Some thoughts on this atrocity, which depressed me:

Joker is gorgeously filmed, yet amateurishly directed; each meticulous, airless shot is, on its own, competently composed and lit, but, like a sequence of big words strung cumbrously together, they don’t ever form a rhythm of unique style. It has a filmic vocabulary and references (and sometimes straight-up purloins from) myriad other movies. It never finds a voice, or anything to say. 

The depiction of mental illness—or rather, “mental illness,” an ambiguous,…

A film that understands the power of the subjective truth. 

What initially seems like another fawning paean to moving images and old music slowly reveals itself to be Tarantino’s most earnest and vulnerable work since Jackie Brown, an exploration of aging and coming to terms with one’s own mediocrity, the aching reality of failure. It’s pervaded by a melancholic air, and yet in its absurd final scenes a glimmer of hope emerges. 

Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth are two of…