English Speaking Film actors today just aren't that good.

“@Joks

Like Hobsbawm said, the italians nowadays aren’t less intelligent nor have a worse aesthetical taste than they did in the renaissance. What seems to have died in the artists is the felling that the public needs them"

Yes i agree with you but that in itself is extremely problematic, as well as depressing. Art is largely built on faith. without faith, it’s screwed.

Damian Lewis, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Pitt, Michael Shannon, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christian Bale, Cillian Murphy, Michael Peña,

Miasma hit the nail right on the head regarding Philip Seymour Hoffman. “He works very hard.”

Yes, he does and, in most of his films, it shows!

Great screen acting should not be a display of Technique, but a revelation of Character. Great screen acting is Invisible. It does not appear to be acting; it appears to be Being.

And yet, when actors (who should know better) annually choose to honor one of their peers with a gold statue, they almost invariably pick a performance that involves heavy make-up, physical disability, mental breakdown, drug or alcohol addiction, or preferably a combination of these highly Visible elements. A few years ago, the Academy gave a well-deserved award to Morgan Freeman for his quiet, yet forceful performance in Million Dollar Baby, but passed over Clint Eastwood, perhaps the best American screen actor of our time, in favor of the skillful, but flashy work of Jamie Foxx who created a more credible and moving character in Collateral.

One of the best-acted movies in recent years was Sidney Pollack’s The Interpreter, not a good thriller, but an excellent picture about two people who meet in difficult circumstances. Watching Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn together (a brilliant match, she a cool one, and he warm) was a joy: nothing much on the surface, but their Eyes (at least on the big screen) revealed a fire and depth of character that we are never able to see on the stage.

It’s hard to get a committed performance out of an actor living at the hands of tin men. An actor relies on a good script. The population of filmmakers with vision dedication these days is spare, which means we have to sit and watch these English bastards shampoo themselves for a paycheck (this spans the complete cast and crew). Unfortunately, most sheep fear the Shepard, and therefore rarely test the boundaries, perhaps in fear that they wont be let back in.

Naturally, there will always be dedicated performance artists- the performer determines that much. I see a number of very talented actors that are doing the best they can with the available material. Most English films these days, survive solely on the actors; 99.9% of them are picketed by faces. So the real source of malformation is much deeper than the actor.