This was a damn fine movie with a few moments of greatness. It was a joy watching Cage as the title character. The boy could hold his own against Cage but it's definately his movie. Supporting players are all very good too, especially the despicable father. The story is nothing new, no surprises there. I was a tad bit disapointed with the climax which is why the movie didn't left that strong of an impression on me. Loved it up till then, though. Overall, this is an at times beautifully, engaging filmed movie with a fantastic performance by Cage. He's worth the price of admission alone.

Did you like it more than Prince Avalanche?

Yes, but it's really close. It's funny how similiar the settings of both movies are. The more I think about Avalanche though, the more I like it, it's growing on me.

Same here.

This got quite a bit better once the relationship between Joe and Gary begins developing about 45 minutes in, and the final act is genuinely riveting. The ending is very touching. I thought Mud was a better movie that tackled similar themes, but this is still definitely solid. Nicolas Cage and Tye Sheridan are great, and Gary Poulter was just incredibly menacing and evil. Definitely worth watching. B


For the record, I enjoyed Prince Avalanche slightly more.

Directed by David Gordon Green, Joe opens with a teenage son chastising his alcoholic father. The decrepit patriarch has once again misbehaved and brought trouble to the doorstep of himself and his family, forcing them to drift to another town. The father hits his son and teeters into the distance; there, a group of men emerge and beat him. The son leaves the scene as the sound of landed blows echo. This grim scene sets the stage for the overall film, a heavy Southern-Gothic meditation on failure, family, and masculinity.

The aforementioned son is played by Tye Sheridan, who, between this film, The Tree of Life, and last year's Mud, has mastered the art of playing Southern lads on the verge of transitioning from earnest childhood to hardened knowledge of the adult world and its perils. The bastard of a father is played by the late Gary Poulter, a real-life bipolar drifter and former G.I. cast on the street. Poulter received a terminal cancer diagnosis shortly after the end of the production and later drowned in a small pool of water, inebriated. (This knowledge only intensifies the impact of a brutal, lived-in nonprofessional performance.) And the great Nicolas Cage delivers one of his most rewarding performances as the title character, an introverted ex-convict who heads a tree-poisoning outfit and becomes an improbable mentor to the Sheridan character.

Green, who here laces the grand visual poetry of his debut George Washington with arsenic and old-fashioned suspense, gives the central trio of characters time and space to reveal themselves, and they emerge as flesh-and-blood characters who are at the same time almost mythological in their sunburned, forgotten-by-society-at-large melancholy. Cage, always existing on the line separating the A-list movie stars from the wild-eyed character actors, is the perfect choice to play a man whose day-to-day existence in an exercise in extreme self-control. Joe is a bit of an asshole, and he has a fire inside him, yet he is also tender and desperate to be the best version of himself given the circumstances of his existence. It is a delight to see Cage portray this internal conflict. I am not sure any other high-profile celebrity performer could do it so well. The film in general is highly entertaining and involving, however foreboding and profane. There are points which honestly invite a reaction of, "Christ, can they shoehorn one more filthy, larger-than-life, mean-spirited character into this crazy film?," but it is always a fleeting response because the characters and their hard-edged arcs are just too riveting to turn away from.

A-

Joe

Hmm, it was ok, I suppose. Rather slow and uneventful, though. I enjoyed how you could sense some previous trouble in the town between Joe and the police etc., but I didn't appreciate how in the dark we were kept until the third act. The film was basically about a small town of low lives, squatters and degenerates. Not the most appealing subject matter. Nic Cage is good but not up to his normal level. Tye Sheridan, on the other hand, was very good. There's one thing I don't quite understand; the first scene. That old guy looked like he was being killed but later he died from jumping off a bridge. At first I thought it was some non-linear timeline stuff, but the rest of the film ran smoothly. I guess he didn't die. He just got a beating instead (of which there were no signs of afterwards). Technically, the film is fine, but pretty standard with nothing screaming out as riveting, intense, or mesmeric. It's a good film, but that's it.

B-