"Joker"
Joker, the disturbing origin story of the character from director (and co-writer) Todd Phillips and actor Joaquin Phoenix, is the bleakest of comedies. Late in the film, Arthur Fleck, who will become Joker, says that he has long thought his life is tragedy only to realize it is a comedy. But his life, and the film, are comedies only in the sense that the Joker sees the word -- one daring everyone else to admit that they don't get the joke. That Phoenix is brilliant cannot be argued, and with an impressive resume already he may become the second actor to win an Oscar playing the best known of the Batman villains. But the movie overall, as watchable as it may be, is a too-familiar consideration of the connection between private madness and public heroism, of the rage of the disenfranchised against the unfeeling elite, of Bernhard Goetz, of the themes evident in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and King of Comedy . It's no accident that Robert De Niro plays a talk-show host i