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There are very few actors in Hollywood today as dedicated to their craft as Joaquin Phoenix. In heavy roles such as Commodus in Gladiator, the tortured Batman villain in Joker, and possibly the most anxious man alive in Beau Is Afraid, Phoenix’s roles take a great toll on the actor both physically and emotionally that a lot of his harshest critics write off as performative hogwash. It doesn’t seem to bother him. Phoenix gives everything he has to his performances, and the payoff is clear in intoxicating films including Her, The Master, and Inherent Vice.
In Phoenix’s latest film, Eddington, he plays a sheriff of a small, Southern town who inexplicably finds himself in the middle of all of America’s problems. The Covid-19 pandemic hits, Black Lives Matter protesters pop up everywhere he looks, and he begins losing his family to conspiracy theories online. It’s one of his most controversial and dangerous films since he decided to sing in Joker: Folie à Deux. To see where Phoenix’s latest film stacks up, we ranked his entire filmography (all 38 movies!) from worst to best below.
38. Irrational Man (2015)
Critics were mixed (to say the least) about this Woody Allen comedy starring Phoenix as a college professor who begins a romantic relationship with one of his students (Emma Stone). For some reason, he sets out to find purpose in his life by murdering a judge who is making trouble for a woman locked in a custody battle. It’s Allen’s take on Crime and Punishment, but it’s still hard to fall in love with such an irrational man.
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37. Russkies (1987)
At 12 years old and acting with the stage name “Leaf” Phoenix, the fresh-faced preteen Phoenix played one of several military brats in a bizarre comedy called Russkies, which saw the group pretend to become real soldiers once a Soviet warship raft washes ashore. It’s tough to judge a 12-year-old on their acting abilities, but Phoenix didn’t have much to chew on here.
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36. It’s All About Love (2003)
You say the planet is getting hotter—It’s All About Love says it’s getting colder. While the earth is on the brink of economic collapse due to a mysterious global cooldown, Joaquin Phoenix is going through a divorce from his wife, a world-famous figure skater portrayed by Claire Danes. Phoenix soon learns that Danes’ family has cloned her in order to continue living off her income after she’s no longer able to skate–however, they’ll need to dispose of the real Danes first. That might sound far-fetched, but it’s hardly the most egregious thing about a movie in which characters with broken hearts are susceptible to death by iced-over heart. Climate change, y’all. It’s All About Love is a garbage movie with a preposterous plot, but Phoenix and Danes make a fun pair.
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35. Mary Magdalene (2018)
Playing Jesus is a blessing and a curse. On one hand, he’s one of the most recognizable names on the planet, and on the other, there’s not been a solid depiction of Jesus since Mel Gibson made that kind of anti-Semitic version back in the early 2000s. Rats. But Phoenix gives it his all, taking his turn as Christ in the flop film, Mary Magdalene. Rooney Mara does a serviceable job as Mary Magdalene, following the story of Mary’s devotion to Jesus. Meanwhile, Phoenix is mostly just tasked with being the Messiah in a surprisingly underwhelming way. Points for casting someone with such a strong bone structure for Jesus. Points deducted for making it so milquetoast.
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34. 8MM (1999)
Nicolas Cage is a private investigator employed by wealthy clients to determine if a snuff film is the real deal in Joel Schumacher’s 8MM, and for his journey into L.A.’s porny underworld, he enlists the assistance of adult video store employee Max California (Phoenix). The name of Phoenix’s supporting character is just about his most interesting feature, which isn’t the actor’s fault; with a cheery demeanor that indicates he’s wound up in his seedy situation not exactly by choice—and with spiky hair and tattoos that make him at least visually fit his milieu—he proves the type of sleazeball whose deviance has its limits (namely, movies depicting genuine murder). Phoenix’s scenes with Cage are the high points of this descent into depravity (penned by Seven’s Andrew Kevin Walker), as the former exudes a wiseass slacker cool that would be even more pleasurable if Schumacher’s thriller wasn’t such a drearily grim affair.
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33. Inventing The Abbotts (1997)
Whoa boy! You better watch out when Jo Jo is in hair-slicked-up, heartthrob mode. Inventing the Abbotts is a 1950s-set romantic drama, where Phoenix plays the intrepid Doug like a shy James Dean, crushin’ on a young, I-do-what-I-want!-type lead, Liv Tyler. If you really want to piss Phoenix off in an interview, this is probably a top-10 movie of his to bring up. It’s the kind of warring-families movie where the characters are reminded which side of the tracks they live on. Cue the kissing, fake punches, screaming alone in cars, etc. etc. etc.
