The best Robin Williams movies are, perhaps contrary to our expectations of the comedian-turned-actor, films where he is able to tap into his deep well of melancholy emotion. Sure, the elastic, ecstatic actor delighted us with his manic comedy since he brought his act to the small-screen, playing the bonkers alien on the sitcom Mork & Mindy. Elements of this are often present even in his most surprisingly soulful dramas. This makes it all the more surprising, effective and retroactively crushing to watch Williams turn fully into his abilities with pathos. His performances as father figures, wounded and imperfect, allowed a performer constantly trying to gas everyone up to not only age with grace, but to remain ageless as these roles lodged in the popular imagination. Finding success as a voice actor, a dramatic character actor, and the family-friendly lead of strange IP gambles, Williams’ particularly inviting brand of irrepressible energy — one that always felt lodged in a yearning psychology — led him to an Oscar win, a handful of box office smashes, and characters so ingrained in pop culture that whatever role you think of when you think of him, you’ll also be thinking of a quote to go alongside it.
Here are the best Robin Williams movies:
16. Cadillac Man
Year: 1990
Director: Roger Donaldson
Stars: Robin Williams, Tim Robbins, Pamela Reed, Fran Drescher
Runtime: 97 minutes
Like a lot of stand-up and TV comedians who make the jump to movies, Robin Williams doesn’t actually have that many great broad cinematic comedies to his name. His best movies tend to recontextualize his comic skills, applying them to more complex characters, or mute them in favor of more grounded characters. While it would be a stretch to call Cadillac Man a great comedy, it’s a more disciplined version of Williams going for laughs that, at least in terms of his commitment and relative restraint, has more in common with his dramatic parts than most of his manic-schtick vehicles. As Joey O’Brien, a womanizing car salesman so addicted to his job that he tries selling to a widow during her husband’s funeral procession, Williams bullshits his way through a stressful weekend and eventually a hostage situation. It’s a harder-edged studio comedy than many of his later studio works, but Williams also seems sincerely interested in Joey’s psychology. He turns a stock character type into a guy who, despite his fast talk and scheming, seems paradoxically trustworthy at his core – maybe because his love of sales seems utterly, perversely sincere.—Jesse Hassenger
14./15. Dead Again/Hamlet
Year: 1991; 1996
Director: Kenneth Branagh
Stars: Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, Andy García, Derek Jacobi, Hanna Schygulla, Wayne Knight, Robin Williams; Kenneth Branagh, Derek Jacobi, Julie Christie, Kate Winslet, Michael Maloney, Richard Briers, Nicholas Farrell, Robin Williams, Gérard Depardieu, Jack Lemmon, Billy Crystal, Rufus Sewell, Charlton Heston, Richard Attenborough, Judi Dench, John Gielgud, Ken Dodd
Runtime: 108 minutes; 242 minutes
Neither of these cameo-level roles for director Kenneth Branagh are really substantial enough to stand with top-tier Williams performances, but they’re worth mentioning because they offer a rare glimpse of a character-actor career he could have nailed if he hadn’t been so famous and beloved. In Dead Again, he pops up as a creepy ex-psychiatrist expelled from the profession for sleeping with patients, cleverly using his wisecracking image to deliver unsettling insinuations and the occasional pearl of wisdom (“Someone is either a smoker or a nonsmoker. There’s no in-between. The trick is to find out which one you are, and be that”). In Hamlet, he plays Osric, organizer of Hamlet’s duel with Laertes, saving the zaniness for between takes. The spark he adds to Branagh in both bonkers-pulpy mode and Shakespeare-steward mode implies that he would have been a terrific addition to the filmmaker’s Hercule Poirot series.—Jesse Hassenger
13. Good Morning, Vietnam
Year: 1987
Director: Barry Levinson
Stars: Robin Williams, Forest Whitaker, Robert Wuhl, Bruno Kirby
Runtime: 121 minutes
