Ahead of its weekend premiere, here's Variety's review of Joker, a 'rare comic-book movie that expresses what's happening in the real world':
), the mentally ill loser-freak who will, down the line, become Batman’s nemesis, stands before us not as a grand villain but as a pathetic specimen of raw human damage. 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.
For all two hours of “Joker,” Arthur, a two-bit professional clown and aspiring stand-up comic who lives with his batty mother in a peeling-paint apartment, is front and center — in the movie, and in our psychological viewfinder.
You’re always aware of how much the mood and design of “Joker” owe to “Taxi Driver” and “The King of Comedy.” For a filmmaker gifted enough to stand on his own, Phillips is too beholden to his idols. Yet within that scheme, he creates 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.
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