‘Joker’ Wins Top Award at Venice Film Festival—A Rarity for a Studio Film: WATCH
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Director Todd Phillips’ dark supervillain origin story Joker starring Joaquin Phoenix as the “Clown Prince of Crime” trumped the competition at the Venice Film Festival, taking the Golden Lion award.
According to Variety, “It’s a rarity for a major Hollywood studio production to take the top prize at Venice, and unprecedented for a superhero-adjacent property to take any such honor, but the Warner Bros. title established itself early on as the festival’s lightning rod: a film that sparked headlines and critical discussion to the very end of the festival, as many other competing titles came and went without a ripple.”
Variety chief critic Owen Gleiberman was among its many champions, acclaiming it as “a neo-‘Taxi Driver’ knockout: the rare comic-book movie that expresses what’s happening in the real world.” Other critics voiced reservations about the extremity of the film’s onscreen violence, and what they perceived as sympathetic centralization of a toxic male protagonist; we can expect the back-and-forth to continue when the film goes into general release on Oct. 4.
