In 2019, a year now separated from us by enough catastrophic global events to feel like a remote archaeological era, the movie Joker, like it or not (I certainly didn’t), was a big deal. It won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and later garnered a leading 11 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, with star Joaquin Phoenix eventually winning Best Actor for his performance as a mentally ill would-be stand-up comic turned murderous clown. The movie also became the subject of heated discussion and not a little hand-wringing. Would its portrait of the comic-book villain as the lonely, misunderstood victim of mistreatment by a vaguely defined “society” inspire copycat acts of mayhem? Joker may have teetered uneasily in the balance between critiquing incel violence and being a commercial for it, but thankfully its many admirers kept their enthusiasm contained to the box office, where the film raked in over a billion dollars worldwide, shattering the all-time record for an R-rated movie.
Five years later, Joker’s director and co-writer Todd Phillips has returned with a sequel that swerves in an unseen—and on paper, intriguing—new direction: Our miserable antihero has become, of all things, the singing, dancing protagonist in his own private musical. A lot of things could be said about Phillips’ execution of that idea, most of them deservedly negative. By any reasonable measure this is a terrible movie, too long and too self-serious and way too dramatically inert, a regrettable waste of its lead actors’ boundless commitment to even their most thinly written roles. But no one could accuse Joker: Folie à Deux of being a mere cash grab, lazily recycling its predecessor’s mood, themes, or plot structure.
There’s an admirable boldness to Phillips’ decision to cast a pop supernova like Lady Gaga opposite the darkly charismatic Phoenix, then ask them both to sing, live-to-film, a jukebox-musical soundtrack of more than a dozen well-known songs that range from 1940s Broadway standards (“Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” from Pal Joey) to 1970s easy-listening pop (the Carpenters’ “Close to You”). Granted, the director fails to clear the bar he sets for himself—fails hard enough, at times, to scrape the skin off his legs from knee to ankle—but it’s fair to say that this movie’s problems have little if anything to do with the attempted magic trick of its premise. It’s mainly the weirdness of that trick, and the stars’ doomed dedication to pulling it off, that renders Joker: Folie à Deux even minimally watchable.
Joker ended with Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck locked up in a mental institution but seemingly on the verge of escaping to start his career as Batman’s archnemesis. Instead, Folie à Deux finds Arthur still locked up in Gotham City’s inhumane Arkham State Hospital. Having been judged competent in a sanity hearing, Arthur is about to go on trial for the murders of five people, one of them on live television. (As he confesses to more people than he probably should, the number is really six if you include his mother.) Outside the institution’s grimy walls, he has become a folk hero to a certain set of clown-mask-sporting nihilists and a tabloid bogeyman to the public at large. But inside the hospital, Arthur remains a pitiable loser, mocked by his fellow inmates and singled out for alternately friendly and cruel treatment by an Irish prison guard (Brendan Gleeson).
Phillips’ desire to mess with the audience’s genre expectations is evident from the jump. The first thing the audience sees, after a vintage WB logo, is a cartoon short entitled “Me and My Shadow,” animated by the Triplets of Belleville filmmaker Sylvain Chomet in a style reminiscent of classic Looney Tunes. In it, Arthur’s shadow self emerges from his body to commit crimes that the real man is then blamed for. The plot of the cartoon is a literalization of the defense that his sympathetic lawyer (Catherine Keener) will later use in court: Arthur, she believes, is the victim of dissociative identity disorder, a former abused child who’s made up the Joker character as a way to vent his otherwise inaccessible rage. It’s not clear whether the movie wants us to agree with her assessment or with that of Gotham assistant district attorney Harvey Dent (Industry’s Harry Lawtey), who thinks Arthur is merely a sociopath faking mental illness in order to escape the consequences he deserves.
Advertisement
Meanwhile, Lee Quinzel (Gaga), an arsonist serving time in Arkham’s minimum-security wing, has a very different vision of the Joker: She’s a groupie, having followed his crime spree in the news and obsessively rewatched a TV biopic about him. (Even fans who haven’t consumed the aggressive marketing won’t take long to recognize her as the future Harley Quinn.) When they’re put in the same music-therapy group—a place where cheery sing-alongs are touted as a wholesome counterpoint to the grimness of asylum life—Lee and Arthur bond instantly and soon develop their own more twisted motives for bursting into song. When they’re together, or apart and thinking of each other, their internal monologues bubble to the surface as ready-made classics of the American songbook. This despite the fact that Lee, for her part, seems not to be a big fan of the musical genre. When the asylum shows the MGM classic The Band Wagon on movie night, Lee gets so bored she sets fire to the rec-room piano. Not liking The Band Wagon should surely serve as a red flag for any prospective suitor, but Lee redeems her taste later on, when the by-then-besotted couple belts out a cover of that musical’s most enduring number, “That’s Entertainment.”
