Joker
Directed and written by Todd Phillips • Produced
by Creative Wealth Media Finance and DC Entertainment
• Distributed by Warner Brothers
Downton Abbey
Directed by Michael Engler • Screenplay by Julian
Fellowes • Produced and distributed by Focus
Features
The Conversation
Directed and written by Francis Ford Coppola •
Produced by The Coppola Company • Distributed
by Paramount Pictures
There must be other films as ghastly as director Todd Phillips’ Joker, but I can’t think of any that come close to its sickness. I don’t say that lightly. This is a thoroughly immoral film, and a profoundly unpleasant one, unless, of course, you hanker for gruesome scenes. How about watching people get shot in the face point-blank, the content of their skulls exploding behind them? Or, perhaps you take delight in watching a deranged son suffocate his elderly mother with a pillow. How about seeing a demented man repeatedly stab a work colleague in the neck, erupting a geyser of blood from the poor fellow’s jugular? And there’s more, much more.
I thought I had become inured to the grisly images proffered as entertainment in many current films, but Joker’s descent into blood and gore corrected...