For Fans of Robin Williams

Williams won his Oscar for playing Sean Maguire, a therapist who has outlived his own grief by helping a self-destructive genius process his. The performance is almost entirely reactive: he listens, waits, and then says the thing that lands with the precision of a scalpel. It is the opposite of his stand-up persona, and it reveals something his comedy always hinted at: his greatest skill was paying attention. The 'it's not your fault' scene works because you believe, completely, that this man has earned the right to say it.

Terry Gilliam's 1991 film pairs Williams with Jeff Bridges as two men undone by guilt and grief who find in each other a path back to the world. Williams plays Parry, a former professor reduced to homeless delusion after a personal tragedy, and the performance is funny, terrifying, and devastating in roughly equal measure. The Grand Central waltz sequence, which Parry imagines among the rushing commuters, is five minutes of pure cinema that no summary can do justice to. It is the role where you see most clearly how he thought about comedy: as a defense, not an evasion.

The late-seventies sitcom that introduced Williams to mass audiences is easy to dismiss as a vehicle for his improvisations, and to some extent that is what it was. But the premise (an alien learning to be human through observation and mistake) is also a perfect frame for what he did best: noticing the texture of ordinary life and finding it both absurd and genuinely moving. Mork's end-of-episode reports to Orson, delivered in the deadpan of someone trying to explain Earth logic to a superior, are some of the best five-minute essays on American culture from that era.

In the early 2000s, Williams took two back-to-back roles that operated entirely against type: a lonely photo technician who has built a parasocial obsession around a suburban family, and a detective in Christopher Nolan's remake of the Norwegian noir, undone by insomnia and moral compromise. Neither film is comfortable, and neither tries to be. They confirm that what made his comedy land was the same thing that made his villains and obsessives land: total commitment to the specific emotional logic of the character, without a single wink at the audience.