(Continued)

5. "Bad Santa" (2003)
What self-righteous Grinch could resist this movie? Down and dirty, even vile, with a suicidal, child-loathing, boozing horndog at its sulfuric heart, "Bad Santa" thoroughly cleanses holiday goo and saccharine sentiment from the palate. Skinny and unshaven, tattoos on parade, Billy Bob's Willie T. Stokes shines as a sublimely sleazy Kris Kringle, decked out in grimy T-shirt and red suit with dirty-gray fur trim. Mumbling bracingly obscene bons mots through his ratty beard, this department store Santa endures a face full of chocolate courtesy of a spewing toddler and occasionally loses control of his bladder. He's W.C. Fields in excelsis, totally unplugged, anorexic and sporting the face of a terminally depressed hound. You'll treasure totally pickled St. Nick wavering in space, his bleary eyes cherishing Lauren Graham's curvalicious rump as she perches on a ladder trimming a Christmas tree -- then reaching out to worshipfully splay his palm over its roundness as if he'd finally snared the Holy Grail.

4. "Monster's Ball" (2001)
Until he gets shed of both son and father, exemplars of broken and brutal manhood, Hank Grotowski is condemned to solitary confinement, emotionally speaking. Thornton marks the slow defrosting of this paralyzed soul not through supersize epiphanies or dramatic curtain-chewing, but through a process of gradual relaxation. Grotowski falls awkwardly into forms of natural decency -- especially as he pursues a redemptive relationship with a black woman (Halle Berry) whose husband the former prison guard escorted to the electric chair. Hunched uncomfortably in the far corner of a couch, he watches the drunken Leticia (her son's just died) act out awful grief, a scarecrow ignorant of the rules of spontaneous human engagement. When pain bends her double, Hank lays a tentatively comforting hand on her back, takes it away, queries helplessly: "What do you want me to do?" "Make me feel good," she begs, getting to the heart of the matter. Their coupling is red-hot and violent; it's as though they mean to literally get inside each other. "I felt you," marvels Grotowski, as though he's been dead for a lifetime. Berry's flashier performance rightfully caught Oscar's eye, but Thornton's quiet expressions of newfound tenderness were half the show.

3. "A Simple Plan" (1998)
In this rural noir, two brothers find big bucks in a crashed plane, setting off a slo-mo explosion of greed and death. Billy Bob's Jacob is the ugliest of ducklings, the antithesis of his college-educated sibling (Bill Paxton), who's blessed with a picture-perfect life undisturbed by the slightest glimmer of self-knowledge. In contrast, Jacob squints out at a perplexing world through ugly, duct-taped glasses, revealing big, yellowed teeth every time he fends off trouble with a stupid-ass grin. Ears poking through lank strings of long hair pasted down by a black watch cap, his pudgy face bathed in a sickly pallor, this slow-witted grotesque exudes both sweetness and menace. Opening up to his emotionally stunted brother, in the front seat of their pickup, Jacob confesses that a girl he dated for a month in high school spent time with him just to win a $100 bet. Camera holds on Jacob's sad-sack face as the middle-aged virgin recalls, without a smidgen of self-pity, the only taste of intimacy he's ever known. By film's end, Thornton's dummy, Karl Childers' kissin' cousin (see below), has quietly evolved into the one moral touchstone in a morass of murder and betrayal. (The performance earned Billy Bob an Oscar nom.)

2. "Sling Blade" (1996)
Thornton had "done" Karl Childers, among other characters, onstage and filmed a 25-minute short ("Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade") some two years before getting green-lighted to direct and star in the film that earned an Academy Award nom for acting and a win for writing. His immersion -- physical and emotional -- in Childers is total. Who can forget Karl's undershot jaw, Halloween-pumpkin smile, eternally furrowed brow, the monklike tonsure and grating voice, every other sentence punctuated by an emphatic "Mm-hmm"? And, of course, the Ed Grimley posture and walk. But Thornton never lets Karl fall into caricature, consciously casting his holy fool as kin not to Gump, but to a more mysterious angel: Chauncey Gardner (Peter Sellers) in "Being There." Savor the several conversations between Billy Bob's Frankenstein monster and the fatherless boy (Lucas Black) he's befriended: sitting by a woods-fringed pond (once in silvery moonlight), these old souls speak to each other in the slow, sweet rhythms of shared wisdom and pain. Born into unspeakable evil, Karl Childers is an Old Testament son -- then father -- who kills out of primal righteousness and selfless sacrifice.

1. "The Man Who Wasn't There" (2001)
Ironically, it's the coupling of Roger Deakins' elegant black and white cinematography with the affectless landscape of Thornton's gaunt face that brilliantly, beautifully focuses "The Man Who Wasn't There." Kafka would have loved the Coen brothers' blackly comedic excursion into existential angst, the noirish saga of a dim bulb gone so spiritually and emotionally gray he's more ghost than flesh and blood. The angular Thornton lounges in doorways, a silhouette trailing perpetual cigarette smoke, watching the self-absorbed antics of his unfaithful wife (Frances McDormand), her bombastic lover (James Gandolfini), and a toupeed con artist (Jon Polito) as though they were aliens from another planet. While greed and lust animate their over-the-top expressions, the deadpan barber shows no appetite for anything but smokes -- and a local Lolita's piano-playing. Ed Crane -- no one ever remembers his name -- makes just two false moves, minimally suspect bids to do some good, and the whole rigged card game that is life falls down around his ears. It's film noir in spades, and an Oscar-worthy performance: Thornton's flat, nasal voice-over and masklike melancholy nail down the exact lineaments of a lost soul -- casualty not of sin or some great tragedy, but of an utterly indifferent universe.

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Kathleen Murphy reviews films for Seattle's Queen Anne News and writes essays on film for Steadycam magazine. A frequent speaker on film, Murphy has contributed numerous essays to magazines (Film Comment, the Village Voice, Film West, Newsweek-Japan), books ("Best American Movie Writing of 1998," "Women and Cinema," "The Myth of the West") and Web sites (Amazon.com, Cinemania.com, Reel.com). Once upon a time, in another life, she wrote speeches for Bill Clinton, Jack Lemmon, Harrison Ford, Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, Art Garfunkel and Diana Ross.