Williams had attempted some more serio-comic roles before this 1987 smash about an Armed Forces Radio DJ assigned to a station in Vietnam, but this one became his biggest hit and earned him his first Oscar nomination. Of his four certified Oscar Parts, Adrian Cronauer – a real guy retrofitted to Williams’ comic stylings – is probably the least interesting, and almost certainly the least challenging for Williams (who would eventually win, a decade later, for his least manic, least riffy nominated role). But in retrospect, his work in Good Morning, Vietnam provides crucial insight into exactly the kind of compulsively zany, peacocking comedy Williams was known for as a stand-up comic (and sometimes a movie star). We’re mercifully spared much backstory about Cronauer, left to wonder if even he knows exactly what motivates him (and, by extension, Williams) to act as a one-man Morning Zoo. A scene where Cronauer, disillusioned about the restrictions he faces on the job, meets a group of soldiers and essentially does his act live and in person, offers a lovely moment of clarity about what a comedian might be able to contribute during times of strife. A corny notion, perhaps, but neither Williams nor the movie around him gets too bogged down in sentimentalizing Cronaeur as some kind of Patch Adams-style saint of schtick. It simply understands how that kind of restless desire for laughter and applause can be put to good use. —Jesse Hassenger
11./12. Mrs. Doubtfire/World’s Greatest Dad
Year: 1993; 2009
Director: Chris Columbus; Bobcat Goldthwait
Stars: Robin Williams, Sally Field, Pierce Brosnan, Harvey Fierstein, Robert Prosky; Robin Williams, Daryl Sabara, Alexie Gilmore
Runtime: 120 minutes; 99 minutes
Fatherhood was obviously a subject near to Williams’ heart, allowing his explorations of it to sometimes transcend uneven material. That’s especially clear in two of his best dad performances, one in a crowd-pleasing smash and the other in a dark, confrontational obscurity. Mrs. Doubtfire is an antic, squishy Chris Columbus comedy that includes moist-eyed courtroom speeches and comic scenes that frequently strand Williams in uninspired physical comedy. But when Williams actually gets to “play” Mrs. Doubtfire, the Scottish-nanny disguise that Daniel Hillard dons out of desperation in order to spend more time with his children during an ugly custody battle, he’s wonderfully alive – and, yes, pretty convincing. The movie is partially about Daniel learning to be a better, more disciplined parent through this alternate persona, and the completeness of his transformation sells the idea that this father will near-literally shapeshift into an entirely new person if he needs to step up for his kids. This extends to the movie’s comedy, too: Even Daniel’s dad jokes (“drive-by fruiting,” things of that nature) feel freshened up by Doubtfire’s presence. Many of the audience members who made Mrs. Doubtfire the biggest hit of Williams’ career would likely flinch throughout Bobcat Goldthwait’s black comedy World’s Greatest Dad, in which Williams plays a failed writer who forges a suicide note after his unpleasant teenage son dies in an embarrassing accident. The movie itself is a little bit infatuated with its own outrageousness and performs some off-putting lurches between tones. Williams, though, working with his old friend Goldthwait, is terrific, offering a more complicated variation on a father finding meaning through his children, making the selfishness and ego of a character like Daniel Hillard more explicit, in a sad-sack package that strips away much of the actor’s familiar, frenetic charm (eventually literally). —Jesse Hassenger
9./10. Popeye/Hook
Year: 1980; 1991
Director: Robert Altman; Steven Spielberg
Stars: Robin Williams, Shelley Duvall; Robin Williams, Dustin Hoffman, Julia Roberts, Bob Hoskins, Maggie Smith
Runtime: 114 minutes; 142 minutes
