Todd Phillips
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Connections, in both directions
Phillips’ Joker is brazen in its open homage to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King Of Comedy but it also has certain moments which echo visual cues from William Friedkin’s 1970s masterworks, The French Connection and The Exorcist .
There are also two extended subway sequences: one in which Arthur uses his gun for the first time, and another in which, pursued by police, he ducks in and out of the carriages, as if in homage to “The French Connection” (1971).
Even the first violent scene in the subway harkens back memory of The French Connection.
It might still be called Gotham, but the reference isn't even thinly veiled: This is early '70s New York during a garbage strike, as depressing, foul and pitiless as anything from Midnight Cowboy or The French Connection.
Set in the late-1970s/early-80s hinterland, Phillips pays obvious tribute to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy , as well as including notes from The French Connection and Serpico .
Example: the opening in which Fleck chases thugs down the city blocks in full clown costume recalls Popeye Doyle giving chase in a Santa outfit in The French Connection .
Phillips wears his inspirations more proudly than Quentin Tarantino, but where Tarantino finds reverence in his source material and, more importantly, understands the tone of those inspirations, Phillips perverts and twists the meaning of all his homages, from Taxi Driver to Network .
In a climax channelling Network (1976), Fleck says ‘you decide what is right and wrong like what is funny or not’.
It is saturated with homages to Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and King of Comedy (1982), as well as other films of that era like A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Network (1976).
Phillips’ greatest trick is making Joker look like a gritty character study from the 1970s, inspired by the films of Martin Scorsese ( Taxi Driver ), William Friedkin ( The French Connection ) and Sidney Lumet ( Network , Serpico ) but it’s nothing more than a poor imitation.
There are sly nods to key 1970s texts such as Sidney Lumet’s Network , alongside movie theatre marquees advertising such early-80s releases as Blow Out and Zorro, the Gay Blade .
There are also nods to Sidney Lumet’s Network , twisting that film’s anarchic glee to the tyranny of mob violence, shifting allegiances in fascinating ways.
GoodFellas (1990)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
influenced War Dogs (2016), Joker (2019)
Visuals Plot Themes
Cinematographer Lawrence Sher’s tracking shots and zoom-ins pay homage to other Scorsese hits like Raging Bull and Goodfellas.
Overall, the wildest swing Phillips takes with Joker is that instead of ripping off Goodfellas and Casino like so many other filmmakers, he's instead built an entire film out of plot elements of two other Martin Scorsese films, Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy.
When War Dogs grows up, it really, really wants to be Goodfellas.
“War Dogs” plays like a movie made by someone who has spent a life in cinematic isolation, watching nothing but “The Big Short” and “Goodfellas” on a constant loop.
Then he’s looking up at the barrel of a loaded gun, and the screen freezes, “Goodfellas” style, and off we go with the flashbacks and the darkly comedic stuff set to classic rock tunes, and more freeze-frame moments used as devices for the narrator to introduce various colorful characters along the way.
A movie like War Dogs makes a pretty strong case that, outside of perhaps Pulp Fiction, no film from the last thirty years has been as influential—or just straight-up copied— as Goodfellas.
A pivotal moment where Arthur crashes a posh screening of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times is Phillips’s less-than-subtle reminder that it has always been the clowns in this world who reflect society’s reality back to us.
And if everybody who knows any bit of “Batman” lore knows where this is going, if the violence crosses the “repellent” line into gratuitous, if the Chaplin references (“Modern Times,” and his song “Smile”) and Sinatra notes do little to dress up an ugly age referencing an earlier ugly age, that’s all of a piece.
(These observations would be more daring if Phillips et al. didn’t wallpaper the film with their obvious influences — casting Robert De Niro as a late-night host in a King of Comedy homage and setting one scene at a theater screening of Modern Times — but what can you do?) Phoenix leans into the anarchic madness of Arthur at every turn, and it’s an affecting, disturbing lead turn, zagging into every lurch of the film’s tone with remarkable grace.
After a man in clown-face kills three yuppies on the subway, protesters take to the streets wearing clown masks and demonstrate outside a fancy benefit screening of “Modern Times” (providing an excuse for a scene in which Arthur/Joker laughs uproariously at Charlie Chaplin’s famous roller-skating scene).
Furthermore, another cringing scene sees Fleck sneak into a theatre as a bellboy while the wealthy and powerful, including Wayne, watch Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) and presumably eat caviar.
