An ex-con, who is the unlikeliest of role models, meets a 15-year-old boy and is faced with the choice of redemption or ruin.
Joe may be too bleak and unsparing for some tastes, but it's an adult, accomplished drama that elevates an ordinary story to near-operatic heights.
Cage gives us a complex portrait of a formerly bad man trying to do the right thing in all his imperfect and messy glory.
An understated Nicolas Cage — there’s a phrase you don’t get to write too often these days — anchors a superbly realised film, which, like its eponymous hero, has a brittle outer shell concealing a surprisingly warm heart.
Green’s soul-baring Southern noir has much to say about those who speak with their fists and is a masterwork of threatening melancholy.
Moody, melancholy and well-intentioned, Joe works better as a character study than the melodramatic parable that it eventually embraces.
Exudes a quiet determination that American cinema could use more of.
Here is a seething piece of social-realist Southern gothic, featuring a powerful performance from a big and broodingly bearded Nicolas Cage. It's a film that also appears to mark the end of the weirdest auteur-detour in modern movie history.
Joe is a gripping drama with a powerful moral core, that has sympathy for those trying to make their way alone through the world, but doesn't give them much of a chance. Friendship and hard work are its characters' only paths to redemption.
Best of all, Green coaxes a far more subtle and affecting performance from Cage than he has ever given in a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.
Joe is a grim, often shockingly violent rural drama where you can almost feel the dirt and sense the menace. In a community where nobody has much, life is cheap and virtue is a luxury that few can afford.
What follows is strong on a general mood of hopelessness, decay and misplaced machismo but light on plot.
The result is a sinewy if somewhat overripe taste of the south, at times self-consciously "poetic" (the voice-overs are a misstep), but generally as raw as the steaks that Cage manfully cuts from the carcass of an impaled deer, the high whiff of which seeps through every frame of the film.
David Gordon Green on why he cast Nicolas Cage to star in Joe
David Gordon Green: 'Why I love Nicholas Cage'
General release. Check local listings for show times.
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