Joker

Director: Todd Phillips

2023 / 122min / 35mm

Awarded the Golden Lion by a Lucretia Martel-led jury at the Venice Film Festival, Phillips’s telling of the origins of Batman’s arch-foe channels the nightmare New York of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, with Joaquin Phoenix giving a totally committed, impressively unhinged, and physically transformative performance as Arthur Fleck, a mentally ill would-be stand-up comic whose eventual very public violent breakdown unleashes an explosion of pent-up rage in powder keg Gotham City. “Phoenix is astonishing… the rare comic book movie that expresses what’s happening in the real world.”—Variety

Introduction by production designer, Mark Friedberg, on Friday, October 20th