For Fans of Mahershala Ali

Barry Jenkins' Moonlight is the film that made the conversation about Mahershala Ali unavoidable. He is onscreen for perhaps 20 minutes, yet he grounds everything. Juan is a drug dealer who becomes, improbably, the gentlest father figure a boy could find, and Ali plays the contradiction without flinching, without telegraphing guilt, without asking for sympathy. The film won Best Picture; Ali won Best Supporting Actor. Neither outcome is surprising once you have seen what he does in the pool scene alone.

Season 3 of True Detective never quite got its due because Season 1 cast such a long shadow. But Ali's Wayne Hays, aging across three timelines, memory fraying as conscience holds firm, is one of the great TV performances of recent years. The Ozark grit is real. The sense of a man watching himself disappear, and the question of whether what he did was justice or something uglier, is exactly the kind of slow-building dread Ali handles better than almost anyone working.

If you follow Ali for his particular brand of controlled intensity, a few peers operate in the same frequency. Wendell Pierce brings the same structural integrity to The Wire and Treme. Anthony Mackie, a co-star in The Hate U Give universe, carries weight with similar economy. Outside of American cinema, Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave, Children of Men) and David Oyelowo (Selma, A United Kingdom) share Ali's preference for characters who bear history in their posture.