Joaquin Phoenix Archives | Deep Focus Review

Eddington

Brian Eggert — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 00:53:21 +0000

Listen to the audio version of this review. Ari Aster dissects the culture war with Eddington, a portrait of how COVID-19 irrevocably tore America apart at its already frayed seams. The pandemic intensified partisan rancor, social fragmentation, and reactionary behavior—conditions that enabled opportunists to seize power amid the chaos and, ultimately, profit from it. Set in late May 2020, the film looks back five years at the titular New Mexico town, seemingly in an attempt to understand what led to the erosion of democracy in Trump’s America today. Described as a Western in the promotional materials, it’s also a period piece, though the time hardly feels that long ago, much to the film’s detriment. Still, Aster captures the uncertainty, paranoia, and desperate search for answers that drove people to rely on the worst possible source: social media. Rather than offering clarity, it only deepened the divide between the right and left, as both sides leaned into their worst impulses and most extreme reactions. Fortunately, Eddington boasts an excellent cast, led by another tour-de-force performance by Joaquin Phoenix under Aster’s direction. It’s unquestionably well-crafted and brimming with the director’s anxiety-ridden style. But the question remains: Is now the right time for […]

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Joker: Folie à Deux

Brian Eggert — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 01:17:34 +0000

Joker: Folie à Deux is a lot of things. At its most basic, this is the sequel to co-writer and director Todd Phillips’ 2019 hit Joker, a gritty take on the Batman villain that earned over $1 billion in worldwide box-office receipts and caused a lot of heated debate about its intended meaning, assuming one exists. When Warner Bros. earned that much money on a reported $70 million budget, a follow-up was inevitable. And so, five years later, Phillips reteams with Joaquin Phoenix, who earned an Oscar for his sullen and unhinged performance, on a movie that’s part comic book, part musical, part courtroom drama, and part miserablist portrait of mental illness. Admittedly, I never quite settled on what its overrated predecessor hoped to be: A spotlight on America’s willingness to prop up a psychopath despite all evidence pointing to him being a narcissistic criminal? A condemnation of incels? A portrait of how people fall through the cracks of social systems? A superficial pastiche of ’70s cinema masquerading as an artistic supervillain origin story? A product of artistic self-indulgence? All of the above? None of these questions stuck with me because, a few days after reviewing Joker, it left no […]

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Napoleon

Brian Eggert — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 15:59:26 +0000

A decisive moment in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon finds the French Emperor, played by Joaquin Phoenix, examining an Egyptian sarcophagus and the pharaoh inside. Bonaparte approaches the mummy, who stands taller than he does, so he uses a stool to meet the preserved ruler eye-to-eye—or, in the mummy’s case, eye holes. The scene gives a telling assessment of a man desperate to make his mark on history, to leave a legacy worthy of a god-king’s pyramid. Napoleon aspired to become one of the great leaders from antiquity, such as Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great—inspired by his fervent study of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, a book about prominent figures from Greek and Roman history. And at his height, Napoleon conquered much of Europe. But his rule was neither noble nor admirable in Scott’s film. “He can’t help himself,” observes one opponent, who cannily sizes up Napoleon’s fragile ego. Rather, the film portrays a despot with an inferiority complex, one of history’s most iconic figures brought to life by Scott and Phoenix. A classical production where historical inaccuracies run rampant, the cast speaks in primarily British accents, and the production spared no expense, Napoleon is a true Hollywood epic. The film falls into […]

