Winona Ryder

Joyce Byers is all cigarettes and grabbing hands in Stranger Things (2016), and Winona Ryder plays her as a woman who was struggling long before her son vanished. The grabbing matters: Joyce seems unable to wait for anyone else to understand. We found her panic upsetting because Ryder makes her seem so close to exhaustion. There is no attempt to make that distress tidy or endearing. Matt and Ross Duffer's tightly built first run sustains that urgency; the later runs grow bigger without improving on it.

Beetlejuice (1988), with Ryder as Lydia Deetz, established the outsider casting that still shapes how we think of her. Her expressive eyes suit such characters: she can make their feelings clear without much dialogue. Tim Burton brought her back as Kim in Edward Scissorhands (1990), a suburban fairy tale we recommend despite its blunt plotting. Johnny Depp and Dianne Wiest do much to earn its tenderness, helped by a neighbourhood that has been carefully thought through. It gives the performances room to matter alongside the scenery.

Her period work makes the label of eccentric outsider look too narrow. As May Welland in The Age of Innocence (1993) and Jo March in Little Women (1994), she found room for subtlety and for vulnerability that did not rule out resolve. We would keep those performances in mind before mistaking Joyce's agitation for the only thing Ryder can do. The renewed prominence of Stranger Things came through a mother rather than another young outsider, a useful change for an actor so strongly associated with her early parts.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024) returns her to Lydia, now the mother of a teenage daughter played by Jenna Ortega. Burton plainly enjoys the reunion, but the script supplies more plots than the film can manage. There is fun here, though it comes in bursts, and familiarity with these people cannot fix the overcrowding. For Ryder, start with the first run of Stranger Things, where the writing gives all that nervous energy a job to do.