Best Movies Starring Only One Actor

Ryan Reynolds stars as a civilian truck driver in Iraq whose convoy is attacked by insurgents. He awakens inside a coffin, with only a lighter and his cellphone, battling panic and claustrophobia hoping to be rescued.

Critics hailed Robert Redford’s performance as a lone sailor traversing the Indian Ocean who discovers his boat is taking on water after a collision with a container that tumbled off a ship. After barely surviving a violent storm, his supplies are dwindling and his hopes rest on sailing into a shipping lane. All the while, he takes stock of his life and contemplates his mortality.

Robert Altman’s often unsettling look at former President Richard Nixon in retirement in New Jersey depicts the disgraced ex-chief executive as he recalls his upbringing and tries to absolve himself of his role in the Watergate scandal. Philip Baker Hall’s performance as Nixon was lauded as “staggeringly good” by critic David Butterworth.

“Compelling” and “consuming” are descriptions from Rotten Tomatoes critics of Tom Hardy’s performance in “Locke.” Hardy plays a man whose life disintegrates in one day: He leaves hist a job supervising a large pour of concrete to be with a woman giving birth to his child, conceived in a one-night stand. While traveling to be with her, he confesses his infidelity to his wife who bans him from home – and he also loses his job.

In “The Machinist,” Christian Bale plays the title role as a man so afflicted with insomnia that it causes weight loss and a lack of concentration on the job that leads to a terrible accident involving a fellow worker. That further accelerates his descent into self-loathing and self-pity. Rotten Tomatoes critic Victoria Alexander described Bale’s performance as “brilliant, harrowing.”