What a year for Joaquin Phoenix (
Walk the Line, Her) will 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. The highly anticipated
The Sisters Brothers (fall release) has also received 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 was skeptical of the title and the trailer because you never know if a Phoenix movie will be great or terrible. But I trust director Gus Van Sant (
Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester). I felt 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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Over seven years into my movie review website and BlacKkKlansman, this is the first Spike Lee-directed movie I’m reviewing. I realized this when I checked his category and saw that he wasn’t on my list. It certainly isn’t because I don’t enjoy a good Spike Lee movie. It’s more than one of my first 370+ reviews; more than 300 have been since 2010. And while Lee has certainly directed many films since 2010, I haven’t heard of nearly any of them. I did see (and enjoy) 2013’s Oldboy and am pretty surprised I did not write a review on it. It is a movie that I will go back and watch again and review. However, Lee is better known for the movies he directed over a 15-20-year period, starting with 1989’s Do the Right Thing and ending with 2006’s Inside Man. Shockingly, he does not have a Best Director Academy Award nomination to his credit and only has one actual nomination (as a screenwriter for Do The Right Thing). While Lee isn’t a Steven Spielberg, he has directed many memorable movies that people can immediately roll out of their mouths.
Meticulously crafted and tenderly executed, Baltasar Kormákur’s (
Miles Teller (
Each year, there is at least one movie that I think I will hate and that I end up loving. Some years, it is much easier to pinpoint that movie than in other years. Not in 2017. Based on the trailers and the movie’s premise, I thought I would hate James Franco’s (