Joker

Essential within its own continuity, which contains two films and connects to nothing else. It requires no DC knowledge at all and arguably benefits from none.

It is openly a pastiche of two Scorsese films, borrowing the structure of one about a man curdling in a decaying city and the subject of another about a failed comedian's delusion, down to casting Robert De Niro as the talk-show host. Todd Phillips has never hidden it. What the borrowing buys is a register no comic-book film had used: grainy, slow, and almost entirely interior.

Joaquin Phoenix won an Academy Award for a performance built on physical transformation and on a laugh presented as a medical condition rather than a flourish, and the film is at its best when it is simply watching him fail at things. The sequence on the stairs is the one everybody saw and the bus scene in the first ten minutes is better.

It arrived with a great deal of public anxiety about whether it sympathised with its protagonist, and the honest answer is that it is more interested in him than in what he does. It made more than a billion dollars, the first film with that certificate to do so, and the character here never becomes the figure from the comics in any functional way.