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Beau Is Afraid

Brian Eggert — Thu, 04 May 2023 20:30:40 +0000

In Beau’s bathroom, there’s a small picture of a woman holding her infant child face-to-face. Writer-director Ari Aster returns to this motif in Beau Is Afraid, again with a small knick-knack that Beau intends to give to his mother, on the bottom of which he inscribes, “Thank you I’m sorry I love you.” And again with a statue that towers next to his mother’s home. But if you look closely at the picture in his bathroom, the angelic figure appears to have sharp, monstrous nails supporting the baby’s head. The sight, just one of the film’s countless surreal and Freudian details, surely spilling out from the protagonist’s subconscious, is funny and disturbing. Much of Aster’s film is like that. You don’t know whether you should laugh or feel aghast by this Kafkaesque voyage into Beau’s pointedly Jewish identity. Both reactions are correct, and you’ll probably feel them simultaneously. After all, the line between comedy and horror is thin. Laughter and fear come from our essential selves; you either find something amusing or scary, or you don’t. Aster’s film might terrify you at points, and at others, it might be the most strangely hilarious Greek tragedy you’ve ever seen. However, after […]

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C’mon C’mon

Brian Eggert — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 00:01:48 +0000

Mike Mills’ C’mon C’mon is a remarkable achievement. It’s one of those rare films that, despite its specific subject matter, feels like it’s about everything. Joaquin Phoenix plays Johnny, a radio journalist working on a project that entails interviewing children about their worldview and vision of the future. While Johnny’s estranged sister Viv (Gaby Hoffman) tries to get a handle on her husband Paul’s (Scoot McNairy) mental-health crisis, she entrusts her nine-year-old son Jesse (Woody Norman), a strange and idiosyncratic boy, to Johnny for a couple of weeks. Together, uncle and nephew travel from Los Angeles to New York to New Orleans on Johnny’s assignments, bonding along the way. What unfolds is a film about seeing beyond your bubble; about people trying to understand one another; about how children are more open to the world and different perspectives, and how adults gradually close themselves off; about how children will inherit an Earth that’s in worse condition than adults found it; about people figuring out how to take care of each other; about learning to listen; about planning for the future only to realize that nothing works out the way one wants it to; about embracing the uncertainty of parenthood, childhood, […]

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Joker

Brian Eggert — Fri, 04 Oct 2019 17:45:01 +0000

Miserable and nihilistic, Joker rethinks the iconic Batman villain in terms of a darkly realistic origin story of a murderer. Director Todd Phillips constructs a new version of the Joker whose emergence is preceded by textbook warning signs, including child abuse, an unstable family life, antisocial behavior, and various neuroses. It’s an unusual approach for a character whose chaotic behavior often proves entertaining only because Batman’s order balances it. The character, named Arthur Fleck and played in an uncanny performance by Joaquin Phoenix, lives in a seedier, punishing version of Gotham City, where he feels persecuted by society at large. Following the trajectory of another cinematic psycho, Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver (1976), Arthur finally lashes out at the world that has ignored and abused him, becoming a more disturbed and lower-stakes version of the legendary DC Comics villain. The film might be a reckless and angry statement about the world today, capable, although not intentionally so, of inciting incels to violence. It might be nothing more than a bleak character study in the footsteps of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, commanded by an impressive performance and incredible formal craftsmanship, in which case it’s a bold piece of studio filmmaking. But Joker’s […]

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The Sisters Brothers

Brian Eggert — Mon, 08 Oct 2018 17:56:58 +0000

The Sisters Brothers, a violent and episodic Western that grows more affecting as goes on, opens as Eli and Charlie Sisters, two hired guns of the savage frontier, approach a farmhouse where their target has holed-up with an armed gang. The night’s thick bronze blackness saturates the scene. The siblings attack and, in the volley of gunfire, only the brief, fiery discharges from their pistols flash in the dark. Shot from a distance, the sequence is dazzling and scary, but not so much as the next shot, as the siblings—assassins, paid thugs, and criminalized jacks-of-all-trades—approach the farmhouse and dispose of its many occupants with ruthless efficiency. Eli Sisters, the older and more competent of the two, is played by John C. Reilly in a performance that uses his mutual capacities for comedy and tragedy. Likewise, Joaquin Phoenix, who’s carried a persona of displacement and unrest in several roles, plays Charlie Sisters, a drunk whose killer instincts feed his reckless ambition to become a criminal overlord. Their unceremonious elimination of the opposition in this first sequence should not suggest a comically violent Western that uses death as a punchline, a characteristic of cooly self-aware post-modernism; rather, it gives way to a poignant and telling moment just afterward, where the brothers see a horse, its flesh on fire, galloping away from a […]

