To be worth arguing about

Rating: 10/10 (4 October 2019)

A movie must first of all be interesting: it must have, if not a coherent point of view, at least a worked-out, thought-provoking set of themes, some kind of imaginative contact with the world as we know it. "Joker," an empty, foggy exercise in second-hand style and second-rate philosophizing, has none of that. Besotted with the notion of its own audacity - as if willful unpleasantness were a form of artistic courage - the film turns out to be afraid of its own shadow, or at least of the faintest shadow of any actual relevance.