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32. I’m Still Here (2010)
Remember Joaquin Phoenix’s infamous 2008 David Letterman interview? He walked out on stage in a full beard and sunglasses, refusing to answer any questions. Audiences later learned that Phoenix was acting as his character from his 2012 mockumentary, I’m Still Here, where he plays a version of himself attempting to start a rap career. Let’s just say, we’re glad he stuck to acting.
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31. Brother Bear (2003)
Who really knows how Joaquin Phoenix got wrapped up in the slight mess that was Brother Bear. Sometimes you got to get that Disney money. Kenai (Phoenix), a young Native American boy who does not like bears, is given a totem: a necklace with an animal representing what he must emulate to “be a man.” Kenai’s is, unsurprisingly, a bear. Resentful and angry, things only get worse when a bear is responsible for his brother’s death. Yikes! To top it all off, Kenai then becomes a bear, learning what the other side of the situation looks like. While it’s a fine story, it also requires Joaquin Phoenix—prestige actor and all around artsy guy—to voice a cartoon bear for 85 minutes. That is the greatest gift of all.
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30. Joker: Folie a Deux (2024)
It may feel like a jump scare when you see how high Phoenix’s original, Oscar-winning performance as the Joker is on this list, but Joker: Folie à Deux is not anywhere as hypnotic (or compellingly divisive) as the first. It’s generally agreed upon that this second endeavor—a musical co-starring Lady Gaga—was made solely in opposition to the first film’s success. Sadly, it doesn’t feel so great to watch a movie like that either.
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29. Reservation Road (2007)
We have reservations (apologies) about this film. In Reservation Road, Joaquin Phoenix plays a father who is obsessed with his son’s unsolved death by a hit-and-run driver (played by Mark Ruffalo). It’s a dark, depressing film about how guilt and grief eat away at a person. Despite the strength of its two leads, Reservation Road isn’t much more than a textbook thriller.
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28. Ladder 49 (2005)
With Joaquin Phoenix going all-prestige-everything the past few years, it’s hard to imagine him in a film like Ladder 49. Phoenix plays the young, new hotshot in a group of rough-and-rowdy ensemble of firemen, including John Travolta (believable!). Ladder 49 probably delighted a bunch of moviegoers, being the kind of all-American flick where you watch some bros drink whiskey, fight fires, and save a few people. That said, Ladder 49 isn’t going in Phoenix’s future awards-show career retrospective montage. Belt it out with me, else I lose you forever: “I’m not leavin’ till you leave!”
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27. U-Turn (1997)
U-Turn is, overall, is a pretty unpleasant film. Still, Phoenix really goes all in with his character choices. From his weird vocal inflection to shaving his character’s initials into the back of his head, there are hints of the performer that Phoenix will someday become even a few years before his defining early 2000s roles. Plus, his look has Johnny Cash written all over it. (Hell, even his most defining scene in this movie has “Ring of Fire” playing in the background.)
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26. Clay Pigeons (1998)
The most memorable thing about 1998’s Clay Pigeons is Vince Vaughn’s turn as a serial killer. In this wacky thriller, Phoenix stars as Clay Bidwell, a small-town nobody mistaken for a serial killer through a comedy of errors. Jeaneane Garofalo appears as Agent Dale, an FBI agent intent on booking Clay for a string of murders. Wrongly imprisoned, Clay busts out of jail to go in search of Lester Long, the real serial killer played by Vaughn. Director David Dobkin has since gone onto greater things, like producing 2015’s The Man From UNCLE, but Clay Pigeons lives in infamy as a bonkers, slightly incoherent cult classic.
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25. Napoleon (2023)
In Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, Joaquin Phoenix is terrifying in one scene and a shell of a man in the next. It makes sense: Napoleon Bonaparte one of our most popular conquerors in history, but he’s also a man known for being on the short end of a few height jokes. Hell, in Napoleon, Scott adds that maybe the French emperor even oinked when he was horny. Phoenix makes a few choices with this mixed bag of historical (and fictional) factoids, resulting in a pretty uneven performance. It’s impossible to tell when you should be in awe of the man or when you should laugh at him. Inevitably, you’re left doing a little bit of both.
