IMOGEN POOTS: girl for all seasons

Imogen Poots in GREEN ROOM
Imogen Poots in GREEN ROOM

Sometimes actors become a brand name in the sense that you can depend on a movie being good if they are in it. Actors like Robert Duvall, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Parker Posey, Alfre Woodard and Michael Shannon come to mind – they just don’t seem to ever be in a lousy movie.  Imogen Poots is proving that she belongs on the list.

Poots is only 26, but she’s been in EIGHT really good movies in the past eight years.  She can play anything except uninteresting.

Here’s her most recent work:

  • Me and Orson Welles – don’t blink or you miss her in a good indie coming of age film.
  • Solitary Man – after Michael Douglas beds a girlfriend’s daughter (Poots) while taking her to tour colleges, she gets the best of him.
  • Jane Eyre – haven’t seen it, but she got good notices.
  • Greetings from Tim Buckley – she’s the girl who takes the musician Jeff Buckley off track from his coming-to-terms-with-his-dad navel gazing.
  • A Late Quartet – has the best monologue in a movie filled with great actors; she blasts her mom (Catherine Keener) out of the water with a lasered-in rant.
  • The Look of Love – almost steals the movie as the daughter who inherits a porn empire.
  • A Country Called Home – In this underrated indie, she’s a low self esteem young woman who returns to the funeral of her estranged alcoholic father and finds self-discovery.
  • Green Room – In this bloody thriller, she goes from a numb basket case to a fierce force of nature bent on survival at all costs.
  • Frank & Lola – her most complex role so far as an unreliable girlfriend; but the roots of her unreliability are a mystery – is she Bad or Troubled?

That doesn’t count two not-so-great movies from great directors: Peter Bogdanovich’s She’s Funny That Way and Terence Malick’s Knight of Cups – those certainly weren’t  her fault.  And we’re not counting her debut as a 15-year-old in V for Vendetta.  Right now, she’s also starring in the Showtime series Roadies.

Poots is on an impressive streak, and she’s earned this much – if it’s an Imogen Poots movie, we should all go and check it out.

Imogen Poots with Michael Shannon in FRANK & LOLA. Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.
Imogen Poots with Michael Shannon in FRANK & LOLA. Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Film Society.