Robin Williams had the kind of charisma that seduced nostalgic auteurs. Maybe it was his self-assured, self-contained, always-running performance — that inability to turn off when there was a job that needed doing, and people watching who needed winning over. It was one thing filmmakers with big ambitions didn’t have to worry about. You could always trust that Williams was going to be Williams. But he was a strange A-lister in that he was always a little much to be just a “movie star.” That’s a precedent you establish by having your first starring film role be a mumbling, bumbling Popeye impression. A seemingly perfect fit for how cartoonish Williams loved to be (and how he often seemed unable to contain the impersonations from tumbling out of him), Robert Altman’s oddball gamble built its cartoonishness up around him. Taking place on a garish Malta-built set that was of a piece with the massive forearms Williams sported, Popeye attempted to channel the controlled chaos of comics without actually controlling anything. Non-stop ad-libber Williams made himself a pain on set and, despite his winning physical performance, is underserved by Altman’s dialogue, which is less decipherable than usual. Perhaps too decipherable was another throwback role for a respected director that set Williams’ career in a new direction: A grown Peter Pan in Steven Spielberg’s Hook. Despite a big, spectacular, totally bizarre theme parky take on Neverland (Norman Garwood and Garrett Lewis earned an Oscar nod for their art direction), Williams and crew were left to wrangle a script whose themes were maybe too close to home for its director. The lack of confidence resulting in hammering everything home with an extra-large mallet, though the quintessential boy who wouldn’t grow up couldn’t have been cast better. Williams’ odd man-child performance, this time downplayed compared to his setting, can be awkward, silly and affecting — all moving towards kid-friendly turns in Aladdin and Jumanji (the latter of which would tap a similar Lost Boy vein). —Jacob Oller
8. One Hour Photo
Year: 2002
Director: Mark Romanek
Stars: Robin Williams, Connie Nielsen, Michael Vartan, Gary Cole, Eriq La Salle
Runtime: 96 minutes
Ah, the summer of 2002: the summer of Spider-Man, the summer of Stitch, and the summer of Robin Williams creeping people out. The season was bookended by his outright villainous turn in Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia, and a sadder, lonelier variation on a stalker figure in One Hour Photo. Mark Romanek’s Photo is the less successful thriller overall – it’s more than a little diagrammatic in its assignments of motivation and psychology – but it still contains fine work from Williams as Sy Parrish, a photo technician who becomes obsessed with a “perfect” family through their pictures. He slips so seamlessly into this role that you might remember it as more of a physical transformation than it really is. Mostly it’s a blonde dye job and some out-of-style glasses – and a matter of Williams redirecting his natural tendency to ingratiate in a more disturbing direction. Again he shows keen awareness of how a basic human need for connection can turn destructive and poisonous without a proper outlet.—Jesse Hassenger
7. Dead Poets Society
Year: 1989
Director: Peter Weir
Stars: Robin Williams, Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard, Josh Charles, Gale Hansen
Runtime: 137 minutes
The Maverick Mentor Who Changes Everything is a cinematic supertrope for a reason: It’s real. Many of us have had that teacher, and those who haven’t have missed a transcendent experience. In the case of Peter Weir’s 1989 classic, the sorcerer is a rogue literature teacher named John “Keats” (ha ha) Keating, who has returned, in 1959, to his alma mater, an ultra-stodgy elite boys’ boarding school. His mission is to teach poetry to what must be the most poetry-resistant demographic on earth: adolescent males. And since there are no spoiler alerts on 25-year-old films, let me just say he succeeds. In an extraordinary performance by Robin Williams, Keating harnesses his classic manic coke-y verbal machine-gun-volleys and hilarious impersonations—restraining that impulse with the very control his character was urging his students to shake off, exhorting his students to emulate Thoreau and “suck the marrow out of life.” He shook them up, demanding that they look at their ordinary environment from different perspectives (from the tops of their desks, for example) as he fed them Walt Whitman and Shelley and the Transcendentalists. We all need to be reminded that we have agency, choices, that we make our own worlds regardless of what tools or materials with which we’re given to make them. That we don’t have to accept gray, mindless, forgettable lives. That we can each choose to be more alive even if that choice includes choosing death (and it sometimes does). As Dead Poet’s Society member Charlie Dalton, a supporting character played beautifully by Gale Hansen, intones one night to beatnik drumming, “Laughing, crying, tumbling, mumbling / Gotta do more, gotta be more; Chaos screaming, Chaos dreaming / Gotta do more, gotta be more.” The message of the movie is one of the eternal ones: Be the hero of your own play. Be the star. Carpe diem, boys. —Amy Glynn
