Best Movies Starring Only One Actor

Rotten Tomatoes critics hailed David Oyelowo’s performance in “Nightingale” as “breathtaking.” Oyelowo, who played Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in “Selma,” here portrays an unstable man who’s killed his mother and talks to people on a video log about his obsession with a former Army friend. Critics also liked the use of the one-man, one-set format of the movie.

In this thriller set almost entirely in and around a New York City paid telephone booth (yes, they used to exist), Colin Farrell plays a media consultant trapped in a phone booth after a caller tells him that he’ll be killed by a sniper if he tries to leave tit. The film boasted a strong cast that included Kiefer Sutherland, Forest Whitaker, and Radha Mitchell.

Will Smith reprises the role made famous by Charlton Heston in “The Omega Man” in a third screen adaptation of Richard Matheson’s novel about an Army biologist who survives a man-made plague that’s created flesh-eating zombies on the hunt for him. Rotten Tomatoes critics called Smith’s performance “mesmerizing.”

Christopher Plummer plays American acting giant John Barrymore, who, months before his passing, is rehearsing for a revival of his triumphant performance in “Richard III,” which he played in 1920. Rotten Tomatoes critic James Plath called Plummer’s one-man performance a “tour de force.”

“The Last Man on Earth,” the first of three cinematic adaptations (so far) of Richard Matheson’s novel “I Am Legend,” stars Vincent Price as the title character, a man immune to a plague that has turned most of humanity into vampires.