| Warner Bros. | Release Date: October 3, 2019 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
33
Mixed:
16
Negative:
11
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Critic Reviews
Aug 31, 2019
Featuring a riveting, fully realized, and Oscar-worthy performance by Joaquin Phoenix, Joker would work just as well as an engrossing character study without any of its DC Comics trappings; that it just so happens to be a brilliant Batman-universe movie is icing on the Batfan cake. You will likely leave Joker feeling like I did: unsettled and ready to debate the film for years to come.
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Aug 31, 2019
Movie NationOct 2, 2019
Repellently violent, intimately epic and powered by a performance so absorbed, hurt, confused and just “out there” that it makes everything that’s come before it in the genre just a vamp in tights, Joker turns every previous film in this justly maligned genre into “just a cartoon.” Damn. There’s an Oscar in this.
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Oct 2, 2019
This is a disturbing film, a journey into the heart of a damaged man’s psychosis. In many ways, it’s more of a horror film than an action/adventure offering. Even Nolan’s The Dark Knight, the crown jewel of the 21st century DC/Warner Brothers cinematic catalog, traced a more traditional comic book movie template than Joker. Within this genre, there has never been anything quite like it.
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Oct 2, 2019
At times the film overdoes it with the clown metaphors (including the use of songs such as “Everybody Plays the Fool” and “Send in the Clowns”), and I had major misgivings about one particular subplot, but with Phoenix appearing in virtually every minute of this movie and dominating the screen with his memorably creepy turn, Joker will cling to you like the aftermath of an unfortunately realistic nightmare.
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The Observer (UK)Oct 6, 2019
Subtlety is not Phillips’s strong point. What he does have is an eye for a well-chosen location, an ear for a provocative line of dialogue and a finger on the pulse of very marketable, confrontational (if also “cynical”) entertainment. Add to this an incendiary central performance by Phoenix and Joker looks set to have the last laugh.
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Oct 2, 2019
The Joker’s superpower is his resentment, his narcissism, and Phoenix cultivates these methodically in his performance, slowly transmuting the character’s awkward fragility into a kind of raging charisma — aided and abetted, of course, by all the tricks of art direction, sound design and editing that a journeyman filmmaker has at his disposal.
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Aug 31, 2019
This is Phoenix's film, and he inhabits it with an insanity by turns pitiful and fearsome in an out-there performance that's no laughing matter. Not to discredit the imaginative vision of the writer-director, his co-scripter and invaluable tech and design teams, but Phoenix is the prime force that makes Joker such a distinctively edgy entry in the Hollywood comics industrial complex.
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Oct 3, 2019
While Phoenix is always more than watchable (his scary-Fred-Astaire dance moves, born from Arthur’s habit of watching old movies with his mother, are both mesmerizing and disturbing), “Joker” really has nowhere to go. Its characters are one-note cartoony, but fun is the last thing on this movie’s mind; it’s all despair, from its opening scenes on downward.
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