It turns out that observing how time withers men who believe they’re impervious to everything, especially the law, is an essential add-on to Scorsese’s body of work. Appropriately, it’s a movie about the ravages of time that would have been impossible to make without the hundreds of years of collective experience of the cast and crew.
Read MoreMessy psychology aside, Joker behaves in the Batman film universe very much like The Killing Joke does for comics: it doesn’t need to connect to any other stories or characters, and captures just one possible timeline for how the Joker came to be, much like the several different threads that Heath Ledger’s Joker references in The Dark Knight.
Read MoreBeyond the visceral, in-the-moment thrills of gangster movies - the shootouts, the acidic dialogue, the displays of power - one of the most compelling things the genre can offer is a meditation on trust. When a low-level thug aspires to lead his own crew, which of his friends can he count on to get him there? Once he becomes the boss, do the guys he leaned on in the past hold true? And what about at home - in the world of organized crime, can a gangster ever rely on the people he loves?
Read More
