Leonardo DiCaprio’s 10 Most Incredible Performances

It's been a long time coming - he got his first nomination 22 years ago, and there have been three other AMPAS acting nods since - but 2016 looks like the year that the 'Where's my Oscar?' memes end and Leonardo DiCaprio at last wins that Academy Award. The competition might be tough (Michael Fassbender, for one, will put up a fight), but at this point likely no one is going to stop Leo from taking home the big prize. The Revenant features what by all accounts is a DiCaprio performance built by months of hardship, spent in freezing corners of Canada and Argentina, eating raw animal and sleeping in horse carcass. It's a tough, fiercely committed turn from an actor who's before our eyes gone from a young pretender to one of the most reliable leading men in Hollywood; and, when on-form, one of the best. Though just 41, DiCaprio has been acting professionally for close to three decades already. In that time, he's delivered some truly stunning performances, and here are his ten best (excluding The Revenant). 10) Blood Diamond For a man of such considerable charm, DiCaprio does slimy surprisingly well. To play the chain-smoking and entirely self-serving gun runner Danny Archer in Edward Zwick's Blood Diamond, DiCaprio virtually spits out dialogue like venom. He hits the Afrikaans accent a tad hard, but the arrogant swagger and self-satisfied air are spot-on. It's Djimon Hounsou's film really, but DiCaprio is no less impressive as an entitled white African, still referring to his home country of Zimbabwe as the colonial 'Rhodesia'. Both Archer and DiCaprio become less interesting as Zwick sends the character on a journey of redemption come the end, but for the most part the movie shows us just how satisfying it can be to watch DiCaprio go bad. 9) The Departed Martin Scorsese's finest working relationship with an actor remains that which he shared with Robert De Niro, but a look at his recent filmography shows his pairing with DiCaprio comes a close second. Together they've made five movies in total, and undoubtedly one of their most entertaining - and one of the most successful for DiCaprio's progression as an actor - is cops-and-robbers epic The Departed. As Billy Costigan, the young cop infiltrating Boston's Irish-American mob, DiCaprio is required to be permanently anxious. It's a high energy performance, conveying the paranoia and fear of a man out of his depth in a world of violence. This is DiCaprio forced to subvert any leading man heroism and remain in a constant state of desperation; throughout, he looks like someone struggling just to keep it together. 8) The Aviator DiCaprio's first film with Scorsese was Gangs of New York, but the pair didn't really hit their collaborative stride until The Aviator. Where in Gangs DiCaprio seems uncertain of himself, battling with an accent (never his forte) and struggling to catch up with Daniel Day-Lewis, in The Aviator we find him inching closer to being comfortable with the leading man status Hollywood has been thrusting upon him his whole career. DiCaprio's no physical match of Howard Hughes, but he captures the eccentricity, the ambition and the frustration of being a genius restrained by ever-worsening psychological ailments. As the film progresses, DiCaprio is required to become increasingly tic-y, as Hughes' OCD reaches debilitating levels, but it never seems forced or artificial. It's an attractive, charming performance giving way to an all-too pained one. 7) Django Unchained In Django Unchained, which features Leo's one and only strictly 'bad guy' role, DiCaprio doesn't just tiptoe into the waters of villainy: he fully submerges himself. Calvin Candie, the effete plantation owner, slaver and antagonist to the heroes of Quentin Tarantino's western, is a man content with being a bloodthirsty devil. He's strictly irredeemable. Putting any ego aside, DiCaprio rejects any semblance of nice guy-ness to take on Candie. He plays it gleefully wicked, clearly having fun indulging his nasty side and crafting a memorable baddie under the guidance of Tarantino. The part borders on the cartoonish, but DiCaprio makes Candie believable enough to be effectively terrifying. 