Elle Fanning is a fresh curd with a film-school edge: soft enough to disappear into a frame, hard enough to hold a whole film on her shoulders. She knows how to be seen without demanding it.
Start with The Neon Demon. Jesse arrives in Los Angeles with a face and nothing else, and Fanning lets that hollowness curdle slowly into something terrifying, barely moving until the moment she does. Somewhere showed it earlier: a young woman drifting through her father's life, a performance built almost entirely from what she chooses not to do. The Beguiled turns up the pressure; Corporal McBurney disrupts a house full of women, and Fanning plays the one who watches longest before she acts. 20th Century Women is the opposite register, a teenager asking difficult questions in her own home, sharper than the adults assume. Catherine in The Great crumbles the princess into something hilarious and human at once, petulant one moment and genuinely lost the next, and she carries a whole series on that fractured charm.
What matters is the restraint. She can do big and small in the same film without either cancelling the other out. Fanning melts slowly, and she knows exactly when to let the cold show through.
Highest rated review
Margo
Margo's Got Money Troubles
2026
7/7cheeses
last week
This would not have been an easy role, to make Margot likeable, to make you understand her choices, but Elle Fanning did such an incredible and engaging job. Also, she is super comfortable in her own skin, even with all the breastfeeding, as the audience you never felt awkward, it was just such a normal portrayal of new motherhood. Her range is incredible, when you compare this against her role in A Complete Unknown you see just the breadth of what she is capable of.
