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.
Continue reading Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018)
When you are the director who helped the likes of Jennifer Lawrence into stardom, you’ll garner lots of attention. But that doesn’t mean you must capitalize on this and chug out movie after movie. Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone, Down to the Bone) did not do this. Winter’s Bone, which launched Lawrence into the public eye with her first of, as of 2017, four Academy Award nominations, was released in 2010, but this is Granik’s first non-documentary film since then. And, for critics, it was worth the wait. At the time of this review, her new film Leave No Trace 
Sicario: Day of the Soldado is not so much a sequel to 2015’s megahit 
Remember, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.
The crowning achievement of Robin Williams’ storied career is not the Mork and Mindy sitcom where he was first discovered. It’s not the numerous leading roles he has received recognition with, such as Best Lead Actor Academy Awards (Good Morning, Vietnam, The Fisher King, Dead Poets Society). It was not in the numerous timeless comedies we’ll watch for ages (Mrs. Doubtfire, The Birdcage, Jack, Robots, Night at the Smithsonian, Jumanji). It’s not for his creepingly effective turns in movies like Insomnia, One Hour Photo, The Night Listener, or heartwarming dramas such as Awakenings. Heck, it was not as the voice of The Genie in Aladdin. Instead, it is a community college professor who has not been able to move on from his life after losing his wife to cancer in Gus Van Sant’s (Milk, Drugstore Cowboy) surprise 1997 hit Good Will Hunting. Nevertheless, the film earned Williams the only Oscar of his career. And he’s not even the best part of this movie.