6) The Basketball Diaries Before DiCaprio became a mega-star post-Titanic, he was making a solid go at a more indie-based career path, starring in darker dramatic fare like The Basketball Diaries. Scott Kalvert's movie is about a New York City kid, DiCaprio's Jim, curtailing his dreams of becoming a basketball star by entering a world of drugs and crime. A feelgood film it isn't. What saves it from becoming a monotonous misery-fest is an electric DiCaprio, thrilling to watch even in the film's most harrowing moments. It's a surprisingly rough and raw turn, and a shockingly realistic depiction of a person in the throes of addiction. The scene in which Jim asks his estranged mother for money, before quickly turning aggressive in his heroin haze, remains one of DiCaprio's most powerful moments. 5) Revolutionary Road The film that reunites Leo and Kate Winslet, famously star-crossed lovers in Titanic, could barely be further from the movie that made the pair famous. There's no love or romance to be found in Revolutionary Road - here, in this tale of a marriage going sour, there's only misery and middle-class ennui. So, it's a slog, but also an excellent platform for DiCaprio to suffer, shout and cry to his heart's content. Unfolding like a fine stage play, Sam Mendes' 50s-set existential drama is always building to an explosion. When Winslet's April and DiCaprio's Frank finally blow up at one another, it reveals a crucial truth of modern cinema: that Leonardo DiCaprio is incredibly good at yelling. Frank isn't always easy to like, but DiCaprio ensures he at least remains endearingly human. 4) Inception Inception's Dom Cobb is a deceptively simple part for DiCaprio. Christopher Nolan's mind-bending sci-fi epic doesn't ask its actors to reach deep within themselves or deliver blistering monologues. Cobb for one remains cool and collected for most of the movie - and it's a testament to DiCaprio's skill and innate screen presence that he makes the character so immensely watchable. If anyone needed a single one as evidence, Inception is the movie that proves Leonardo DiCaprio's star quality. It's a quality he often denies in his work, taking on as he does so many dark, complex roles. Cobb is the kind of character that, once upon a time, the likes of Robert Redford and Paul Newman would have been hired to play - great stars and people that DiCaprio so effortlessly emulates when he dares to be a straightforward leading man. 3) What's Eating Gilbert Grape DiCaprio was just 19 when he received his first Oscar nomination for What's Eating Gilbert Grape. This was before Romeo + Juliet and Titanic made him one of the biggest names on the planet. It's hard to imagine him taking on a role like his one in Gilbert Grape now: it's a part that totally eschews vanity and asks the actor to take an enormous risk. We should be thankful we have this one at all, then, as DiCaprio's performance as Arnie Grape is one of the defining cinematic portrayals of developmental disability. It's difficult to believe DiCaprio spent only "a few days" in the company of mentally handicapped teens as research: Arnie's screeches of excitement, outbursts and involuntary hoots and hollers seem absolutely genuine, in a way that DiCaprio never makes patronizing or offensive. 2) Shutter Island Though it has its pulpy charms, the horror-noir Shutter Island is one of Martin Scorsese's lesser efforts, a well-crafted B-side in a career full of solid As. Still, there's a tortured performance at its core that stands as one of DiCaprio's very best. He is disturbed war veteran-turned-cop Teddy Daniels, investigating the disappearance of a woman on Shutter Island, home to an asylum for the criminally insane. Only he isn't really. Shutter Island is really about a man coming to terms with his own violent, confused past; it's a platform for DiCaprio to display his skill as a performer, being wound up like a spring for much of the film before he finally crumbles. The stage is set for the actor to expose his soul as he does in no other film: Teddy's final moments are, thanks to DiCaprio, terrifying and tragic all at once. 1) The Wolf Of Wall Street The culmination of two careers running simultaneously, that of the charismatic movie star and that of the dynamic risk-taking actor, DiCaprio's performance in Scorsese's dark financial corruption comedy The Wolf of Wall Street is one for the ages. It's already become a legendary turn, Leo cursing, ingesting narcotics and indulging in lewd behavior with zero restraint, in a fearless tour-de-force. It's a revelatory performance, not least because DiCaprio unveils a heretofore unseen comic timing. It has the actor pushing audience sympathy to its limits, playing the most hateful man and somehow still keeping us hooked for the entire three hour ride. It's because you can't take your eyes off him - as Jordan Belfort, DiCaprio is at his most despicable, but he's s0 manically committed, so convincingly immersed that all you can do is marvel.