Joaquin Phoenix's top 5 performances

5. The Master (2012)

It's so obvious when I watch a Paul Thomas Anderson film that the director, behind beloved dramas like Punch-Drunk Love, Boogie Nights, and Magnolia, completely lost himself in Joaquin Phoenix's acting during the making of this film. For Anderson loses focus multiple times and the director becomes more passive, relying instead entirely on his lead actor's performance to drive the story forward rather than the story itself, which is as fascinating as it is frustrating. I'm not particularly fond of The Master, considering it one of Anderson's weakest films, but I'm always ridiculously impressed by Phoenix's performance.

4. Walk the Line (2005)

He was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for his performance as Johnny Cash and, frankly, should have won it. For it is a portrait drenched in charisma and humanity that Mr. Phoenix offers here and he manages to convey the inherent darkness that Cash carried around, with small, powerful means. Tight and stylish with a hell of a lot of intensity.

3. Don't Worry, He Won't Go Far on Foot (2018)

Good Will Hunting director Gus Van Sant's painfully forgotten 2018 classic is a hilarious, tragic and fascinating story where Phoenix plays the pants off everything and everyone. Phoenix manages, as he so often does, to bring his characters to life and, above all, to inject enough humanity and vulnerability into them to make even the darkest of tragedies watchable and enchanting. So, here is a film that I just don't think would have worked without Phoenix, at all.

2. Her (2013)

When Phoenix changes pace, he does it with a vengeance and has repeatedly offered us abrupt changes between such different film characters that it is sometimes difficult to accept that it is actually the same actor behind all the roles. This was the case for myself when I first looked through the wonderfully warm and watchable Her, in which Phoenix plays tender, kind, caring and delicately lonely with a kind of lovable vulnerability that drove the film forward, frame by frame.

1. Joker (2019)

When Heath Ledger mesmerised us as the Batman arch-villain Joker, it felt in many ways like no other actor could ever take on the character and live up to even half of what Ledger offered. He was that good. But we all thought wrong, because it would take a special gentleman named Phoenix to surpass Ledger's interpretation of the role, which happened in The Hangover director Todd Phillips' absolutely furiously well-made character study Joker. Phoenix portrays the tragic, psychotic, unpredictably dangerous Arthur Fleck with a presence and dynamic that enchanted and, for once, ticked off the Academy and gave him an award for this unforgettable role.