JOKER directed by Todd Phillips (USA, 2019)
Who needs critics anyway? All of us have opinions so we don’t need to be told what to like and why.
The initial official press reaction to Joker was broadly positive but winning The Golden Globe in Venice seems to have provoked a bizarre backlash. How dare a popular movie win such an accolade over the latest worthy but dull art house fodder?
Roger Ebert.com has dismissed the movie as “pernicious garbage” and Time magazine’s hack even have the bare-faced nerve to attack Joaquin Phoenix’s stellar performance as “aggressive terribleness”.
On top of this, and in keeping with its liberal tendency for fence-sitting, the UK’s Guardian newspaper try to have it both ways. They currently have a policy of filling space in their culture pages by printing reviews with wildly opposing points of view. On one hand Xan Brooks praised the movie’s “glorious daring” but then Peter Bradshaw described it as “very shallow”.
Thankfully, ordinary punters have wisely disregarded the negative reviews. At the time of writing, the critic’s average rating at Metacritic is a paltry 59% while users have given it a resounding 9.3. Continue reading
As with his previous book – The Story Of Film (the tie-in with the brilliant Channel 4 series) , Mark Cousins acts as an articulate and able guide in the same way that E.H. Gombrich did for 
