Daniel Plainview

Daniel Day-Lewis's Daniel Plainview is cinema's greatest portrait of American ambition curdled into misanthropy — an oil prospector who builds an empire by consuming everything and everyone around him. Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is structured as the story of a man who starts with nothing and gains everything, and the tragedy is that gaining everything costs him his humanity. Day-Lewis won his second Best Actor Oscar for a performance that is simultaneously magnetic and repulsive: you cannot stop watching Plainview even as he destroys every relationship he has.

The mustache. The voice — a deep, rolling growl that Day-Lewis based on recordings of John Huston. The way Plainview drinks his milkshake, the way he crawls through mud to stake his claim, the way he tells Eli Sunday that he has 'a competition in me' and the competition wins every time. Day-Lewis builds Plainview detail by detail into the most complete character study in 21st-century cinema. There is no moment where you see the acting. There is only Plainview, fully realized and utterly terrifying.

Plainview is the villain as protagonist — a man driven by greed, rage, and a contempt for humanity that is so total it has become his religion. The final scene, where he murders Eli Sunday in a bowling alley while screaming 'I'm finished!', is the most unhinged climax in modern cinema. It is Day-Lewis at his most feral, and it is extraordinary.