Sarandon has been a critics’ darling every since her lemony good performance as a wannabe-blackjack dealer in 1981′s “Atlantic City,” holding her own against Burt Lancaster. But she didn’t become an honest-to-goodness movie star until she played Annie Savoy in “Bull Durham” opposite Kevin Costner and her future husband (and ex-husband) Tim Robbins. And after that, it was hit-and-miss, interspersing great performances in a great movies with projects that seemed a bit half-baked.

Her best run was in the mid-’90s, playing characters who had a maternal aspect but were still smart as whips and sexy as hell. She was heartbreaking and ferocious as Michaela Odone in “Lorenzo’s Oil” (1992), the mother of a young boy afflicted with a mysterious and supposedly incurable disease. As lawyer Regina “Reggie” love in the John Grisham potboiler “The Client,” she held a turgid and mostly forgettable movie together, making a somewhat flamboyant New South character earthy and believable, and really selling the surrogate mom aspects of the role (the character was representing a redneck teen played by Brad Renfro, who had witnessed a mob lawyer’s suicide). Although nobody saw the film, I loved her in “Safe Passage,” where she played the mom to a brood of seven children, one of whom is feared dead in an accident. She was extraordinary as Mrs. March in the 1995 Gillian Anderson version of “Little Women,” a hugely underrated adaptation of a classic novel. (If you have kids between the ages of 10 and 14, watch it with them immediately.) And it’s hard to imagine how her Oscar-winning performance as Sister Helen Prejean in “Dead Man Walking” could be improved.

Yes, you read those dates correctly. Morgan Freeman gave astonishingly great screen performances within the space of about a year. He was so phenomenally good as the rehab counselor in the 1988 Michael Keaton drama “Clean and Sober” that whenever he was on-screen, I found myself thinking, “I like Keaton a lot, but I want to see a whole movie from the perspective of that guy.” His turn as bat-swinging principal Joe Clark in “Lean on Me” (1989) was such an old-school, working-class movie star performance — channeling Gene Hackman in its hot-tempered righteousness — that it nearly made you forget what a pandering, hagiographic wank-job that film was. He was sly and playful as the detective in Walter Hill’s crime drama “Johnny Handsome,” jousting with Forest Whitaker’s doctor, and he looked as mythically potent in a cowboy hat as Clint Eastwood. (Eastwood and Freeman’s long collaboration began a couple of years after this movie. Coincidence?) And “Glory”? I’d rather not even talk about his performance in that film, it’s so moving. The scene where he talks sense into Denzel Washington’s Trip is one of the most heart-wrenching things I’ve ever seen.

How strong was Freeman’s output during this period? So strong that you could movie the chronology back a couple of slots and start with 1987′s “Street Smart,” 1986′s “Resting Place” or even the overwrought 1985 teen soap “That Was Then, This Is Now” (co-starring Freeman as a bar owner) and still have a string of five great film performances.

People tend to think of the 1970s as Robert De Niro’s greatest decade, but his work in the 1980s was just as technically interesting and a lot more fun. It was the decade when he figured out how to be a movie star — that he did, in fact, have a persona — and exploit that realization without coasting along on intensity and tics. His string of five unquestionably great performances starts with 1986′s “The Mission,” in which he plays Rodrigo Mendoza, a Spanish swordsman defending a Jesuit mission against an assault by Portuguese soldiers; it’s a movie about a man rediscovering, or perhaps discovering, his idealism, and the journey begins with a scene in which De Niro’s character gets jilted, and is so heartbroken and embarrassed that he flees halfway around the world to escape the pain. He was hammy, hilarious and truly sinister as Louis Cyphre in “Angel Heart,” and explosively funny as Al Capone in “The Untouchables” (Pauline Kael said De Niro played him as “the first thug celebrity”). He played the emotionally constipated macho man routine for laughs in “Midnight Run,” one of that decade’s funniest films; his teamwork with Charles Grodin is exquisite. And if you have never seen “Jacknife,” please do; De Niro gives one of his few completely credible romantic lead performance as a Vietnam veteran who falls in love with the sister (Kathy Baker) of his best friend (Ed Harris). He’s warm, sweet and sexy, words you don’t normally associate with De Niro.

