"In Christian Bale's, I see an incredible actorly thing, but with Rami Malek, you see a role that just really connected with audiences," said Variety's chief film critic Peter Debruge.

As an exercise in actorly transformation, joyless determination and uncompromising tone, this procedural whodunit set in the city's seediest precincts and arid, desolate outer reaches can't help but inspire admiration.

Shakespeare has a lot to answer for - he had Richard III stitched up - and I want to unpick some of these stitches, to reconsider the historical impact of a the hellish 'bottled spider', and to have some fun with actorly depiction, deconstructing Richard with a female comedic performer, with a disability perspective."

On a fall afternoon at a sidewalk cafe in Texas, he orders shrimp fajitas but apologetically skips the tortillas thanks to a semi-strict regimen for an upcoming role, perhaps the most actorly thing about him.

Grant is marvellous, never overdoing the pantomime villainy, seething with actorly vanity as he shares his evil plans with a roomful of mannequins done up as Hamlet, Macbeth, etc.

The baritone employed the same approach to this role as to that in Hamlet, which she describes as "actorly, but based on a reduction of vocal and histrionic spectacle ...

The second, consistent pleasure was Juliet Stevenson, who spoke extracts from the plays and sonnets with lucid elegance and a refreshing absence of actorly preening.

Her name was Annelise (there's a fine actorly name for you).

Expect raves, iconic music and dodgy tracksuits ThiS iS ThomAS Actorly chat on Did you have any idea you'd be playing Shaun for this long?

Mark Ruffalo ("Foxcatcher"), as an Olympic medalist victimized by one man's delusion of grandeur, toned down his actorly mannerisms and physically transformed himself into a believable wrestling champ.

I would constantly screw up and forget props, or show up at the wrong entrance." She laughs now, but it's clear that her actorly ineptitude was a source of pain and confusion; her difficulties culminated during a fateful performance of Guys and Dolls: "For the scene where Adelaide brings the present, I showed up without the present.

That "inner life" so rapidly became the metric of actorly evaluation says much about the role of the commercial theater review in indoctrinating actors, audiences, and--in a self-fulfilling loop--other reviewers in a language of inferiority, a language so familiar to us that we might fail to register how recent, pervasive, and remarkable it is.