Joker (2019)

Everyone involved should be hugely proud of their creation.

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.

A dazzlingly disturbed psycho morality play, one that speaks to the age of incels and mass shooters and no-hope politics, of the kind of hate that emerges from crushed dreams.

More character study than comic book movie, and anchored by an Oscar-worthy Joaquin Phoenix, Joker is a bravura blockbuster that proves you don't need superpowered scraps to dazzle.

"Joker" is a dark, brooding and psychologically plausible origin story, a vision of cartoon sociopathy made flesh.

Bold, devastating and utterly beautiful, Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix have not just reimagined one of the most iconic villains in cinema history, but reimagined the comic book movie itself.

Superhero blockbuster this is not: a playful fireman's-pole-based homage to the old Batman television series is one of a very few lighthearted moments in an otherwise oppressively downbeat and reality-grounded urban thriller...

What do you get when you take a poor, mentally unstable loner and you treat him like trash? The answer given in Todd Phillips's ingenious new feature is Batman's arch nemesis, the Joker.

"Joker" achieves two contradictory goals simultaneously, delivering a blockbuster that highlights what is eternally captivating about the character, while at the same time offering a sobering critique of the nihilism that has long been the Joker's M.O.

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.

Having brazenly plundered the films of Scorsese, Phillips fashions stolen ingredients into something new, so that what began as a gleeful cosplay session turns progressively more dangerous - and somehow more relevant, too.

This is a truly nightmarish vision of late-era capitalism - arguably the best social horror film since Get Out - and Joaquin Phoenix is magnetic in it.

It's nothing less (and nothing more) than an agent of unbridled chaos.