20th Century Women. I'm a little mixed on The Kids Are All Right...the flattened "lesbian" affect feels so mannered, Nyad looks like more of the same.
This list is definitely missing The American President!
I am not a fan of dive Bening, but I love understated Bening. So, she's of course a million times better in 20th Century Women and The Kids are Alright than she is in Being Julia and American Beauty.
I know this is not a popular opinion, but I ADORE her in Kevin Costner's Open Range, a beautiful film.
I prefer understated Bening as well as I'm with cal roth on Open Range which I think is an extremely underrated film and she is amazing in that.
I can't recommend Running with Scissors at all as it was just a bad movie all around with her being over the top and over-doing it. I didn't like her much in The Kids Are Alright considering that she tried to make Mark Ruffalo's character the bad guy when he really didn't do anything wrong and tried to apologize for it. It's an overrated film.
She's great in The Grifters and 20th Century Women while I also liked her small role in Postcards from the Edge and Ruby Sparks. I'm also with DK on The American President which was the last film by Rob Reiner that is watchable.
A top 10 would look like this
1 - The Kids Are All Right
2 - 20th Century Women
3 - American Beauty
4 - The Grifters
5 - Running With Scissors
7 - Bugsy
8 - Being Julia
9 - The American President
10 - Mars Attacks
I just saw Nyad and was underwhelmed by Bening,It's one of the first time i've actively been unimpressed,maybe it was the direction,those fantasy scenes are out of place,it's a two lead film and Foster is the main focal point and the one who should be getting Best Actress consideration she's not supporting anyone in the film,she has as lots of screen time and plenty of scenes on withourt Bening,it's the best she's been since Contact.
I don't have a clearly differentiated 10, so I'll do a 5 - 1) 20th Century Women, 2) The Grifters, 3) Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool, 4) American Beauty, 5) Valmont. I'll throw in an honorable mention - Richard III. She doesn't have much to do but is solid and memorable.
How great is the 1990 line-up. Same goes to 2004 and 2010. Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud.
i appreciate that you didn't leave out the oscar nominated roles this time -- i thought that was the rule for you ;) -- but I was sad not to see POSTCARDS in the list. I liike what you wrote about FILM STARS DON'T LIVE IN LIVERPOOL but I don't feel the same. I love her so much but i thought Jamie Bell ran circles around her in that movie. I also don't get FACE OF LOVE making this list when BUGSY is *right there*
The American President is such a great star turn from her. It used all of her best qualities and she makes that film sing.
I’ve never heard of the race of love. Excited to see it.
Can't remember if she even says anything in the scene, but that one dream sequence in The Sopranos where Tony dreams that he's sitting at some dinner table with Annette Bening was great. Even her Presence is even to make you sit up and appreciate her.
Her awards attention is similar to Amy Adams. Bening was so good in The Grifters she started being treated like a contender regardless of the later performances. Ditto for Amy Adams post Junebug. They've both been fairly reliable since but neither has outshone those early dazzling performances, both of which were Oscar worthy.
I agree she was good in 20th Century Woman, Valmont and the American President, but wouldn't have nominated her for any of them. Probably wouldn't have nominated her for The Kids Are All Right, Being Julia or American Beauty.
But to end on a positive note, Bening in The Grifters and Adams in Junebug are absolute gems.
The promise of a top ten list of Annette Bening's best performances is tantalizing. I'm eager to see which films make the cut and relive some of her outstanding work. Thanks for the trip down memory lane and the anticipation for what's to come! Geometry Dash World takes platform gaming to new heights! The linear progression through levels and worlds keeps you engaged, and the brief yet challenging stages make it perfect for both quick sessions and longer gaming marathons.