6. Awakenings
Year: 1990
Director: Penny Marshall
Stars: Robin Williams, Robert De Niro, Julie Kavner, Ruth Nelson, John Heard, Penelope Ann Miller, Peter Stormare, Max von Sydow
Runtime: 121 minutes
Robin Williams’ facial hair sometimes appears to invert Roger Ebert’s rule about Kevin Kline: Clean-shaven often indicates broad comedy, while a beard flags a more serious role. That’s certainly true of medical drama Awakenings, where Williams plays Malcolm Sayer, a fictionalized version of doctor and author Oliver Sacks, who uses an experimental drug to treat patients who have been catatonic for years. The results are successful but short-lived, and Robert De Niro has the showier role as Leonard, a man who “wakes up” after decades of a statue-like exterior. He’s terrific, but so is Williams as a man fighting his own natural shyness in order to reach out and attempt to help patients whose true selves are known only to handfuls of loved ones. Subtly mirroring the warning-sign hand tremors that Leonard experiences, Williams has Sayer appear uncomfortable with his own hands, as if in constant search of pockets in which to hide them, further insulating himself from the people around him. It seems possible that Williams was drawing on his own childhood shyness (as well as Sacks’ real-life behavior) for this portrayal, one of his most delicate and well-calibrated.—Jesse Hassenger
5. Insomnia
Year: 2002
Director: Christopher Nolan
Stars: Al Pacino, Robin Williams, Hilary Swank, Maura Tierney, Martin Donovan, Nicky Katt, Paul Dooley
Runtime: 118 minutes
Released squarely between Christopher Nolan’s introduction to the world as an intriguing British import with Memento and his ascension to box-office god with the revamped Batman trilogy, Insomnia is a film that often falls between the cracks. And that’s a shame. Taking its title and premise from a 1997 Norwegian thriller starring Stellan Skarsgard, the film casts Al Pacino in the central role of an insomnia-ailed police detective who travels to a remote Alaskan town to investigate the murder of a young teenage girl. His chief suspect is a true crime writer named Walter Finch (played, with surprising menace, by Robin Williams). Typically known for their gleefully over-the-top histrionics, both Pacino and Williams are refreshingly understated here, giving their scenes together a quiet, yet tense pulse.–Mark Rozeman
4. Good Will Hunting
Year: 1997
Director: Gus Van Sant
Stars: Robin Williams, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Stellan Skarsgård, Minnie Driver
Runtime: 126 minutes
The story of a genius janitor capable of solving the world’s most difficult mathematical problems, Will is both exasperating and loveable as the Boston boy reluctant to live up to his true potential. Robbin Williams takes the oft-clichéd mentor paradigm and turns it into a wholly original character as Damon’s therapist Sean. But what’s special about this film is the way Gus Van Sant captures the existential angst and, ultimately, the frustrated striving of a brilliant boy form the wrong side of the tracks. Matt Damon and Ben Afleck star in their own breakthrough roles as best friends closer than even blood brothers. Though the movie touches on heart-wrenching topics like childhood abuse and heartbreak, the sarcastic humor and witty banter are just as memorable. Effortlessly charming and never overwrought. —Amy Libby
3. The Fisher King
Year: 1991
Director: Terry Gilliam
Stars: Robin Williams, Jeff Bridges, Mercedes Ruehl, Amanda Plummer, Michael Jeter
Runtime: 137 minutes
