The official twitter for Joker has just announced more critical acclaim coming from the Venice Film Festival. The Todd Phillips directed movie has won the "Golden Lion Best Film" award.
The Golden Lion is the top honor a film can take at the Venice film festival and it's rare for it to go to a mainstream studio picture. The award follows weeks of glowing reviews for Joaquin Phoenix's go-for-broke portrayal of the Batman villain.
Joker is the 2019 live-action Warner Bros. movie loosely-based on the DC Comics character The Joker.
Joaquin Phoenix stars in this intensely grounded character study as a tormented wannabe-entertainer named Arthur Fleck, a man struggling to find his way in Gotham’s fractured society. A clown-for-hire by day, he aspires to be a stand-up comic at night…but finds the joke always seems to be on him. Caught in a cyclical existence between apathy and cruelty, Arthur makes one bad decision that brings about a chain reaction of escalating events in this gritty character study. Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, Robert De Niro, Marc Maron, Glenn Fleshler, Shea Wigham, Brett Cullen, Douglas Hodge and Josh Pais also star.
Todd Phillips directed the movie from a script he co-wrote with Scott Silver. The film is produced by Phillips and Oscar nominee Bradley Cooper under their Joint Effort banner, along with Emma Tillinger Koskoff. It is executive produced by Michael E. Uslan, Walter Hamada, Aaron L. Gilbert, Joseph Garner, Richard Baratta, and Bruce Berman.
The movie was a massive critical and box office success. It garnered numerous awards including the Oscar for best actor for Phoenix. Phillips has insisted the movie is a stand-alone effort, but given its success there are always rumors of sequels.
