Robin Williams: 5 Awesome Performances & 5 That Sucked

1. Sy Parrish - One Hour Photo (2002)

In the same year that he was terrorising Al Pacino in Insomnia, he played an entirely different kind of menacing villain in Mark Romanek's One Hour Photo. Though it wasn't as universally loved as Nolan's more showy thinker, Williams' performance was the superior of the two, and made up for some of the film's other shortfalls (like its over-commitment to style in places). As Sy the photo guy, Williams is breath-takingly memorable: he's a monster dressed in the clothes of normalcy, and again it's a performance - and indeed a film - marked by contradictions. It's as much about how expectations and surface appearances can be entirely wrong: the image of the family portrait as an idealised fantasy (what Sy strives for) clashes with the portrait of a normal, boring man with a gnawing malevolence that horribly encourages you to sympathise with him up to the point where he ultimately pushes too far. Again, it was accused of being a stunt casting, but Williams' performance is completely authentic and entirely genius, and it is completely compelling to be given an invitation to really explore the depths of one of his characters, rather than just flirt with their suggestion. And now what of the performances that simply weren't up to scratch?