Robin Williams

Night at the Museum

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Ben Stiller and Robin Williams in Night at the Museum

One of Disney’s old standbys is the perky live-action comedy, of the sort they used to put out on the 1960s, invariably starring Dean Jones and a gaggle of pesky kids, plus a cute animal or two. These movies were zippy and had a gee-whizz wholesomeness that was easy to mock but hard to hate. Night at the Museum drills right into that vein, and even gives a small part to Dick Van Dyke, king of Disney’s live-action magnum opus, Mary Poppins. But he’s not the star. Instead there’s an appropriately bumbling Ben Stiller fitting right into the Van Dyke mould, as the hapless, hopeless dad who takes a job at a Museum … Read more

The Night Listener

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Robin Williams and Toni Collette

When he switches off the mouth, Robin Williams can be an incredibly effective actor. This is one of those turns, yet it’s ironically about a man who is a professional mouth, a DJ with a late-night show who uses his graveyard phone-in to tell and listen to stories. It’s another of Williams’s characteristics as an actor that he’s happy, let’s say willing, to play characters who either aren’t likeable or are downright nasty, One Hour Photo being the ultimate proof of that. Again ironically, he’s neither here, though he is playing a character despised in much of society – a gay man. There’s a dark almost Hitchcockian feel to the path that leads off … Read more

RV: Runaway Vacation

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Robin Williams ready for ordeal by ordure in RV

And you thought that after being excellently sinister in Insomnia and One Hour Photo, Robin Williams had stopped making goofily sentimental comedies that stop every 20 minutes for toe-curlingly inappropriate improv from Mr W. Sadly not, as evidence there’s this woeful, slight affair in which Williams plays the family man driving his family cross country to a business convention (they think they’re going on holiday but he hasn’t told them the truth) in a recreational vee-hickle, even though they’re the sort of family who don’t do recreational vehicles, camping, communication, fun or togetherness. Cheryl Hines plays the exasperated wife and Jeff Daniels and Kristin Chenoweth are the heads of a family they meet … Read more