Masterful Filmmaking!

Rating: 10/10 (8 October 2019)

It's rare when we get to see a movie that's this close to perfect. Normally something or another, sometimes multiple things, are lacking in a movie. It could be one of the actors, the writing, the cinematography could be subpar, and on and on. To have a movie made like that this is so nearly flawless across the board is very special.
Joaquin Phoenix plays, quite likely, his best performance to date which says a lot considering how many great roles he's already done in his life. When I first heard about this movie when it was in the works I'll admit that I thought Joaquin was miscast. Boy was I wrong and in retrospect I'm not sure why I thought that.
Another thing that concerned me initially was that the director, Todd Phillips, was unproven as anything other than a comedy director (to me). Another major miss on my part there. Todd Phillips did an absolutely amazing job both directing and writing this masterpiece of a movie.
Going back to what I said above, most movies suffer from scenes that are either wasteful, serving no purpose or scenes that are flawed. All of these scenes serve a purpose and succeed at it very well by adding to the movie in some way or elevating the movie in some way. Further, there were some scenes that if they weren't in the movie the movie as a whole would have been less cohesive. Todd Phillips did such an amazing job walking the fine line between having redundant scenes or scenes that barely told us enough to paint the picture of how The Joker became The Joker.
Truly an amazing movie. I'd rate it between a 9.5 and a perfect 10.