AFT Awards: Best Limited Performance

This is the twentieth category of the 2nd Annual AFT Film Awards to be announced. The AFT Awards are my own personal choices for the best in film of each year and the best in television of each season. The AFT Film Awards include the traditional Oscar categories and a number of additional specific honors. Nominees are pictured in the order I’ve ranked them.

The winner:
Thekla Reuten (In Bruges) had a brilliant small part as the pregnant hotel head whose unwillingness to lay down got her caught in the middle of the film’s most edgy and violent characters.

Other nominees:
Peter Sarsgaard (Elegy) was perfect to play Ben Kingsley’s tortured son desperate to share his problems with the father who always neglected him. Amy Ryan (Changeling) has been doing so many diverse things lately (from “Gone Baby Gone” to “The Office”), and she’s great as a fellow psychiatric ward patient who is not prepared to put up with what the doctors do to her. Emile Hirsch (Milk) teamed with Sean Penn for the second year in a row, and showed that his interactions with people are actually quite entertaining – the look makes the part. Marie-Josée Croze (Tell No One) was the focus of her film, but was hardly in it, but for the moments she was, she was entirely refreshing and real.