10 Best Joel Schumacher Films

10. Flawless

Flawless begins much like a lot of Schumacher’s ‘90s films, with a focus on a hard boiled man of action (Robert De Niro as cop Walter Koontz), but quickly shifts into an outlier in the director’s canon: a slow burning, sensitively drawn buddy movie between an intolerant middle aged man and his vivacious drag queen neighbour, Rusty.

It’s the latter character who really lifts the film, portrayed as he is by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. You’d be hard pressed to name a single bad Hoffman performance, and the actor was on a hot streak here. He dips into stereotype on occasion - Rusty is tough, but he’s also exceedingly camp - but as per is more than capable of finding the depth in his character.

Schumacher, an openly gay man for most of his life, clearly connected to the material, and the New York LGBT scene is handled well, especially for the time. The film isn’t the most exciting of his oeuvre, and De Niro has done better work (his character suffers a stroke, and the actor’s commitment to the affected speech is at times detrimental), but Flawless is worth checking out for Hoffman alone.