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Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot

Brian Eggert — Mon, 30 Jul 2018 16:51:54 +0000

Director Gus Van Sant and actor Joaquin Phoenix first collaborated on the satiric post-Tarantino crime project To Die For (1995), where Phoenix’s vulnerable performance was overshadowed in an erotic and fascinating showcase for Nicole Kidman’s talent. Over the last twenty years, Van Sant’s material has descended into generic and mostly forgettable titles such as Finding Forrester (2000) and The Sea of Trees (2015), while Phoenix has become one of the essential performers of the twenty-first century with roles in films by Paul Thomas Anderson, James Gray, Spike Jonze, and Lynne Ramsay. Van Sant and Phoenix’s second collaboration, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, is based on cartoonist John Callahan’s 1989 autobiography of the same name. The late Robin Williams, who earned an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor working with Van Sant on Good Will Hunting (1997), purchased the rights to Callahan’s book with the intent to star for Van Sant. But after Williams’ death, the production went ahead with Phoenix in the Callahan role. The adaptation by Van Sant opens on John Callahan (Phoenix), a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic who creates darkly humored drawings of taboo subjects with only minor use of his hands. In bookended scenes, John appears onstage […]

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You Were Never Really Here

Brian Eggert — Sat, 21 Apr 2018 22:27:36 +0000

Unnerving and stunningly crafted, You Were Never Really Here inhabits the fractured mental state of Joe, a traumatized mercenary played by Joaquin Phoenix. A portrait as complex and raw as any of the actor’s collaborations with Paul Thomas Anderson, Scottish director Lynne Ramsay arranges the pieces of Joe’s mind in a way that challenges the viewer to understand him, fashioning them around the structure of a tense, brutally violent plot. Adapted from a Jonathan Ames novella, the material’s noirish foundation ruptures into a nightmarish odyssey through New York’s underbelly, a place filled with corrupt politicians and seedy pedophiles. But Ramsay’s treatment of Joe’s psychology, through her precise application of the cinematic apparatus from Johnny Greenwood’s score to her own concentration on close-up details, represents a unification of formal bravado the level of which audiences rarely glimpse. Her fourth film in the nearly 20 years since her 1999 debut Ratcatcher, Ramsay made You Were Never Really Here somehow both economical and impressionistic, uncanny and sympathetic, savage and heartening. The skeletal plot finds Joe in a hotel room as he wraps up his latest assignment, the details gleaned from the presence of duct tape, zip ties, a hammer, blood, and the photograph of a young girl. On the […]

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Irrational Man

Brian Eggert — Wed, 12 Aug 2015 00:00:59 +0000

Thinking about murder is natural, therapeutic even. Over a drink, friends might deliberate in jest about how to carry out the proverbial perfect murder. There’s a great scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt where a suburban paterfamilias sits down with his neighbor Herb to discuss how they plan to kill one another. When his wife scolds him for such morbid conversation, he replies, “We’re not talking about killing people. Herb’s talking about killing me and I’m talking about killing him.” In Irrational Man, Woody Allen explores the concept of a radical philosophy professor who justifies the ethical implications of murdering a corrupt judge because he determines its positive effect on society results in a moral act. Not unlike Jean-Paul Sartre’s views on the responsibility of freedom, Allen seems to believe that people determine their own moral guidelines—that ethics are a matter of individual conscience. Social and religious structures usually inform moral choices, applying notions of law and sin to our collective conscience; as individuals, we embrace certain rules and choose to abide by them. These structures vary depending on the individual society and, even further, the individual’s own ability to engage in an existential search for answers and […]

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