Bizarrely, Joker: Folie à Deux seems embarrassed to be a movie about the Joker. Every time it gets close to letting the Joker (Joaquin Phoenix) and Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga) drift into twisted, dream-like musical sequences, the movie does it in a halting, tuneless way, exacerbated by Phoenix’s ear-stabbing vocal performance.
Read MoreThere’s still a chance that the Film-Twitter ApprovedTM foreign-language nominee Parasite may act as a dark horse and make history in the Best Picture race, but I’m not putting a huge amount of faith in an Academy that only last year gave the award to Green Book, a (not terrible!) but thoroughly plain choice in a far more accomplished field. With less than one week to go, on to the picks!
Read MoreMessy psychology aside, Joker behaves in the Batman film universe very much like The Killing Joke does for comics: it doesn’t need to connect to any other stories or characters, and captures just one possible timeline for how the Joker came to be, much like the several different threads that Heath Ledger’s Joker references in The Dark Knight.
Read MoreBack in February, we surveyed all the films set to come out over the upcoming year and wondered who could win their first statue in 2020.
It’s now five months later, so we thought it was high time to revisit the list and see what’s changed.
Read MoreThere are plenty of actors and actresses who have yet to win, including Amy Adams, Willem Dafoe and Viggo Mortensen this year, though I’m sure they’ll get other chances. Here’s a list of actors with upcoming films that could net their first win.
Read MoreThe problem with a lot of crime films is that they often feel the need to explain multiple backstories to their viewers before going for the pay-off moment, rather than dropping them in to the middle of a crisis and saying, “here, figure it out.” There’s no big build-up here; you see things as Joe sees it, and a lot of it doesn’t make sense right away. Joe’s PTSD is as much a character of its own as Joe, and it’s often manifested through quick cuts to Joe suffocating himself with plastic bags or silently drowning in water
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