Carey Mulligan

Kate Stables says An Education loses the anger of the memoir behind it and leaves its heroine almost impregnable, then gives the key to that transformation to Carey Mulligan's playing: an uncannily self-assured performance, blending an indomitable sharpness of mind with the wonder of someone relishing a new world. Praise and fault issue from one place, then, since on her account the heroine never feels genuinely in danger. Wally Hammond writes that in Drive she stays at best a contrivance of plot and at worst a cipher, laying the fault on the director's inability to draw women as fully sympathetic. At the 2018 Independent Spirit ceremony the Robert Altman Award went to Mudbound, from 2017; a film's director, its casting director and its ensemble cast share that award, and Mulligan is inside the ensemble.