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I'm correcting a film review by one my ESL students and she has written the following sentence as the first one in one of the paragraphs:

Starring, Joaquin Phoenix, with incredible acting that makes it hard for the audience to difference himself from the actual characters.

It is wrong on several levels, but I'm mainly interested in knowing why the beginning of the sentence and the use of commas sounds so terrible. Do any of you know the reasoning behind the ungrammaticality of this sentence?

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  • I would say no punctuation "Starring Joaquin Phoenix..." or maybe "Starring: Joaquin Phoenix..."
    – GEdgar
    Commented Feb 9, 2020 at 18:03
  • Actually, the sentence is poorly constructed. There is no subject.
    – Hot Licks
    Commented Feb 9, 2020 at 18:40
  • There is no verb. If you added at the end "Joker is a serious candidate for an Oscar", it would be grammatical.
    – Greg Lee
    Commented Feb 9, 2020 at 20:02

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Taking account of the comments above, what your student probably meant is:

Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix, with incredible acting that makes it hard for the audience to differentiate him from his character, is a serious candidate for an Oscar.

Thus the statement has been changed to a full sentence. The noun difference has been changed to the verb differentiate. The comma after starring has been deleted. Himself from the actual characters has been changed to him from his character as there is no reference to other actors.

It still remains a lumpy overlong sentence with the widely-abused all-purpose adjective incredible that has elbowed aside outstanding, excellent, marvellous, magnificent, superb and numerous other synonyms. (Forgive a personal opinion!)

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