De Niro was so mind-bogglingly good from the early ’70s through the early ’90s that you could pull five performances from almost any part of that time period and have a solid Five Performances list. Looking over his filmography again, I realized I could have selected De Niro’s five previous ’80s movies — “True Confessions,” “The King of Comedy,” “Once Upon a Time in America,” “Falling in Love” and “Brazil” — and submitted that as my list. The only two titles that are slightly iffy are “True Confessions” and “Falling in Love,” but only because they’re good but not great films; De Niro’s work in both is superb.

William Hurt is one of those actors I am always glad to see. He very rarely phones anything in, and even when he gives a performance that I think is miscalculated (such as his over-the-top performance as the gang boss in “A History of Violence”) I understand why he made certain choices. During the 1980s, he was kind of a WASP answer to Pacino and De Niro, ridiculously handsome but technically skilled, too, and capable of playing everything from light romantic comedy to political allegory. My list of Hurt’s five begins with 1983′s “The Big Chill” — in which he played a drug-dealing Vietnam vet who called bullshit on the rest of the characters — and continues with “Gorky Park,” an under-seen drama about a Moscow police investigator (Hurt) trying to solve a triple homicide in Moscow. Then came his Oscar-winning performance as Luis Molina in “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” an out-of-left-field character turn in which Hurt convincingly portrays a flamboyantly gay window dresser who is imprisoned on morals charges. The character, Luis Molina, regales his political prisoner cellmate (Raul Julia) with tales of classic Hollywood, but he might have a destructive hidden agenda. If you had never seen Hurt’s previous work, you might assume this was the role he was born to play.

Hurt was nominated again for 1986′s “Children of a Lesser God,” in which he played a teacher at a school for the deaf who falls in love with a beautiful, rebellious student (Marlee Matlin, who won the best actress Oscar that year). This performance is as technically impressive as Hurt’s work in “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” albeit for different reasons. He’s performing simultaneously in two modes — speaking and signing. He’s acting as the audience surrogate and interpreter for non-deaf viewers, translating everything Matlin’s character says and saying her words out loud, then answering her verbally and in sign language. This is an expository indulgence; in real life, Hurt’s character probably wouldn’t verbally repeat everything a deaf person signed to him, because what would be the point? And yet Hurt is so convincing as a great teacher and an idealistic, romantic man that the film’s clunkier aspects barely register.

And “Broadcast News”? Turn on your TV. Tom Grunick is everywhere.

Once in a great while I’ll run across a person who tries to argue that Katharine Hepburn is “the same in every movie.” There’s no point continuing a conversation with anyone who believes that, because a) they haven’t seen many Hepburn performances, and b) they don’t know anything about acting. Hepburn was one of the most original movie stars the medium ever produced, and she did an extraordinary job of modulating her unique charisma, adapting it to comedies, romances, adventure tales and intense dramas. Within a short span of time, she could play vivacious, physical, force-of-nature characters (“Adam’s Rib,” “Pat and Mike”), emotionally muted or sexually withdrawn women (“Summertime,” “The Rainmaker”) and combinations (her “African Queen” character, Rose Sayer, is a prim missionary but she is also the film’s moral force as well as its dramatic motor, and cuttingly hilarious).

Hepburn was in some bad films and gave some bum performances, but if you look over her filmography, you’ll see that she had better luck at sustaining excellence over time than some of her fellow actors. I could have submitted another five from a different period of her career and felt just as confident in my choices: “Stage Door,” “Bringing Up Baby,” “Holiday,” “The Philadelphia Story” and “Woman of the Year.”