[Phoenix has] crafted a layered, terror-inducing antagonist, and earned his rightful place alongside Heath Ledger and Jack Nicholson in the pantheon of all-time-great Jokers.Nobody who sees this new film will ever need any other version.Joaquin Phoenix is astounding… [he] will be nominated for his work here, and rightly so.Phoenix’s performance is astonishing… playing a geek with an unhinged mind, yet he’s so controlled that he’s mesmerizing.Phoenix takes what might have been a turn filled with over-swings, and makes it all feel disturbingly natural… the actor never ceases to give each moment just the right amount of gas.It’s a raw, festering wound of a performance that flirts with virtuosity and redundancy alike.If you live to see Joaquin Phoenix go to performing extremes like nobody’s business, this movie really is the apotheosis of that.It’s hard to tell whether this is a poor performance, or if he just has precious little to work with.Phoenix is acting so hard you can feel the desperation throbbing in his veins.There are moments of intense violence, but the dread is really the thing that will make you squirm, rather than gore.The mounting violence is intensely unpleasant, shocking if not particularly surprising; in scene after scene, the buildup is so agonizingly drawn out that you’re unsure whether the movie is depicting or embracing its protagonist’s cruelty.The violence in this movie means to shock, and it does.What’s so compelling about the title role, both as written and in Phoenix’s full-throttle, raw performance, is that we’re encouraged to feel sympathy for the Joker even as he’s clearly turning into a homicidal maniac.Even as we’re drinking in his screw-loose antics with shock and dismay, there’s no denying that we feel something for him — a twinge of sympathy, or at least understanding.It may be irresponsible propaganda for the very men it pathologizes.Phillips and the Ace of Knaves have turned out to be the perfect marriage of filmmaker and material.Phillips, utilizing clever tracking shots, tight close-ups and lost-in-the-crowd framing to convey Arthur’s existential angst, has made us forget about those agonizing [It’s] directed by a glorified edgelord who lacks the discipline or nuance to responsibly handle such hazardous material, and who reliably takes the coward’s way out of the narrative’s most critical moments.Unfortunately, the film errs in its on-the-nose depiction of politics and class warfare.Phillips may want us to think he’s giving us a movie all about the emptiness of our culture, but really, he’s just offering a prime example of it.The movie is chock full of so many themes at so many different times it’ll leave your head spinning.If there’s a shortcoming it’s that, in taking inspiration so transparently from Scorsese’s late ’70s/early ’80s output, Joker is a film that exists squarely in Marty’s shadow.There is going to be a lot of talk about how what we see in the film reflects the world we live in right now, and how monsters come to be.
Phillips and Phoenix deliver a shattering and fresh new take on an age-old character, a character study of the birth of the supervillain with darkly disturbing vigour. For all the hype and anxiety surrounding the film, one can't help but walk away asking, all of that noise for this? While drawing heavy influence from previous Scorsese movies, Joker boasts a great performance from Phoenix and shows that darker comic book films continue to have a place in a family-oriented realm. July 3, 2020 June 27, 2020 July 24, 2020 Added: Apr 4, 2019 Joker is dark, dense, violent, and monstrous. Undeniably compelling. The definitive site for Reviews, Trailers, Showtimes, and Tickets Joker is a 2019 American psychological thriller film directed and produced by Todd Phillips, who co-wrote the screenplay with Scott Silver.The film, based on DC Comics characters, stars Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker and provides a possible origin story for the character. You got to hand it to Joaquin Phoenix for fully inhabited his role of a loner on the verge of psychological breakdown in "Joker".