‘The People’s Joker’ Is a Comic-Book Fantasia More Authentic Than Just About Any Comic-Book Movie

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Challengers,” Luca Guadagnino’s enthralling sports opera about three great-looking tennis stars who trade partners, is the latest movie to feature that time-honored configuration, the love triangle. And make no mistake: This one is complicated. It’s no mere either/or thing.

Academy Award winner Aaron Sorkin has reiterated his plans to write a sequel to his acclaimed drama, The Social Network, examining the origins of Facebook, one that will hone in on the social media platform’s impact on U.S. democracy.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Boy Kills World,” Bill Skarsgård has burning eyes and model cheekbones, sinewy arms popping out of a dirty red athletic vest, and a feral pout that make him look like Jean-Claude van Damme crossed with Lou Reed. He plays a deaf-mute avenger, known only as Boy, who kills people in insanely violent ways. Yet through it all, the character retains his innocence.

Every frame of The People’s Joker, the debut feature from Vera Drew, drips with an anarchist spirit. In theaters now, the film began as a lark during the COVID-19 lockdown, a gag that poked fun at the endlessly rebooted Batman franchise and its iconic lead villain the Joker. It eventually grew into a feature-length film with Drew as its lead Joker and enlisted dozens of friends and collaborators to create the dynamic, varied visual style.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Any photographer who shoots what’s happening in the gleaming, raw, people-packed carnival of New York City — the stores and walls and towers and alleyways, the celebrities, the endless cross-section of humanity — already has an artistic leg up. But the other leg is what he or she does with it. Weegee shot the violent night world of sin and crime.

It’s been two and a half years since the release of Spider-Man: No Way Home and the movie continues to be one of the most successful films of all time. The film is currently the third highest-grossing movie of all time with a domestic total of $814 million and it’s safe to say that the lead actors took home a lot of money for the film!

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic What do you call world-building when it’s built entirely out of worlds that have already been built? I wouldn’t call it cinema; it might be closer to Lego with attitude. Zack Snyder’s “Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver,” like his “Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire,” is a sci-fi action fantasy so familiar and generic, so borrowed from and inspired by other things — it’s the 1977 “Star Wars” meets “Seven Samurai” meets “The Lord of the Guardians of the Rings of the Galaxy” — that it’s already the theme-park version of itself.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic For readers of Alexandre Dumas’ novel, extravagant French adaptation “The Three Musketeers – Part II: Milady” packs its share of surprises: killing off important characters, sparing others and reimagining allegiances that have stood for nearly two centuries. For viewers of “Part I: D’Artagnan,” however, this swashbuckling sequel feels totally in keeping with what has come before.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare,” British Prime Minister Winston Churchill authorizes an illicit mission to undermine Hitler’s fleet of German U-boats during World War II. The plan calls for renegades with little respect for the rules, led by a cocky ex-criminal named Gus March-Phillips (Henry Cavill), who’s released from prison and called into a top-secret briefing.

Linda Hamilton is in a late-career renaissance right now thanks to Syfy‘s “Resident Alien” and an upcoming role in the fifth and final season of “Stranger Things.” But will she ever return to her most famous role, that of Sarah Connor in the “Terminator” franchise? Sorry, “Terminator” fans: in a new interview with THR, Hamilton all but confirmed her turn as Connor in 2019’s “Terminator: Dark Fate” will be her last.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Sting,” a giant-spider-grows-in-Brooklyn thriller that’s cheeky, bloody, and (most important) very gooey, Sting is the name given by Charlotte (Alyla Browne), a precocious tween, to the elegant two-inch-long black spider that becomes her pet (she keeps it in a jar and feeds it bugs). Yet given how much slaughter is caused by this omnivorous arachnid, which grows bigger and bigger with each feeding, the moniker turns out to be a major understatement.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic SPOILER ALERT: The following essay discusses key plot points, including the ending. Last weekend, I took in “Le Samouraï” for what must have been the sixth or seventh time, relishing the new 4K restoration of Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterpiece (now playing at Laemmle theaters in Los Angeles). As I exited the screening, I discreetly eavesdropped on my fellow audience members. Most seemed impressed.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem” is a documentary about 4Chan, the popular imageboard website that became the Petri dish in which QAnon — the mother of all crackpot conspiracy theories — came into being. The story of 4Chan makes for a fascinating chapter in the evolution of Internet culture.

Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker – which was pulled from TIFF in 2022 over “rights issues” — starts a theatrical debut today at the IFC Center, moving to LA’s Landmark’s Nuart next weekend and expanding thereafter with about 85 booking so far — a nice outcome for the mixed-media coming-of-age dark superhero parody that “had gone into into hibernation mode” until Outfest LA Film Festival, said Frank Jaffe, whose distribution company Altered Innocence acquired it then. It’s U.S premiere garnered a Special Mention in the North American Narrative Feature Competition.

Alison Hammond and Dermot O'Leary have returned to host This Morning as new presenting duo Cat Deeley and Ben Shephard take a break for Easter. And it seems that Alison and Dermot are proving rather popular with viewers. Body language expert Darren Stanton has insisted that while Cat and Ben are total professionals, they just cannot compete with Alison and Dermot’s natural chemistry and charm.

EXCLUSIVE: Top Belgian distribution and production company Belga Films Group is teaming up with French director Cédric Nicolas-Troyan on an English-language, live action adaptation of the iconic, European comic book The Yellow M.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s War on Democracy” is the scariest film I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a documentary that explores the rise of Christian Nationalism, and much of what it shows you, about the mutation of the Christian Right into a movement that has openly abandoned any loyalty to democracy, has been covered in the mass media in recent years.

“Star Wars” is set to make a grand return this June with the highly-anticipated Disney+ series “Star Wars: The Acolyte.” A recent feature from Entertainment Weekly has shed light on the character played by actress Dafne Keen (“Logan”), a young Jedi, the Padawan of Lee Jung-jae’s Jedi Master Sol. The series revolves around the enigmatic murder mystery of multiple Jedi, a case that Sol is determined to solve.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic There had been drill sergeants in movies before Louis Gossett Jr. played one in “An Officer and a Gentleman” in 1982 (though for the life of me, I can’t remember any). There would be a lot of them afterwards.

Brent Lang Executive Editor “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” is looking mighty as it heads into its opening weekend, earning an impressive $10 million in Thursday previews. The muscular results come despite the fact that the film suffered meh reviews — critics faulted the latest clash of the primordial beasts for hectic pacing and overstuffed plotting. Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, for instance, dismissed the film as “overly busy boilerplate” (though he liked the finale).