Joker: Folie à Deux is hardly the first musical to posit the idea of its song-and-dance sequences as the emanations of a delusional mind, but it must be among the ones that hammer hardest on that conceit. In scene after scene, often with hardly a break for dialogue in between, either Lee, Arthur, or both in unison will channel the intensity of an emotional moment by delivering a breathy version of some beloved pop hit or other. Invisible string orchestras may swoop in to accompany these flights of fancy, just as they would in a Hollywood musical, but the secondary characters never join in and seldom seem to notice that a serenade is taking place. With rare exceptions (like the rock-’em-sock-’em Gaga cover of “That’s Life” that plays under the closing credits), most of the vocal performances in Folie à Deux are purposely underwhelming in terms of virtuosity: They’re husky, scratchy, and in Phoenix’s case often half-spoken, suited more for a tipsy karaoke night than for the Broadway stage.
Gaga has pointed out in interviews that neither her nor Phoenix’s character is a professional entertainer, so why should they sing like one? It’s a reasonable point, as is a less polite one she doesn’t make: that if she sang full-out instead of curbing her usual vocal splendor, the contrast would place Phoenix’s adequate but limited baritone in unflattering relief. But what makes the songs, irresistible toe-tappers all, start to blur into a drab wall of sound has less to do with the performance quality than with the nonstop onslaught of musical numbers and the sluggishness of the story in between. Other than the building of internal emotion to the point that it must express itself in song—over and over and over—precious little happens in Folie à Deux. Arthur is declared fit to stand trial, goes to court, and is marched back by the cruel guards each night to the bleakness of his cell. A few familiar characters from the first Joker, including Zazie Beetz as Arthur’s former neighbor, show up to take the stand, and at one point a horrific act of violence interrupts the proceedings. But the forward motion of the story is so minimal, and so broken up by long stretches of musical stasis, that the result barely feels like a movie. It’s more like a work of Joker fanfic, created not just by the credited screenwriters (Phillips and Scott Silver, who also co-wrote the 2019 film) but by Phoenix and Gaga themselves in what was apparently a collaborative project to revise the script in real time during the shoot.
The fact that Folie à Deux has the self-referential quality of fanfic does not necessarily mean it will go down well with actual Joker fans, who seem likely to come out scratching their heads over a sequel about a comic-book supervillain that contains virtually no fight scenes, a single car chase that ends roughly a minute after it begins, and scarcely a moment that could be classified as suspenseful. The main question to be answered by the viewer is not “What will happen next?” but “Is all this taking place in the real world, or just inside their heads?”—an epistemological puzzle that is not enough in itself to sustain our energy for nearly two hours and 20 minutes. Even more confoundingly, all this time spent locked in the psyches of two deeply disturbed characters gives us little insight into their motivations. The pathetic Arthur Fleck remains, as I called him in my review of the 2019 movie, a “poor little clownsie-wownsie,” while Gaga’s Lee is so underwritten we remain unsure to the end whether she is a vulnerable fangirl or a heartless femme fatale. If he is, as the lyric from “That’s Entertainment” goes, “the clown with his pants falling down,” does that make her simply “the skirt who is doing him dirt”? To make Gaga’s character little more than a mirror that reflects the Joker back to himself (in alternately flattering and unflattering ways) is a real squandering of this powerhouse performer, whose life experience as a stadium-filling superstar has given her no shortage of insight into the psychology of fame monsters.
Advertisement
Without spoiling the ending, it’s safe to say that with it, Phillips seems to foreclose the likelihood that anyone will be begging for more. That’s probably a blessing for both the filmmaker and us, since this somber, muddled, maudlin film seems to have been made by someone who holds his characters and his audience in contempt.
Last year’s “Superman” ended with Iggy Pop singing “Because I’m a punk rocker, yes I am” — an ironic coda for a superlatively square hero. But it rings straightforwardly true for Superman’s cousin.
Milly Alcock’s Kara Zor-El, or Supergirl, sports not a spandex suit but a Blondie T-shirt. When we meet her in Craig Gillespie’s “Supergirl,” she’s been on an interstellar bender for days. She’s more Courtney Love than Clark Kent.
Nonchalant and sarcastic, Kara is also a little Han Solo-ish, you might say, given that she moves capriciously through the galaxy in her junky spaceship while getting in fights in extraterrestrial bars. She’s a welcome, jagged riff on more buttoned-up superheroes, and Alcock is terrific in the role. If only “Supergirl” was as good as she is.
