Starring Joaquin Phoenix, director Todd Phillips Joker has already generated buzz as a potential Academy Awards contender, and the first reviews for the psychological thriller have done nothing to change that. Its debut at the Venice Film Festival, has garnered more than 20 reviews, earning a critics rating of 86 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and a metascore of 75 on Metacritic.
Existing in its own continuity, outside of Warner Bros.' so-called DC Extended Universe, Joker is set in 1981 Gotham City, where failed stand-up comedian Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) turns to a life of crime and chaos.
Early reviews single out Phoenix's performance as Fleck, with some predicting the three-time Academy Award nominee will be in the running for an Oscar once more. However, others claim Joker is ultimately as hollow as it claims the world to be.
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Here's a selection of what critics are saying about the film.
Mark Hughes, Forbes: "Joker is a phenomenal film, destined to be pitted against Ledger's The Dark Knight performance for the title of the definitive on-screen portrayal of the character. So fabulous is this version of the Joker, it is hard to imagine the upcoming Batman rebooted franchise offering yet another new version any time soon — which is why I hope Phoenix can be persuaded to reprise the role and somehow cross over into Matt Reeves' Batman movies in the next few years."
Owen Gleiberman, Variety: "Phoenix’s performance is astonishing. He appears to have lost weight for the role, so that his ribs and shoulder blades protrude, and the leanness burns his face down to its expressive essence: black eyebrows, sallow cheeks sunk in gloom, a mouth so rubbery it seems to be snarking at the very notion of expression, all set off by a greasy mop of hair. Phoenix is playing a geek with an unhinged mind, yet he’s so controlled that he’s mesmerizing. He stays true to the desperate logic of Arthur’s unhappiness."
Jim Vejvoda, IGN: "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... Joker isn’t just an awesome comic book movie, it’s an awesome movie, period. It offers no easy answers to the unsettling questions it raises about a cruel society in decline. Joaquin Phoenix’s fully committed performance and Todd Phillips’ masterful albeit loose reinvention of the DC source material make Joker a film that should leave comic book fans and non-fans alike disturbed and moved in all the right ways."
Xan Brooks, The Guardian: "Audaciously, it’s a film that invites us to love the monster... what a gloriously daring and explosive film Joker is. It’s a tale that’s almost as twisted as the man at its center, bulging with ideas and pitching towards anarchy."
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Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times: "A dark realist thriller in comic-book drag — or to put it another way, a Hollywood entertainment willing to take its time as it builds tension and brims with ideas — is nothing to scoff at. Still, there are times when your admiration for the filmmaking may blur into the movie’s own obvious admiration for itself."
David Ehrlich, IndieWire: It’s a visionary, twisted, paradigm-shifting tour de force and a bar-lowering mess of moral incoherence. It’s nothing less (and nothing more) than an agent of unbridled chaos... If Christopher Nolan’s Joker was an inscrutable force of nature, Phillips’ couldn’t be more human — all of his eccentricities are explicitly diagnosed. That literalness has its virtues, but it can also be insufferable; Phillips blurs fantasy and reality in the same way that Scorsese did in The King of Comedy, but he insists on doubling back and drawing a clear line between fact and fiction. It’s one of the many ways that Joker poses as a movie worthy of serious thought, but lacks the courage to behave like one."
Stephanie Zacharek, Time: "Director Todd Phillips — who made frat-boy comedies like Road Trip and Old School before graduating to dude-bro comedies like The Hangover movies — bears at least some of the blame, and the aggressive and possibly irresponsible idiocy of Joker overall is his alone to answer for. 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’s cracks — and it’s practically all cracks — are stuffed with phony philosophy. Joker is dark only in a stupidly adolescent way, but it wants us to think it’s imparting subtle political or cultural wisdom."
Directed by Todd Phillips, Joker stars Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Bill Camp, Frances Conroy, Brett Cullen, Glenn Fleshler, Douglas Hodge, Marc Maron, Josh Pais and Shea Whigham. The film arrives in theaters Oct. 4.