Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic released their critic scores for Joaquin Phoenix’s upcoming Joker film.
Rotten Tomatoes
The Rotten Tomatoes score currently sits at 89% based of 37 reviews. It has 33 fresh reviews and 4 rotten with an average rating of 9.08 out of 10.
Here’s what the critics are saying:
Philip De Semlyen at Time Out gives the film a 5/5. He writes, “This is a truly nightmarish vision of late-era capitalism – arguably the best social horror film since Get Out – and Joaquin Phoenix is magnetic in it.”
Alonso Duralde at TheWrap gives the film a rotten score. He writes, “If you strip the Joker and his nearly 80-year history as a cultural icon out of this film, as well as all the 1970s movie homages, there’s not a whole lot left except for Phoenix’s performance, and it’s the kind of turn that’s destined to be divisive.”
David Sexton at London Evening Standard gives the film a 5/5. He writes, “Nobody who sees this new film will ever need any other version.”
Stephanie Zacharek at Time Magazine gives the film a rotten score. She writes, “Phillips may want us to think he’s giving us a movie all about the emptiness of our culture, but really, he’s just offering a prime example of it.”
Glenn Kenny at Roger Ebert gives the film a 2/4. He writes, “As social commentary, Joker is pernicious garbage.”
Mark Keizer at CineGods gives the film a 4.5/5. He writes, “Creates its own world of dank, hopeless urban alienation and tells its own tale of class-based chaos and its newfound champion.”
Esther Miguel Trulla at Espinof gives the film a 3.5/5. They write, “Joker may not be a disaster, but it is also no masterpiece. It remains a highly controlled blockbuster made to facilitate the survival of the franchise and its marketing campaign.”
Raphael Abraham at Financial Times gives the film a 5/5. He writes, “Like the best of the New Hollywood classics it references, this is a film that exhilarates and unsettles while having something to say about today.”
James Mottram at South China Morning Post gives the film a 4.5/5. He writes, “Joker touches on the Batman mythology, although in some ways this is the least interesting aspect of the film – certainly when you’ve got Phoenix going full tilt.”
Metacritic
As is normally the case, Joker doesn’t fare as well on Metacritic compared to Rotten Tomatoes. The film has a 75 Metascore based off 18 critics. The film has 13 positive reviews, 4 mixed reviews, and 1 negative review.
Here’s what the critics are saying on Metacritic:
Xan Brooks at The Guardian gives the film a 100. They write, “What a gloriously daring and explosive film Joker is. It’s a tale that’s almost as twisted as the man at its centre, bulging with ideas and pitching towards anarchy.”
John Bleasdale at Cinevue gives the film a 100. He writes, “Phoenix has created a masterful performance for a film which itself feels like a masterpiece: a cracked masterpiece.”
Jim Vejvoda at IGN gives the film a 100. He writes, “Featuring a riveting, fully realized, and Oscar-worthy performance by Joaquin Phoenix, Joker would work just as well as an engrossing character study without any of its DC Comics trappings; that it just so happens to be a brilliant Batman-universe movie is icing on the Batfan cake. You will likely leave Joker feeling like I did: unsettled and ready to debate the film for years to come.”
Jessica Klang at The Playlist gives the film an 83. She writes, “In amongst “Joker’s” fire and blood and chaos and its blackest of blackhearted laughter, there is the sense of a grotesque, green-haired genie being let out of a bottle, and whether it wreaks havoc or not, we’re not going to be able to put it back in.”
Robbie Collin at The Telegraph gives the film an 80. He writes, “A part of me found Todd Phillips’s radical rethinking of the Batman villain Joker thrillingly uncompromising and hair-raisingly timely. Another thinks it should be locked in a strongbox then dropped in the ocean and never released.”
Richard Lawson at Vanity Fair gives the film a 60. He writes, “The movie is, for a good stretch, a troubling and arresting character study, one done with nervy conviction. Eventually, though, Phillips has to more tightly attach this downward spiral to the larger Gotham mythology, which is where the provocative ambivalence of the film gives way to veneration.”
David Ehrlich at IndieWire gives the film a 58. He writes, “It’s good enough to be dangerous, and bad enough to demand better. It’s going to turn the world upside down and make us all hysterical in the process. For better or worse, it’s exactly the movie the Joker would want.”
What do you make of these critic reviews? Do you plan on seeing Joker when it hits theaters on October 4, 2019?