Terry Gilliam may be best known for his completely inimitable style. Tune in to a Gilliam flick even halfway through and you’ll recognize his signature repertoire of angles—low, high, and Dutch—as well as his love of rectilinear lenses and his meticulously stylized mise en scène. With The Fisher King, though, his distinct aesthetic was transplanted from realms imagined to the far more familiar backdrop of Manhattan, where shock jock Jack Lucas falls from grace after an on-air rant leads an impressionable listener to commit mass murder. Jack is given a chance at redemption when he meets Parry, a delusional vagrant questing for the Holy Grail whose wife died in that aforementioned shooting spree; they bond, and Jack sets out to help Parry score a date with his distant crush, Lydia. The Fisher King wrestles with Brazil for the title of “best Gilliam film,” but it’s almost undoubtedly the most refined entry in his body of work, a contemporary epic that truly lives up to the meaning of the word. Come for Jeff Bridges and Robin Williams, stay for the Gilliam commentary track. —Andrew Crump
2. Aladdin
Year: 1992
Director: Ron Clements, John Musker
Stars: Scott Weinger, Robin Williams, Linda Larkin, Jonathan Freeman, Frank Welker, Gilbert Gottfried, Douglas Seale
Runtime: 90 minutes
Aladdin, along with The Lion King following it in immediate succession, certainly feels like the zenith of the 1990s Disney Renaissance, pushing the company’s animated features to daring new heights of artistic achievement and box office dominance. It was, in many ways, a genesis point for the structure of modern animated features, beginning a period of increased reliance on recognizable voice actors (in this case, a heavily promoted Robin Williams) as an audience selling point, rather than the casts of unknowns that had previously been the norm. Genie, on the other hand, became a character almost bigger and more valuable than Aladdin itself; a pop-cultural watershed moment that also served to make Williams beloved to an entire generation of 1990s kids who hadn’t exactly been the target audience for the likes of Mork & Mindy or Good Morning, Vietnam. More than anything, though, Aladdin thrives on a witty, rapid-fire screenplay, earworm musical numbers and lush animation that expertly mined the deep well of captivating mythology already present in One Thousand and One Nights, so rarely brought to life in the western world. —Jim Vorel
1. The Birdcage
Year: 1996
Director: Mike Nichols
Stars: Robin Williams, Gene Hackman, Nathan Lane
Runtime: 119 minutes
You know what’s awkward? When you’re a middle-aged gay Jewish South Beach drag club owner (Armand, played by Robin Williams) and your straight son shows up and asks for your blessing to marry his girlfriend who is the daughter of a Neocon senator (Gene Hackman) who heads something called “The Coalition for Moral Order.” You want to support your kid, but you don’t love being closeted by him, and the dinner meet-up ends up meaning you and your partner, Albert (Nathan Lane), are forced into a whole new level of drag in which you are straight, a cultural attaché to Greece, and married to the one-night stand straight-sexperiment (Katherine, played by Christine Baranski) that led to the conception of your son. Your partner’s offended, the Senator’s being investigated by the tabloids, tensions are running high and your houseboy Agador (Hank Azaria) has agreed to transform into a Greek butler named “Spartacus,” but let’s face it, tensions are running high on all sides-and that’s before your baby-mama gets caught in traffic and Albert sees the opportunity for the drag role of a lifetime. Fully Shakespearean hijinks ensue. The 1996 Mike Nichols remake of Edouard Molinaro’s La Cage Aux Folles was not really blistering social commentary, but beneath its glib feel-good star-vehicle exterior there are some depths you could easily miss while you’re distracted by the batshit-crazy and heavily sequined antics of Williams and Lane. It’s actually not only rambunctious and witty but, as with many of Robin Williams’ film roles, The Birdcage has a serious streak where a genuine investigation of personal identity is underway, and hypocrisy, acceptance, snobbery, and most of all, everyone’s individual style of “drag” (and hey, we all have one, even if we don’t always express it by putting on fake lashes and singing Sondheim) gets taken out for a much-needed exam. —Amy Glynn