What a year for Joaquin Phoenix (Walk the Line, Her) is set to have. With four movies set for release in 2018, Phoenix is an early favorite for a Best Actor Academy Award for the critically acclaimed and still under-appreciated You Were Never Really Here. Say what you want about that movie if you’ve seen it, but you can’t knock on his amazingly even performance. And the highly anticipated The Sisters Brothers (fall release) is also receiving some early Oscar buzz. As good as he was in You Were Never Really Here and as good as he probably will be in The Sisters Brothers, his performance of the year will be as John Callahan, the quadriplegic cartoon artist in the biopic Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, a movie that many moviegoers will forget because of its title, but not because of its story or the performances of its lead. I admit that I was skeptical of the title and the trailer because you never really know if a Phoenix movie will be great or terrible these days. But I have trust in director Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester). If nothing else, I knew the movie was not going to be f***ing suck (Alex Ovechkin Stanley Cup quote…my team’s average is a combined one win a decade, so I’m going to milk the Washington Capitals championship for a long, long time). And the movie certainly didn’t suck. In fact, people often ask me if I watch movies through the eyes of a fan or of a critic. And more often than not, it goes back and forth, but I feel like I’m always analyzing the movie. However, when a movie is great, the critic’s lens gets taken off, and I’m in it for the ride as much as the persons sitting on my left and right. And that was the case with this movie. I was just really invested in the story and the characters. It reminded me a lot of The End of the Tour, a movie which, admittedly, I enjoyed slightly more than Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot. But it had that same sort of vibe with me.

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