Your full attention: Jesse Eisenberg's 10 best performances, ranked!

As his new film closes the London Film Festival, we count down the actor's best awkward, scheming and occasionally pervy turns. An anxious role can be a trap for an actor: either the two roles aren't distinct enough, or they're too different, and either way the result can resemble a film school graduation project. But Jesse Eisenberg, in Richard Ayoade's adaptation of the Dostoevsky novel, ...

A doppleganger role can be a trap for an actor: either the two roles aren't distinct enough, or they're too different, and either way the result can feel like a film school graduation project. But Jesse Eisenberg delivers a stylish character turn in Richard Aivade's adaptation of Dostoevsky's novel. He plays Simon, a shy computer programmer in a grim future world who is ignored by his employers and his colleague Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), with whom he is hopelessly in love. But then comes his carbon version, James, also played by Eisenberg. James is a confident alpha who impresses his superiors and brings Hannah to Simon's bewildered dismay.

Noah Baumbach's wildly comic black-and-white film, based on his own parents' unhappy relationship, stars Eisenberg as 16-year-old Walt, an insufferably precocious and self-important young man who has inherited all of his father's flamboyant mannerisms. His father is Jeff Bridges, a failed novelist and creative writing professor who jealously falls out with his wife, Walt's mother (Laura Linney), when his writing career takes off. As Walt navigates the world of childhood, it's in many ways a rare unsympathetic performance for Eisenberg, and the awkward mannerisms he's become famous for seem stilted, high-handed and unappealing – yet the poignant vulnerability is clear enough.

It was Eisenberg's teenage film debut, in which his brooding, inexperience, and wandering persona made their debut, along with the patina of self-awareness with which it all seemed to be covered. He's a nice high school boy who's terrified of his virginity and desperately needs advice on how to get it right with girls. He approaches his lothario uncle Roger—a magnificent performance by Campbell Scott—who has just been dumped by his girlfriend, and in a frenzy of misogynistic rage, Roger takes Nick on a tour of Manhattan pickup spots. Eisenberg's innocence has a charm and frankness that The Good Wife lacks. In some ways, he is the opposite of his character in Ink and Whale.

Another "Virgin" show where the younger Eisenberg made his name in '00s indie cinema, he cleverly portrays the way in which the lack of sexual experience becomes central to his character's existence. It's a coming-of-age story about a man named James who has had a solid undergraduate career in college. The world, apparently, is now his oyster. But she is still a virgin. And in order to earn cash for graduate school, he must work at a busy amusement park, ironically or perhaps ironically called Adventureland, which offers an education of a different kind, and where he falls in love with his colleague, played by Kristen Stewart.

It's a film and a role that would challenge any actor: Eisenberg, in full makeup and furry costume, plays a snarling, wordless Sasquatch rolling through the empty desert of northern California. He is one of four Bigfoot ape characters who may be the only creatures left alive after a man-made apocalypse, or perhaps we have simply been allowed to share in their eternal isolation, their secret existence away from humans. Eisenberg is, perhaps inevitably, a beta male sasquatch that is less indicative than an alpha male grunt. It's a cult performance in a cult film.

It was probably Eisenberg's destiny to work with Woody Allen at some point – he's in Cafe Society and, to a lesser extent, in 2012's To Rome With Love. Café Society is one of Allen's countless light jeux d'ésprit comedies, which may not be very attractive, but it is not memorable. He plays a nervous and confused romantic who, of course, voices Alan in a traditional way, but we see him grow from a boy to a man. Set in the US in the 30s, he is a child who gets a job in Los Angeles as an assistant to his film agent uncle and then in a club in New York run by his brother, where he becomes a Bogartian figure in white and nurses a broken heart.

It came out the same year as Adventureland, giving the odd illusion that it's part of some sort of franchise – but no, the two films have nothing to do with each other, although Eisenberg's appearance in both is not dissimilar. He is, as always, a shy person who is also a potential friend. (The film was followed 10 years later by a sequel, Zombieland: Double Tap, in which Eisenberg reprises his role.) He plays Columbus, a wise-cracking man in a post-apocalyptic landscape overrun by zombies. Columbus co-stars with redneck Woody Harrelson, who is very stubborn and also destroys his chances of success with a young woman, played by Emma Stone, who goes on the road with them. His anger with Harrelson leads to one of the funniest outbursts of Eisenberg's cinematic career, as he exclaims, "You're like a giant robot cock made in some kind of secret government lab!"

Filmmaker and Brazilian jiu-jitsu expert Riley Stearns created a dark comedy that allowed Eisenberg to explore an interesting possibility for his usual character: What if that shyness and gruffness led not to romcom sexual success, but to violence and the general prevalence of toxic masculinity? Eisenberg is Casey, a lonely office worker who is attacked by a biker gang and enrolls in a karate class. It is led by a charismatic sensei (Alessandro Nivella), whose demands on him become increasingly alarming.

This short, complex and contemporary film is Eisenberg's directorial masterpiece. He also gives a great performance, all the more interesting in that it's practically a supporting turn, giving Kieran Culkin the spotlight most of the time. (The Polish film is also a very personal one for Eisenberg, now a Polish citizen.) Eisenberg plays David, Culkin is his cousin Benji. The two are on a friendly road trip to Poland to visit the childhood home of their late grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. Eisenberg—inevitably—plays a tight-lipped figure while Culkin is a more anarchic free spirit, but without the former's sensitivity and maturity, the latter's performance wouldn't make sense.

Casting Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg, the young computer genius at Harvard who invented Facebook in 2004 in a frenzy of sexual and social exclusion, was a stroke of genius. This allowed Eisenberg to build a gun and realize the ridiculous on-screen persona that came so easily to him. It also proved that he was a natural delivery of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's mile-a-minute dialogue. In Eisenberg's other films, the underdog aspect existed as an admirable (or perhaps troubling) flaw that had to be eliminated in the course of the narrative. Here is the whole point. Ignorance is superpower. Not going out with girls is equivalent to lifting a car over his head. It was a formidable role that would see Eisenberg play the villain Lex Luthor in DC films like Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice and Zack Snyder's Justice League, and J. Daniel Atlas as the smart aleck illusionist in Now You See Me. But none of them had anything like the quicksilver glow of his Zuckerberg, who is entitled and insufferable, driven and driven. Obsessive, always convinced of his intellectual superiority, never conceding a point in any argument, and treating everyone to an incessant series of put-downs and bells and whistles. Eisenberg convinced an entire generation that Mark Zuckerberg was real. It is a classic performance.