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24. The Village (2004)
The Village is terrible, which is also why The Village is so good. M. Night Shyamalan’s twisty psychological period thriller wouldn’t exist without Joaquin Phoenix’s character Lucius Hunt, partly because the film follows a colonial woman named Ivy (Bryce Dallas Howard) who has to venture through the woods to a nearby town, hoping to get medicine for an ailing Lucius. Why? Because he’s been stabbed by an unstable colonial man in town. Very casual. Phoenix plays a bed-ridden, whimsy 19th century lover like a pro, but the big twist at the end takes his performance from charming to fully creepy. Yeah, the film is coming up on 20 years old, but if you haven’t seen it, we’re not ruining the twist ending.
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23. Return to Paradise (1998)
In Return to Paradise, Joaquin Phoenix plays Lewis, an American man imprisoned in Malaysia on drug charges—he and his friends tossed out some hash at the end of a vacation, and he ended up arrested alone since his friends flew back to New York first. Miraculously, Lewis’s friends do not find out about this until his sister, Beth, who is pretending for some reason to not be his sister, convinces them to travel back to Malaysia in order to share responsibility for the crime and prevent Lewis from getting the death penalty. She also has an affair with Vince Vaughn, who plays one of the friends, in order to successfully manipulate him into returning to Malaysia. In the end, the judge is angered by American media coverage of the situation, and (spoiler alert) Joaquin Phoenix ends up executed anyway. Vince Vaughn lands in Malaysian jail, too. Dramatic, dark, and culturally myopic.
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22. Buffalo Soldiers (2003)
In this send-up of military culture, Joaquin Phoenix stars as Specialist Ray Elwood, a soldier based near the soon-to-fall Berlin Wall. Elwood is a rogue who’s up to no good, selling black market weapons and cooking heroin in the commissary kitchen. When a take-no-prisoners sergeant arrives to clean up the seedy base, Elwood prepares for a face-off to defend his way of life. The movie isn’t as smart as it thinks it is, but Phoenix turns in a characteristically charismatic performance.
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21. Quills (2000)
Back in 2000, Phoenix landed one of his first meaty roles in the Marquis de Sade biopic Quills. He starred as real-life figure Abbé du Coulmier, a Catholic priest who also served in French legislature during the French Revolution. Although he takes a backseat to Geoffrey Rush’s Golden Globe-nominated, manic turn as de Sade, Phoenix turns in a solid performance (even if the accent is a little off) as Coulmier, a progressive who reformed how France treated those locked in its insane asylums.
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20. Parenthood (1989)
Joaquin is barely in this Ron Howard classic, and he’s not even him yet; he’s credited by his birth name “Leaf.” But in a sense, he is already very much the Joaquin we have come to know: a little haunted, a little spooky, the kind of kid who quietly worries the hell out of his mother. Garry is the adolescent son of a single mom played by Dianne Wiest, a boy we’d keep a special eye on in this day and age. He’s got a secret, and it’s only his sister’s dim-witted boyfriend—played by the pre-action-hero version of Keanu Reeves—who can solve the mystery: the culprit is puberty. Phoenix captures the alienation and terror of a changing body, and also the relief as his character—if I follow the ending correctly—becomes a healthier person and better family member through masturbation and kicky berets. In short, the perfect Phoenix role.
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19. C’mon C’mon
Bookended between two signature batshit performances from Phoenix in The Joker and Beau Is Afraid, 2021’s C’mon C’mon might stand as the lost gem of the actor’s career. Telling the story of an uncle and nephew improbably growing together, C’mon C’mon is a reminder that Phoenix can deliver an achingly warm performance. Do yourself a favor and add this one to your queue.
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18. We Own the Night (2007)
Reteaming Phoenix and Wahlberg, James Gray’s 2007 crime drama We Own the Night features the latter as a dogged cop—alongside Robert Duvall, as his dad—and Phoenix as the wayward but inherently good brother intent on living the carefree life while working as a Brighton Beach nightclub owner. Familial strains and obligations to self, loved ones (here, Eva Mendes’ sultry girlfriend Amada) and doing what’s right turn everything on their head, especially once Phoenix’s entrepreneur winds up unwittingly mired in a battle between the NYPD and a Russian mobster. A rain-soaked car chase is the film’s centerpiece, but it’s Phoenix’s conflicted performance that keeps this tangled tale from spiraling out of control. Torn between personal desires and a sense of duty to the institutions he’s fled, Phoenix’s Bobby is not only caught between two opposing forces, but at war with himself – a notion Phoenix brings to life with invigorating intensity.
