MASTERPIECE!

Rating: 10/10 (5 October 2019)

"The Shining", meets "Taxi Driver", meets "Split", with a little dash of "The Fly" and "Alien" (you'll see what I mean by these last two when you get a look at Arthur Fleck's strangley contorted body movements in the film)! Need I say more. Yes, in fact, I do need to say more. I haven't walked out of a film this stunned since "The Dark Knight" and "The Matrix", before that.
The opportunity to see the most evil/psychotic/diabolical character in DC/Marvel history, morph and evolve from lonely medicated sad sap to absolutely insane unmedicated criminal icon, was a pure uncomfortable and breathtaking experience. So extremely well acted by Phoenix. And then there's the music. Holy F#$k! You'll be amazed by a mesmerizing soundtrack that is more like a trip into the Joker's twisted mind, than it is as supporting music for actions in a scene.
Phillips did everything right in creating a believable history to explain Fleck's evolution into madness and gives us an absolute symphony that elegantly blends Phoenix's Joker into Ledger's, basically leap frogging right over "Batman Begins" and slamming us directly into "The Dark Knight". It's art, it's madness, it's chaos, and it's, in true Joker-like fashion, darkly, darkly funny.
There is absolutely no way that the current presentation of Batman could ever exist in this movie. "Joker" has set a very high bar, that the campy Justice League movies can never aspire to. I'm not sure how DC fits their PG superhero movies into "Joker's" R-rated world, but if they could find a way, something magical could happen here.
How the current Meta-Critic average score is only a 58, is mind blowing to me. I would take this film over any Marvel movie, any day. Disney could never pull off what "Joker" has accomplished here, and that's what DC needs to keep doing if they want to offer something that is unique to our typical superhero outings. Well done...well done indeed!