Joker (2019)

The idea of a high-profile film derived from a valuable IP source that doubles as a vital work of art can be taken as a bellwether for future hybridization or a death knell for non-franchise cinema as we know it. Add the fact that [Joker] comes heralded—not, I should say, fully incorrectly—as a self-consciously problematic exercise in rabble-rousing channeling present-tense anxieties about the glorification of male aggression and the ugliness of Trumpism, and there’s suddenly almost too much context and conflict to work through. […] 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. It’s not that I necessarily want an even nastier and more upsetting version of a movie that’s already throwing its back out trying to be frightening, only that the places where it holds back are suggestive of how ultimately risk-averse its creators are. […] The thing about A Clockwork Orange and Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy—and while we’re at it, about Fight Club […]—is that they’re genuinely rich and contradictory works that try to pull the rug out from under the viewer, whereas Joker, built on ancient and rock-solid pop-cultural foundations, doesn’t really do much more than lean into them. […] In a scene-to-scene, shot-to-shot, beat-by-beat level, Joker is intermittently impressive but mostly a mess, riddled with some almost impossibly awful dialogue and on-the-nose music cues (send in “Send in the Clowns”). I can’t say that I liked Joker, but I loved its Joker, and that paradox is interestingly rich: enough that I can’t quite throw the movie onto the pile reserved for empty hype

— Adam Nayman (The Ringer)

Joker reflects political cowardice on the part of a filmmaker, and perhaps of a studio, in emptying out the specifics of the city’s modern history and current American politics so that the movie can be released as mere entertainment to viewers who are exasperated with the idea of movies being discussed in political terms—i.e., to Republicans.

— Richard Brody (The New Yorker)