Movies where your favorites actresses/actors got outshined

I don't think my favorite actor gets outshined much but sometimes it happens - I don't think Kitty Winn is the better lead at all actually - I think that Pacino heralded a seismic change in acting and a whole lot of actresses could have been Winn.

But Russell Crowe in The Insider, Michelle Pfeiffer in Frankie and Johnny, and Christopher Walken in Stand Up Guys did it.......sometimes you're there to just support or in the case of Crowe you catch lightning in a bottle where his performance far exceeds anything else in his Hollywood career and everybody is in great form surrounding him too.

I'll third that I guess. Winn really did steal that movie.

Hackman in Scarecrow was another early 70's Pacino film where I felt he got overshadowed somewhat in a role of roughly equal size and scope. Gene Hackman really imposed his will on that movie, thought Pacino was pretty good.

That one to me is sort of an equal greatness in each performance - in Pacino's pantheon he has a few of those Scarecrow, Heat, Phil Spector ........ones where one performance without the other would cause the film to fail. 

Hmm...I sort of think Hackman sort of finnessed Pacino to the point where his perfromance feels significantly more dominant and less derivative. Pacino is fine, by I think he was still in the early stages of his film career doing his Dustin Hoffman impersonation in that film (sort of like Paul Newman spent a couple of his early films "doing Brando", before finding himself).

Not really .......he didn't really have that Newman/Brando thing except in looks to Hoffman not so much characterizations at all.  Hoffman's Ratso is a dangerous character - he could literally kill you - and Pacino's isn't dangerous at all - and now two people have mentioned him being outshined in his first 6 performances which is the greatest streak ever for an American actor - it's just doesn't stand up when you analyze it. That's why that is the greatest streak ever, because no one outshined him then

Hackman is exactly how you know him to be at the start right up until the end (with some slight hints) - but Pacino's character is the pulse of the film, the odd detours, the humor, the reveals about the character as you go on and on, the underlying darkness is all on him - sometimes without speaking - the scene after the strip tease at the bar for example. Really it's much more like Heat and Phil Spector to me - take one performance away - and I mean performance not character - and it collapses.

I think that's more of an opinion than a fact, though there is nothing outlandish about wanting to argue it. Pacino had a great 70's run, and cumulatively it deserves high praise (especially when you put his actual big gun performances and movies in there, like the Godfather films, DDA, Serpico), but you don't have to think he gave the best performance in every film to see it as a great run.

I made a thread on this ages ago, but I think Matthew McConaughey may have the most impressive streak of any American screen actor (so much so that his streak has become an adjective), yet career wise, he's not someone I put at GOAT level. So while streaks are nice to have, they are not careers. Pacino's standing isn't built on a consecutive run of 6 performances  It's built over several decades of work. Something McConaughey doesn't have to the level of others.

Dude, it's alright if people think an actor was better than Pacino in a single film during his early years. It's a simple preference, no need to try to psychoanalyze someone's preference just because you don't share it (a road that can go both ways, by the by). If you don't agree with it or you prefer Pacino for your own reasons, that's all good but don't dismiss or try to explain someone else's opinion as being faulty or relying entirely on some kind of revisionist context. Hackman and Winn's performances aren't chopped liver, they were widely praised even at the time - hell, Winn won Best Actress at Cannes - so it's not like someone preferring their performances over peak Pacino is some bizarre phenomena that needs investigating.

Maybe but you have to do more than just say to me ___________ was better than ________ otherwise put the thread in the lists or something which leaves no room for discussion  - are we not allowed now to discuss performances in an acting thread on the acting board now - wtf - since when?

You do realize that Winn winning Best Actress at Cannes means she was the Best Actress at Cannes only - not that she was better than her co-star right. I'm not sure since you're throwing it in my face like I didn't know? You do realize I praised both those performances right  - and Hackman's in particular I said was an equivalent to him.

If you're going to chastise me for "revisionist context" (what? where?) ............Jesus......what is your problem today mike, it's alright if you stay out of it entirely and let pupdurcs respond if he wants to yanno.....just sayin........

One I would say fits this thread for me is a performance I've talked about a lot (and especially in the old IMDB days) is Ian Bannen in The Offence.

The picture when I saw it, I though was just a Sean Connery picture - I saw it when I was very young and indeed he's terrific here but Bannen a more than just solid character gave a performance of such guile and keen intelligence I immediately thought this role should have been played by no less than Olivier and Olivier is an all-time fave of mine. One year earlier in Sleuth, Olivier gave a somewhat similar performance for an entirely different effect - some of the best and most venomous (and a times funny) line readings on film of it's time. Bannen however doesn't play anything for straight laughs here at all - it's all fragmented through how we hear it and how Connery hears it - even his humor per se has an undercurrent of the blackest of hearts and the darkest of deeds.

He's not only great himself but especially in the way he mocks Connery in speech and manner and draws things out in him too. He knew Connery and had worked with him before and it's precisely the kind of performance where say if you were drunk and you wanted to get under the other person's skin you know exactly how to go about it.

Back in the 90s, I watched Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead because of Dreyfus. I ended up falling for Oldman and Roth.

Sorry pacionyes ... yes, Phantom Thread is the perfect example of this to me: DDL is amazing, one of the very best performances of his career and such a high note to go out on (presumably), he's so damn watchable and it's easily one of the funniest cinematic performances in recent memory ... and yet he's surprisingly out-shined by both Krieps and Manville. Krieps gives one of the most confident and fiercest performances I've seen of any actress of her age/experience, a true force to be reckoned with, manages the vulnerability of the character beautifully along with her more cunning side -- she's a true natural talent, a mesmerizingly seamless (sorry, bad pun...) performance, one of the very best of this decade (can she please get more roles soon??). And Manville turns in what is probably my favorite performance by a supporting actress in at least the past few years ... she does more with her eyes alone in that role than most actors can do with their entire bodies throughout their careers. Her demeanor is just staggering, her stare is iconic.

Together the three certainly make up some sort of holy trinity, and I hate saying that Krieps and Manville are "better" than DDL because that seems to undervalue his performance, which I would never want to do. He is truly phenomenal ... but Krieps and Manville both leave an even deeper impression on me, a near-impossible feat when sharing the frame with a GOAT in his top form. 

They were both outshined by Manny the chauffer...