"RUSSELL CROWE    His moment: ""Somewhere in the DNA, when I first discovered what the job was about, it was like a revelation to myself of what I'd been waiting for: 'Oh, I get this—I get the complications of this. And I can do this.' Emotion? Easy. Communication? Gotcha. But I can't explain that to you. I can't explain to you why Roger Maris can see a ball X amounts of a second quicker than the next guy.""  Our moment: His wondrous portrayal of ungainly fiftysomething tobacco-industry whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand in Michael Mann's The Insider, an unusual example in the modern era of major physical transformation without the showy melodramatic tics that demand that the actor's effort be noticed.  His legacy: It is a blessing when a great actor just wants to make you feel: ""You're watching something, and you're a cynical bloke, and you find yourself tearing up, and you've got goose bumps on your fucking skin, and just in the back of your mind when you walk out of the cinema, you go, 'Thanks, Russell—now I'll get back to whatever else I'm doing,'"" he says. ""You don't need loud explosions and spandex to take people to another world.""—Chris Heath"