John Krasinski

Jim Halpert, in The Office (2005), hears something ridiculous at the next desk and does not answer it. He lets it sit on his face, and the laugh arrives before the line does. Krasinski and Jenna Fischer were the quiet ones in that cast, and he has said he was told on that show: "Your job is not to deliver these lines funny. Your job is just to deliver these lines believably and if people think they're funny, that's up to them." That is the best account of what he does when he is good.

The series ran from 2005 to 2013 and he directed episodes of it; he has called it his film school. His film work in those years was supporting parts, Jarhead (2005) and The Holiday (2006), and his first two features as director, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009) and The Hollars (2016), were found uneven and sentimental. Then came A Quiet Place (2018), and everything before it looked like practice.

From a story by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, it gives a family one rule, stay quiet or be hunted, and keeps the camera on them for 91 minutes. Emily Blunt, Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe make the danger matter. Krasinski plays Lee Abbott, a father carrying more than he can manage, and he is convincing partly because the part hardly speaks. The script sometimes bends the family's decisions to serve the next scare, but this remains the best thing he has done on either side of the camera. He directed A Quiet Place Part II (2021) and supplied the story for Day One (2024), which Michael Sarnoski turned into a two-hander.

IF (2024), which he wrote, directed and voiced a part in, shows what happens when the rule is taken away. It is warmly shot, short on laughs, and never settles what its own world is for. We were bored past the hour, in a film with a purple monster in it, and then a late scene between Cailey Fleming and one of the older friends moved us more than the film had earned. It works for the reason Jim worked: Fleming watches and says almost nothing. Krasinski, as a father clowning round a hospital ward, we understood and did not laugh at.

Fountain of Youth (2025) is the other failure. Luke Purdue is a man who is always right and always pleased about it, and Krasinski plays him at one speed, grinning through the exposition as if it were a joke he had told before, while Natalie Portman does the objecting. His best film is the one in which nobody may speak, and his best performance is the one in which he mostly declined to. The next good thing he makes will have very little dialogue in it, and he should think hard before casting himself to say it.