Amy Adams
36 films, including Nocturnal Animals and Arrival (2016).
An air of expectancy is what Amy Adams has brought to the movies ever since her breakthrough, in Junebug (2005), an avid acceptance of come-what-may that made her exiled princess in Enchanted such a piquant charmer. The most un-showy of actresses, a smooth canvas each time out, Adams buoys nearly every movie she’s in, her ready calm establishing an oasis amid the testosterone sweatbox of The Fighter and the hurly-burly of American Hustle (both directed by David O. Russell), keeping the multi-narrative crisscrosses of Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals on track, and elevating her performance in the critical and box-office hit Arrival—Denis Villeneuve’s Jungian science-fiction meditation, in which the aliens communicate through enso ink circles, as if blowing Zen smoke rings—to a state of grace. She’s been nominated five times for an Oscar: perhaps this will be the year—finally!—that she gets to lug one home.