Kritiken

If you see Joker, it would be best to see it in a theater with a potential psychopath for that added thrill of maybe not surviving it. Seeing it at home will be a waste of time unless you live with someone who might kill you while it’s on.

Joker is undoubtedly the year’s Trumpiest movie and I mean that as a compliment. Not only an intelligent throwback to the feel-bad shock cinema of the 1970s, Joker is all but unique in its social realism: No other movie so cogently addresses the crisis of the present moment, both in Hollywood and the world.

It was a smart choice for the [Golden Lion] even if it was far from the best film in competition—about a handful of works feel decidedly worthier for formally more complex and/or intellectually more thought-provoking. Then again, Joker was the one film in competition that defies easy categorizations (Multiplex vs. Arthouse and some such) while thriving on messing around with expectations.

When the laughing gas cleared and it was possible to evaluate the movie as a movie, "Joker" seemed more like a sincere and partly successful attempt to deepen the form, unfortunately hampered by the limits of the filmmakers’ imagination.

The film operates under the belief that anything that works once will go over even better the tenth time, and this repetition of effects blunts impact.

There’s no accounting for how people relate to or understand even the most didactic movie. But what mostly struck me both times was how rotely, how condescendingly, the movie animates the tortured soul at its center.

Joker is replete with the signifiers of great cinema, all dialed up so heavily that they could denote parody if the film were not so serious.

In aping the ambition and prestige of its motley influences, it winds up with a bungled understanding of its own relation to violence.

To be worth arguing about, a movie must first of all be interesting: it must have, if not a coherent point of view, at least a worked-out, thought-provoking set of themes, some kind of imaginative contact with the world as we know it. “Joker,” an empty, foggy exercise in second-hand style and second-rate philosophizing, has none of that.

The result is a movie of a cynicism so vast and pervasive as to render the viewing experience even emptier than its slapdash aesthetic does.

Phoenix’s performance in Joker might have been impressive had he not devoted his career to playing so many weirdos.

The spirit is willing, perhaps, but the execution is weak, and results in a movie that’s curiously at odds with itself at all times, threatening true daring, but refusing to follow through in ways that would go beyond superficial provocation.