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17. The Yards (2000)
New York City’s transit system is the backdrop for James Gray’s sophomore feature The Yards, about a young man named Leo (Mark Wahlberg) who, following a stint behind bars, returns to his New York home. There, he begins working for a relative’s (James Caan) railway car repair company, and leaps into hot water by getting entangled in the criminal side of things with his cousin’s (Charlize) boyfriend Willie (Phoenix). It’s a deliberately off-putting part for Phoenix, whose Willie is a cocky smooth-operator whose confidence is the sort that should inspire unease in others, and it’s no surprise that he gets Leo into a world of trouble when a bribery deal goes horribly wrong, culminating in murder. Phoenix is compellingly repugnant throughout, exuding an oily charisma that’s destined to lead to catastrophe, and his final scene with Theron—an altercation spurred by fear, jealousy, anger and desperation—solidifies it as an expertly nuanced heel turn.
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16. Hotel Rwanda (2004)
Hotel Rwanda isn’t exactly subtle—there’s plenty of dialogue feels pretty heavy handed. But the heart is in the right place. The film tells the true story of how hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina, abandoned by the international community during Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, managed to save more then 1000 lives by sheltering people inside the Hotel des Miller Collines. Outside the confines of the foreign-owned luxury hotel, 500,000 to a million Rwandans were killed over just 100 days. Don Cheadle and Sophie Okonedo, who played Rusesabagina and his wife, Tatiana, deservingly got all the attention for the film. But Phoenix left an impression with his supporting role as a cynical American journalist who, like all the other white guests at the hotel, was evacuated by his home nation, leaving his African companions to be slaughtered.
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15. To Die For (1995)
A 19-year-old Phoenix more than holds his own opposite Nicole Kidman (in one of her career-best performances) in To Die For, Gus Van Sant’s 1995 portrait of a small-town TV weather reporter with big dreams and lethal plans to achieve them. With a ratty mullet, a dingy heavy-metal jeans jacket, and a dim-bulb infatuated glint in his eye that speaks volumes about his hunger for Kidman’s Suzanne – and his willingness to go to extreme lengths to please her – Phoenix transforms a bad-boy teen cliché into a three-dimensional study of an adolescent seduced by a light far brighter than his own. It’s an impressively restrained and soulful turn by the young actor, conveying the sincerity of his character Jimmy’s love for Suzanne even as he comes to understand the manipulations to which he’s been subjected. While Kidman rightfully earned the lion’s share of the acclaim, Phoenix’s shy and heartfelt supporting work grounds the film in empathetic emotional terrain.
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14. Don’t Worry He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018)
As a kid, I loved John Callahan’s cartoons. They were bawdier and way more edgy than any of the strips in the Sunday paper, and were often drawn in an appealingly spare, rough style. But I didn’t know this style, and the inspiration for much of his work, came in part from the fact that he sustained a spinal injury in a car accident and became a quadriplegic at just 21-years-old. In this Gus Van Sant-directed adaptation of Callahan’s memoir, Phoenix plays the late cartoonist, who struggled with both alcoholism and his disability. It also stars Jonah Hill, Jack Black, and Phoenix’s future fiancé Rooney Mara.
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13. The Immigrant (2014)
Phoenix’s most recent collaboration with director James Gray is one of his best—an early twentieth-century tale about a young Polish immigrant, Ewa (Marion Cotillard), who arrives in America and is promptly saved from deportation, and then lured into prostitution, by shady theater owner Bruno (Phoenix). Phoenix’s character is the material’s obvious villain, a pimp concerned, first and foremost, with his own well-being, no matter the terrible cost others must pay for his survival, and his horrific decisions are most to blame for Ewa’s ensuing ordeal. Still, Phoenix’s performance is far more than just an exercise in dastardly mustache-twirling, as Bruno’s genuine affection for Ewa creates a messy emotional stew that, invariably, leads to tragedy. While Phoenix’s Bruno is a man to be despised, the actor’s masterful trick is making us also understand – if not identify with, much less forgive – his motivations, therefore deepening the calamitous drama that eventually unfolds.
