Joker Is Craft in Search of a Reason

Full disclosure up front, because you'll likely disagree: audiences adored this (89% audience score, 8.4 on IMDb) far more than critics did (68%), and more than I do. Joaquin Phoenix won the Oscar and deserved it — physically transformative, impossible to look away from, carrying scenes that give him almost nothing to play.

The failure, specifically

Every scene reminds you of a better film — Taxi Driver here, The King of Comedy there, right down to casting De Niro as the talk-show host as if daring you to notice. Homage curdles into homework. Hildur Guðnadóttir's score and Lawrence Sher's sickly Gotham do real atmospheric work, but by the final act the movie is gesturing at ideas about spectacle and violence without earning any of them. The provocation it thinks it's making evaporates the moment you ask what, exactly, it believes.

Craft without conviction is just expensive mimicry.

Worth exactly one watch, for the performance. Not the coronation it was sold as — and the years since, with the discourse settled, have only made the seams show more.