Hard to watch but magnificent!

Rating: 10/10 (28 October 2019)

Okay so it is a bit sad I suppose that I saw this three times in one long weekend but I just had to be sure I Loved it as much as I thought I did after the first viewing!
The first time through, I cried. I literally cried from start to finish: from the haunting way in which Fleck forces himself to smile at the start (but can't stop the tears from spilling out of himself), to the end, where he has unwittingly become a hero to Gotham's suffering masses and paints the smile on his face with blood.
Phoenix's performance is so raw and gritty and painful, you are compelled to watch even when you want to turn your head from the screen! And there were a few times that I wanted to do that!
The second viewing? I was able to watch it without the blurry vision induced by my tears and by the third, I cried at various places and with different motivations from my original emotional response.
This film is not what you might expect from an origin movie - and it is so good because of that perhaps. I am a huge comic book hero and villain fan and this was simply beautiful. And by the end, yes, you are aligned to Arthur somewhat, and you can't and don't blame him for any of the chain of events. Wonderful cinema.