While the latest DC release, and second under James Gunn’s stewardship, has its moments, “Supergirl” struggles to match Kara’s punk-rock energy with an equally spirited supporting cast and story.
Skepticism seems to have gathered for “Supergirl” ahead of its release. Many fans have argued it wasn’t the right next step for DC Universe. But I’m not so sure. Alcock’s breezy cameo in “Superman” was one of that movie’s highlights. Handing the follow-up to her, and her faithful floating dog Krypto, strikes me as an extremely natural next step. When in doubt, follow the dog.
Advertisement
And much of “Supergirl” is winning. It resides almost entirely in space, touching down only momentarily on Earth. In its consistently creative production design, clever needle drops and underdog story arc, “Supergirl” resides a little closer to Gunn’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies than other DC entries. Its outer space is filled with cosmic detritus, mean characters and cute critters. Seth Rogen as the voice of a tiny alien co-piloting a space bus is an inspired concoction, as is a shabbier sci-fi realm with rest stops along the intergalactic highway.
A family and friends gather for a naming-day ceremony at a Danish seaside hotel, but an unexpected appearance by one uninvited attendee (Trine Dyrholm) ruptures the veil of bland, happy-clappy familial unity in director Mads Mengel’s gutsy, well-wrought debut feature, The Guest.
The most audacious move here may be Mengel and co-screenwriter Christian Bengtson’s choice to write something that will inevitably invite comparisons with Festen (The Celebration), arguably the most notorious Danish-language film of the last 30 years, which similarly revolved around a bougie gathering disrupted by angry revelations. But there’s a savvy 2026 vibe about the way the film refuses to create florid melodrama out of quotidian crisis, and instead observes with generosity as the characters grope awkwardly toward emotional détente and mutual forgiveness.
The Guest
The Bottom Line
When wetting the baby’s head goes too far.
Advertisement
Venue: Karlovy Vary Film Festival Cast: Simon Bennebjerg, Trine Dyrholm, Josephine Park, Peter Gantzler, Petrine Agger, Mette Klakstein Wiberg, Kristine Kujath Thorp, Buster Lund Luscher Director: Mads Mengel Screenwriter: Christian Bengtson, Mads Mengel
1 hour 40 minutes
Festen-alumnus Dyrholm, having a bit of a career moment with outstanding performances both here and in the recent The Girl With the Needle among others, leads a uniformly excellent cast in a work that deserves celebration on the festival circuit and beyond.
Dyrholm’s Vibeke is technically the first person we meet, although she’s seen only in shadow at first as she smokes and drives while her unattached seatbelt, caught outside by a closed door, clatters on the road. This is the kind of unsafe driving her son Karl (Simon Bennebjerg) so deplores, a point of contention later on in the story when he will steal her car keys in interest of her own safety and that of others.
Advertisement
But well before we get to that flashpoint, the film introduces Karl, effectively the film’s protagonist, as he arrives at the swanky resort with his wife Emilie (Mette Klakstein Wiberg) and their infant son Elliot (Buster Lund Luscher). The young family, who’ve chosen this new, secular tradition instead of a christening to welcome their child to the world, are there a day before the ceremony to meet up with core family members.
As this advance party settles down for dinner, a table that includes Karl’s sister Rikke (Josephine Park) and Emilie’s parents Frank (Peter Gantzler) and Kirsten (Petrine Agger), there’s a surprise: Vibeke is coming, courtesy of Rikke’s invitation. Karl is quietly furious and seems determined to turn her away, even when she shows up minutes later. Poor Frank and Kirsten look on confused, determinedly polite in their insistence that all family members should be welcome.
Bengtson and Mengel’s economical script carefully dripfeeds backstory as the film unfolds to explain that Karl hasn’t spoken to his mother in years, that Rikke has taken over all the daily mom management and that she’s very worn out by it. Even so, she insists Vibeke is regularly taking her medication and isn’t a problem these days, although to Karl every weird anecdote and moment of emotional intensity is an augur of impending chaos. Rikke counters that their mother is just “big, that’s her personality not her condition.”
Interestingly, that specific condition is never named throughout, although armchair diagnosticians might spot many of the signs of bipolar disorder. But the film’s emotional focus on the person and her actions rather than the label is also very contemporary, reflecting a more holistic, inclusive mindset and approach to dealing with mental health issues.
