Joker: Folie à Deux

The last laugh

Filmmaker Todd Phillips has a knack for combining drama and dark comedy, most notably in the Hangover trilogy: The gags are funny but the stakes are real and potentially devastating. The same is true of Joker: Folie à Deux, his follow-up to 2019’s extraordinary Joker. Like its predecessor, this is a dead-serious examination of duality and identity, of acting on violent impulses in a physically and emotionally volatile world and… it’s also a musical, and a good one. That’s an extra you wouldn’t expect, and the combination is both challenging and engrossing.