Review: Joaquin Phoenix puts on quite a show in ‘Joker.’ And the portrait of madness is both bleak and glib

The best superhero origin stories draw their power from a strange, durable tension: an inevitable destination but an unpredictable journey. “Joker,” Todd Phillips’ sensationally grim new movie about the fall and rise of Batman’s greatest nemesis, fulfills these conventions so that it can turn them violently inside out. Murray is played, with self-aware relish, by Robert De Niro — a direct allusion to “The King of Comedy” planted in a movie that plays like an homage to “Taxi Driver.” The specters of two Martin Scorsese-De Niro classics, plus fleeting glances at other cinematic touchstones like “Psycho,” “Network” and “The French Connection,” are anything but accidental, and they signal a great deal about this movie’s prestige-pulp ambitions. “Joker” is a fun-house of cracked cinematic mirrors, a seething urban hellscape that reflects Arthur’s own inner anguish back at him. No living American actor plays them better: In “Joker” you can see flickers of his great performances in “The Master” and especially “You Were Never Really Here,” a very different movie about a trauma survivor who takes care of his mother while exercising his talent for violent revenge; you didn’t know what that guy would do or who he would become.