Which is all fine and dandy, until Vibeke duly does skip a dosage and starts getting manic. One of the first signs of chemical imbalance arrives during the ceremony on the beach, when Vibeke carries little Elliot much further away from the shore than anyone wants, creating a panic. From there it just gets worse as Vibeke picks up on the censorious feeling emerging from the other party guests, who had found her so charming the night before when she’d led everyone to the casino to play roulette and diverted a bunch of partying teenagers from the room next to Karl and Emilie so they could get some sleep. When the toasts at the formal dinner begin, Vibeke’s mood darkens much further, and if we’ve all learned one thing from Festen, it’s be very afraid when a Dane gets up to make a toast.
Advertisement
Cinematographer David Bauer’s nimble-footed lensing and use of natural light does indeed hark back considerably to the look of those Dogme 95 movies back in the day, as does the naturalistic editing style deployed by Louis Emil Ramm Seeberg. But there are plenty of sins against the rules of cinematic chastity that marked that movement, such as the ample space made for Lasse Aagaard’s affecting, low-key score that amps up the anxiety as Vibeke starts to spiral.
That said, Mengel keeps things simple in sonic terms when it really counts, letting the musicality of Dyrholm’s deep, sonorous voice ring out on its own in the big monologue scenes. She is, as ever, utterly mesmerizing but the performance is made even more powerful by the muted, expressive reactions of the rest of the cast as they look on, frozen like deer in the headlights of the car crash of pseudo-christening. Moments of levity puncture the gloom, but the final feeling is one of numbed sorrow and pity for all these kind, fallible people, just trying to do their best.
In a roundabout way, the fact that I don’t have a strong attachment to The Wizard of Oz as a film (my late mother loved it, so that memory is deeply rooted in me, but the movie itself never did much for me) contributed directly to how amusing I found Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass to be. This comedy spoofs the plot of the classic fantasy movie, though the jokes are largely about Hollywood. The humor is big and broad, with some of the jokes really landing. Others? Not so much. Still, more than enough do to warrant a recommendation.
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass gets a lot of mileage out of sending up show business, even if the observations, while funny, are not particularly new. Besides the deluge of jokes, there’s also a lot of likably broad characters to spend time with, especially our lead. They make the 90 minutes and change spent together with them go down very easy.
Sony Pictures Classics
For Gail Daughtry (Zoey Deutch), her life as a small town hairdresser is perfect. Engaged to her high school sweetheart Tom (Michael Cassidy), she’s the picture of happiness, at least until a trip to a celebrity book signing. There, Tom meets and ends up sleeping with his “celebrity pass,” a term Gail wasn’t even really previously aware of. Feeling betrayed, Gail impulsively joins her co-worker and friend Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) on a trip to Los Angeles. There, a psychic convinces her that the can save her marriage by sleeping with her own celebrity pass: Jon Hamm (Jon Hamm).
Journeying through Tinseltown in a manner that recalls Dorothy’s adventure in Oz, Gail and Otto won’t have to find Hamm alone. Joining forces with talent agency assistant Caleb (Ben Wang), down on his luck paparazzo Vincent (Ken Marino), and actor John Slattery (John Slattery). As they search for Hamm, some for their own purposes, they meet other celebrities, while also being hunted by a group of Italian assassins after a case of mistaken identity. Eventually, they come across Hamm, and the moment of truth is at hand.
Sony Pictures Classics
Zoey Deutch dives headfirst into a broad comedy like this, absolutely relishing the opportunity to get silly again. She’s able to make Gail a babe in the woods but also someone you laugh with, not at. It’s a wildly enjoyable turn. Deutch started out in comedies and was always a talented comedic actress, so it’s a pleasure to watch her back at it. Miles Gutierrez-Riley and Ben Wang get some very funny moments, while Ken Marino is a reliable comic presence. Jon Hamm and John Slattery are delighted to be sending up themselves, with amusing results. Supporting players here, in addition to Michael Cassidy, also include Kerri Kenney, Richard Kind, Thomas Lennon, Joe Lo Truglio, Fred Melamed, and more, plus some cameos.
Advertisement
Filmmaker David Wain, again co-writing with Ken Marino, continues to make it look easy. Few can make a silly comedy like Marino and Wain, especially as they pack their flicks with extra bits that only subsequent viewings reveal. Is Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass on the same level as Wet Hot American Summer or They Came Together? No, not quite. At the same time, is this, scattershot approach and all, funnier than most other 2026 releases? You bet. Marino and Wain have a hit rate that allows some of the jokes to miss, as you only have seconds to wait before the next one, which probably will hit.
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is very amusing, and occasionally hilarious, even if not as many jokes land as you might expect. Zoey Deutch is great in the lead role, David Wain is in his comfort zone, and the laughs come hot and heavy. If you’re a Wain fan, this new movie should be a must see.
Sony Pictures Classics
Sony Pictures Classics
