Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

It's debatable how much this should be labelled, despite having the DC universe as its backdrop and one of the said universe's best-known characters as its subject, as a comic-book screen incarnation. Once you have chosen Joaquin Phoenix as the psychotic titular character, we're automatically not going to be in the primary-colour world of superheroics any more, and it proceeds accordingly. Aside from nods late on to the Batman origin story, which are actually quite unnecessary and seem to be there just as concessions to fans so that they can't go away bleating that the film wasn't about their Joker, this is essentially a dark depiction of a descent into mental disintegration, containing very little in the way of the standard action sequences.
Phoenix, an actor whose real mental state can generally only be guessed at, with his history of throwing up smoke screens, naturally goes full method with drastic weight loss as bullied, needy wannabe stand-up comedian Arthur Fleck, who has severe mental issues and lives with his ill mother, at the receiving end of an already dangerously divided society. The seeds for the eventual unravelling of his mind are all painfully obviously there at the outset, and the film thus has to depend heavily on Phoenix to avoid being merely a story of a man turning into a murderous nutjob with a perverse world view.
But his portrayal carries the whole with aplomb, unsettlingly unbalanced yet utterly mesmerising, and, above all, not pandering to 'How to Act a Looney' conventions. It feels quite frighteningly real. And the inclusion of Robert De Niro as an anodyne talkshow host who Arthur hero-worships at first until the host ridicules him publicly, is also a nice touch, with its overt allusion to De Niro playing a similarly obsessively delusional fan in The King of Comedy. Let's just hope that sense prevails and the urge to automatically turn its uniqueness into another franchise is resisted for once.

7/10