Joker: Folie à Deux

Skippable, and it is the most spectacular commercial failure in modern comic-book cinema. The first film made over a billion dollars; this one made a small fraction of its budget and was gone from cinemas within weeks.

The reason is that it is a deliberate refusal. The sequel to a film about a man becoming an icon is a courtroom drama in which he is told repeatedly that the icon is other people's invention, and the ending takes the position that he is not the Joker and never was. Audiences who came for an escalation were given a two-hour argument that the first film's fans had misread it.

It is also a musical, which the marketing understated. Characters break into standards from the American songbook inside Arthur's imagination, staged on sets that look like a variety show, and these sequences are intercut with a grim prison drama shot in grey. The two registers never meet, apparently on purpose.

Lady Gaga is good and underused, Phoenix is committed to a diminished version of the same performance, and Brendan Gleeson is excellent as a guard. There is a real film in here about delusion and audience and it is buried in a structure almost nobody wanted. Watch it only if the first film interested you as an argument.