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12. Eddington (2025)
Phoenix’s second Ari Aster film is a modern Western about a sheriff who channels all his personal frustrations into a fight over not wanting to wear a mask during the Covid-19 pandemic. So, he decides to run for mayor and dethrone the more liberally conscious incumbent (Pedro Pascal). Sheriff Cross is a more measured take on a man losing his grip with the news than say, Beau is Afraid, but that doesn’t make it any less of a wild ride.
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11. Signs (2002)
The thing about this movie is that Joaquin Phoenix didn’t really need to be in it. He plays the older brother(?)/male cousin(?)/employee of Mel Gibson’s farm(?) where crop circles start showing up shortly before an alien invasion. Killer movie. Although he didn’t need to be in the film, it is absolutely his movie. He spends around 80 percent of his time on camera holding Mel Gibson’s youngest kids in his big beefy farmboy guns, and the remaining 20 percent wondering what the aliens are getting ready to do (invade, you dingus!), yet somehow steals the show.
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10. The Sisters Brothers (2018)
Phoenix and John C. Reilly are gunfighter brothers hired to track down a man (Riz Ahmed) in mid-19th-century America in The Sisters Brothers, director Jacques Audiard’s off-kilter portrait of the Wild West and the complicated bonds shared by siblings. Phoenix’s Charlie is the drunken loose cannon to Reilly’s more responsible and compassionate Eli, and the role provides the star with an opportunity to straddle a fine line between comic buffoonery, ugly nastiness, and agonized inner turmoil – a not-inconsiderable feat Phoenix ably pulls off. A merciless man prone to wild mood swings and half-cocked behavior, much of it the byproduct of his years-earlier murder of their father, Phoenix’s Charlie is akin to a semi-rabid dog. In a turn as harrowing as it is slyly funny, he’s the off-putting (if sympathetic) counterpoint to Reilly’s Eli, who’s caught between loyalty to his brother and his dream of escaping their godforsaken mercenary life.
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9. Two Lovers (2011)
In what may be one of his finest performances (and thus the pinnacle of his four collaborations with director James Gray), Phoenix plays a young, damaged Jewish New Yorker named Leonard who, post-suicide attempt and mental hospital stint, finds himself torn between two romantic options: safe, nurturing Sandra (Vinessa Shaw) and issue-laden beauty Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow). Leonard’s mother/lover choice is Two Lovers’ central narrative dilemma, although Phoenix refuses to simplify his protagonist, infusing him with a neediness, recklessness, subtle playfulness and immaturity, and idiosyncrasy (epitomized by his habit of counting train cars as they approach a station) that makes Leonard’s plight feel anything but schematic. Like the film itself, his turn exists on the precipice between intoxicating passion and bracing sobriety, and Phoenix’s final decision – guided by his heart far more than his head – results in a finale that suggests both the cruelty of love, and the small-scale tragedy of being forced to settle for less.
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8. Beau Is Afraid (2023)
Ari Aster’s three-hour-long epic is a meandering tale about identity, Freudian psychological conflicts, and how childhood trauma can linger into adulthood. Phoenix takes on the emotionally stunted and cripplingly anxious Beau with a level of passion and sincerity that makes him the beating heart of the film. He burdens the craziness Aster throws at him without restraint—like teenage girls forcing laced drugs down his throat, and traveling theater performances that hide in the woods. The actor does it with the kind of genuine earnestness that makes the surreal feel relatable. Without Phoenix’s vulnerable performance to anchor all the chaos, the film would sink under the weight of its runtime.
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7. Gladiator (2000)
Phoenix plays a man who is truly one of the most despicable villains of all time in Gladiator. Not only does Commodus revive the Colosseum into the most impressive fighting spectacle that the world has ever seen, but Ridley Scott offsets his character with deeply unsettling incestuous advances toward his sister. Still, Phoenix did his best with the iconically evil character. So much so, that Gladiator II had to provide audiences with two evil emperors just to make up for their inability to replicate Phoenix’s Commodus alone.
