The 10 Best Performances Of 2016 (So Far)

2) Alden Ehrenreich – Hail Caesar!

It takes a certain kind of confidence, insouciance and sex appeal to play Han Solo. In the Coen brothers’ screwball comedy Hail Caesar!, the future captain of the Millennium Falcon, Alden Ehrenreich, displays none of that. His Hobie Doyle, a minor star of cowboy pictures, is no emblem of cool but a naive, lovable doofus that can’t even manage to nail down one line of the new period drama he’s working on.

Ehrenreich may not be Han Solo material in Hail Caesar! (he’s a versatile actor: elsewhere, in the likes of Tetro, he’s proved he has the goods to headline the solo Solo movie), but he nonetheless gives perhaps the comic performance of the year in it. Always believable despite the character’s outrageousness, it’s a testament to Ehrenreich’s skills that in a cast including George Clooney, Ralph Fiennes and Scarlett Johansson he’s the inarguable standout.