Olivia Colman

In Peep Show (2003), Olivia Colman's Sophie Chapman can make a man's excuse look worse simply by reacting to it. David Mitchell and Robert Webb supply the self-justification; her face gives us reason to doubt it. We rate her highly for the precision of those responses, which let Sophie surprise us even in a comedy dominated by its two leads. She is funny without having to compete for the next line.

The move from television comedy to the dramatic recognition of Tyrannosaur (2011) and Broadchurch (2013) made that ability harder to overlook. Her characters' feelings are often close to the surface, however awkward or unpleasant the behaviour they produce. As Queen Anne in The Favourite (2018), her swearing is funny because we can hear the hurt behind it. That is the standard her lighter films sometimes fail to meet.

Wicked Little Letters (2024) gives her Edith Swan, whose careful good behaviour is beginning to look like a terrible bargain. With her eyes lowered as she reads the obscene letters, Colman makes the pause before a foul word funny. Her scenes watching Jessie Buckley's Rose Gooding are better still: we cannot quite tell how much of Edith's disapproval is envy. Thea Sharrock's film keeps returning to the swearing when Colman has already made us interested in the unhappiness beneath it.

Paul King's Wonka (2023) asks less of her as Mrs Scrubbit, the bad-tempered boarding-house keeper working alongside Tom Davis's Bleacher. She commits to the pantomime, but the part gives us fewer reasons to look closely. There is pleasure in seeing her be broadly unpleasant, though we would rather a film gave her something beyond the costume and the temper.

Dougal Wilson's Paddington in Peru (2024) finds a better use for that broadness in her singing Reverend Mother. We laughed at the greeting because Colman holds the smile long enough for its determined cheerfulness to become ridiculous. The film then leaves her offscreen for stretches when it could use her, one reason our affection for the performance exceeds our enthusiasm for the sequel. We would start with Peep Show, and allow a break when the embarrassment becomes too much.