Best Movies Starring Only One Actor

Director Darren Aronofsky tells the story of the psychological disintegration of a math wiz in the film “Pi.” Sean Gullette played Max Cohen, a numbers genius who’s built a supercomputer in his Chinatown apartment. He stumbles upon a mysterious number and tells his mentor and a religious friend. His life is endangered when thugs acting on behalf of powerful Wall Street interests want the mysterious number for profit.

“Duel,” a TV movie, is one of Steven Spielberg’s earliest efforts. The gripping film stars television veteran Dennis Weaver (“McCloud,” “Gunsmoke”) as an electronics salesman who gets involved in an escalating cat-and-mouse game with the unidentified driver of an oil tanker on a highway.

“Life of Pi” won four Oscars, including one for director Ang Lee. After deciding to sell their zoo in India, Santosh and Gita Patel and their three sons leave on a freighter bound for Canada with their few remaining animals. A violent storm sinks the boat and only the teenage son, Pi (Suraj Sharma), survives. He finds refuge in a boat, but so does a Bengal tiger. What follows is a story about trust and survival.

Delphine Seyring stars as a widowed mother of a teenage boy living in Brussels whose daily ritual involves cleaning, cooking, shopping and working as a prostitute before her son comes home from school. When her routine is disrupted, it leads to deadly consequences. The film has a cult following and was named by a critics poll in the British monthly magazine Sight & Sound in 2022 as the greatest film of all time.

America’s Everyman, Tom Hanks, is on the screen by himself for most of this film. He plays a driven FedEx executive, the only survivor of a flight over the Pacific Ocean, who washes ashore on a deserted island. Though he survives for years, his repeated failed attempts to leave the island push him to the brink of suicide.