How on earth do you condense 26 years of cinema into just 50 performances? It can’t be done, of course – though The Independent’s culture desk have taken their best stab at it.
In whittling down a list of the best performances of the 21st century, we enforced a few rules: firstly, that each actor could only appear on this once. Every performance had to have been in a feature-length film that premiered between 1 January, 2000 and the present day.