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6. You Were Never Really Here (2018)
Joaquin Phoenix lets his haunted eyes and alternately brutal and compassionate behavior do the talking in You Were Never Really Here, Lynn Ramsay’s Taxi Driver-esque tale of a loner charged with rescuing a senator’s young daughter from sexual slavery. Saying little but expressing much, Phoenix is like a bomb ready to detonate at a moment’s notice. Yet despite the volatile ferocity of his conduct (and his erotic asphyxiation proclivities), it’s his character Joe’s tender moments that linger the longest, be it him caressing his mother’s feet or – in a scene that’s at once unexpected and unforgettable – lying down beside a wounded adversary, clasping his hand, and singing a duet of Charlene’s “I’ve Never Been to Me.” Though there’s rage, misery and all manner of PTSD-related trauma lurking beneath Phoenix’s surface, it’s the distressed heart buried deep within Joe that elevates his performance to the realm of greatness.
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5. Joker (2019)
It’s quite unbelievable that Phoenix’s only Oscar win for Best Actor is due to his lead role as the Batman villain in Joker. The clown prince of crime had some big shoes to full after Health Ledger’s portrayal in The Dark Knight, but Phoenix took the character in an entirely new yet equally disturbing direction. Separating his performance from the movie’s confusing message for a second, it’s still one of the most impressive (and borderline unhealthy) portrayals of a man cast out of society.
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4. Walk the Line (2005)
Portraying the Man in Black, one of the most iconic musicians in the world and one of postwar America’s most beloved and enduring symbols of rebellion, is a tall order. It is outweighed, really, only by having to sing those songs authentically, with his knowing—and well-known—rasp. (Ahem, Rami Malek, take notes.) Phoenix did both astoundingly well in 2005 across from a white hot Reese Witherspoon, playing Cash’s Great Love, June Carter. He brought Cash’s signature guitar-swinging bravado, not to mention the ocean of hurt which fueled the singer, to life, but where he really excelled was in the tension he brought to The Line; the border between honest and excess, between the stand-up John and the ne’er do well Cash Inc. Good luck looking away.
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3. Her (2013)
Joaquin Phoenix makes bold choices. He fully commits to every character—putting all of himself and his creative energy into each role he takes. Her is Phoenix at his most nuanced. Spike Jonze’s film follows Phoenix’s character as he falls in love with his phone’s operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). The film speaks to our loneliness in an era of computer mediated interconnectivity. It analyzes our increasing romanticism of technology and the intimate way in which we interact with our devices. But, despite the clear focus on technology itself, Her is a deeply human movie, thanks in large part to Phoenix’s powerful, subtle performance. He’s often acting alone on screen, only interacting with the disembodied voice of the operating system. Yet, he doesn’t need another physical body on screen to interact with and watching a man sitting alone in a room talking to no-one isn’t at all boring thanks to the compelling way in which Phoenix exudes emotion. He captures an astonishing range of the human experience—the pain, laughter, love, loss, absurdity, and loneliness that we all feel. That he didn’t get nominated in an Oscar acting category is one of the biggest oversights in the history of the Academy. This remains one of the most prescient performances of the 2010s, and it only gets more meaningful with time.
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2. The Master (2012)
There’s a harrowing scene from The Master in which Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd is alone in a room with Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie Quell. Dodd is interrogating Quell, asking Phoenix’s character deeply personal questions about his life. Meanwhile, Quell must tell the truth, and he must not blink. Phoenix’s control is incredible—his eyes twitching wildly in a tight close-up. He digs into his character’s deepest secrets, talking about killing a man and having sex with his own aunt. It’s deeply disturbing, unforgettable stuff—one of the most stunning and difficult pieces of acting I’ve ever seen. It remains some of Phoenix’s finest work.
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1. Inherent Vice (2014)
There are few directors better suited to capturing 1970s Los Angeles than Paul Thomas Anderson. A native of the California sprawl, he’s a master of lighting a mood, not to mention the certain je ne sais quoi lackadaisical pace of West Coast living. And yet it’s not his remarkable script—a condensed iteration of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel of the same name—nor the soft lighting or the perfectly sourced wardrobes that I remember most vividly when I think of this film. No, instead its Phoenix’s performance as Doc Sportello, a shaggy, Jesus sandal-wearing P.I. and, perhaps, the final hippie holdout after the Manson murders. There are many moments across the actor’s catalog that have stunned with their vulnerability, as is certainly made clear on this list, but I can’t think of any that have stuck with me as long as cinematographer Robert Elswit’s close ups here. You’ll laugh, certainly, but you just might cry as well.
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