The best of Laura Linney: You Can Count on Me

1. You Can Count on Me
2. The Squid and the Whale
3. Mystic River
4. The Savages
5. The Truman Show
6. Kinsey
Laura Linney is one of my favorite actresses — all the technical accomplishment of Streep, with none of the self-regard. Her role in You Can Count on me is so defining that one suspects she is playing someone quite close to herself: a decent, generous woman whose helpfulness towards others bleeds into a slight primness, or blindness, around her own needs and desires. She's so nice — that killer word — although anyone in any doubt that she can loose her inner Lady Macbeth need only look at her wife in Mystic River. Here's the thing though: I like nice. It's under-rated. Calling someone 'nice' is a dismissive kind of modern snobbery — the same snobbery that rewards the dark, gruelling and gritty over the funny or delightful. Linney's acting is so full of warm observations about the odd stuff people get up to that its like seeing an old friend on the street.