For Fans of Jack Nicholson

Roman Polanski's 1974 masterwork gave Nicholson Jake Gittes, a character who is clever, venal, and ultimately helpless against the machinery of power around him. The performance is meticulous where Nicholson's work often favors explosion: he keeps the lid on, which makes the ending land like a physical blow. Robert Towne's screenplay is the finest original script in American cinema, and Nicholson honors it by trusting the material rather than overwhelming it.

Kubrick pushed Nicholson through dozens of takes to strip away his theatrical instincts, and what emerged was something unprecedented: a man coming apart from the inside, the charm curdling in real time. Jack Torrance is a cautionary figure for anyone who has ever felt their worst impulses gathering momentum. Stephen King famously disliked the adaptation, but the film's power lives in the gap between the book's supernatural mechanics and Nicholson's psychological specificity.

Before the superstardom, there was Bob Dupea: a classical pianist hiding in oil fields, unable to love anyone without destroying them. Bob Rafelson's 1970 film caught Nicholson at the precise moment his intelligence and his recklessness were equally matched, and neither had yet been smoothed into product. The chicken-salad-sandwich scene is famous because everyone has wanted to do that at least once. The ending, in which Dupea simply keeps driving, is honest about a type of American man who has never had a better portrait.

Tim Burton's 1989 Batman was engineered as a pop spectacle, and Nicholson walked in and made it a character study on his own terms. His Joker is vain, funny, and genuinely frightening, because the comedy and the violence come from the same place. He was paid a percentage of the film's gross and earned more than any actor had earned from a single film at that point. The performance is often underrated precisely because it succeeded commercially, but watch it again: it holds the whole picture together.