There’s a scene in “Joker” when a theater full of tuxedoed socialites gather for a charity screening of Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times.”
The Bride! (2026)
Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal
influenced by Joker (2019), Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)
Visuals
The spiritual and aesthetic connection to the Joker duology, especially to its second film (yes, there are musical numbers here), is also something that is bound to haunt the discussion around Gyllenhaal’s film…
…the references to other movies often fall flat (among others, there are allusions to Cabaret, Bonnie and Clyde, Joker, Swing Time, and, of course, Young Frankenstein)…
Lawrence Sher’s cinematography bathes the film in a mixture of smoky chiaroscuro and theatrical spotlights that evoke the vintage tension of his work on Todd Phillips’ Joker…
Visually, it’s messy yet striking as well, with cinematographer Lawrence Sher doing things not dissimilar from what he did on Joker.
La cercanía estética de ¡La novia! a la “versión prestigiosa” de personajes e historias que vienen del cómic, como las películas de Joker…
While the film does stumble in the writing department, production designer Karen Murphy and costume designer Sandy Powell transform the film into a vivid, glittering 1930s playground. The film frequently invites Joker comparisons, an association made unavoidable by the presence of cinematographer Lawrence Sher and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir.
These plot points aren’t a total bust, yet the parallels between “Joker” and, say, another Warner Bros. classic “A Clockwork Orange” are immediate with supporting players, including Glenn Flesler, Brian Tyree Henry (and the always great Bill Camp), elevating their respective scenes, but Phillips borrows all his tone and look from other, better movies that you’d assume he could create a better origin tale than “man goes mad because of mental illness and child abuse.”
It is saturated with homages to Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and King of Comedy (1982), as well as other films of that era like A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Network (1976).
Phoenix’s light-on-the-toes, vaudeville-dance-like movements are reminiscent of Alex in “A Clockwork Orange.”
Stanley Kubrick even pulled A Clockwork Orange from British distribution after a series of copycat crimes.
Regardless of my mixed feelings, I think it’s the best film about the psychological effect of violence as pop art since Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange .
In the canon of onscreen violence wrought by chillingly malevolent men, two scenes loom large: Malcolm McDowell’s macabre rendition of “Singing in the Rain” in A Clockwork Orange, and Christian Bale’s axe-swinging jive to Huey Lewis and the News in American Psycho.
It’s a kinder, gentler usage of the same premise (although the genders have been flipped) with comedy that’s in the vein of The Hangover with a little Weekend at Bernie’s thrown in for good measure.
This is just a combination of The Hangover meets Bridesmaids meets Very Bad Things .
Mixing equal parts of “The Hangover,” “Very Bad Things,” and “Bridesmaids,” “Rough Night” is a comedy cocktail that goes down easy.
She also sends up the sexist stereotype of a groom-to-be and his pals running wild — as in The Hangover and its imitators — while the bride-to-be frets back home.
Imagine The Hangover if it's revealed after everything that the Zach Galifianakis man-child miscreant was acting the way he did because he had sick relatives.
In many respects, Joker hearkens all the way back to the 1928 silent The Man Who Laughs , which inspired the comics character in the first place.
Nevertheless, just as the original Joker character was visually inspired by Paul Leni’s 1928 film, The Man Who Laughs, the new Joker draws its dark inspiration from all Batman-themed films and comics that precede it, especially Alan Moore’s 1988 graphic novel, The Killing Joke, which imagined the Joker's origins as a comedian.
Debuting in Batman’s first adventure in 1940—his appearance is said to have been based on Conrad Veidt in 1928’s The Man Who Laughs —the character helped to popularize the “sinister clown” archetype that ultimately led to Pennywise.
The King of Comedy (1982)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
influenced Joker (2019), Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)
Themes Plot Visuals
It’s not hard to deduce what classic films Phillips and long-time cinematographer Lawrence Sher borrowed for inspiration: The urban alienation of Taxi Driver and The King Of Comedy are clear thematic and visual touchstones.
Joker does indeed borrow elements from Martin Scorsese pictures (specifically, The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver, sometimes paying homage to the cinematography of both alongside sharing a similar setting) including a prominent collaborator in Robert De Niro, except it never feels like thievery considering a major component of the narrative sees Arthur Fleck investigating his own upbringing.
Though thematic and aesthetic parallels can be drawn to producer Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, Joker is also inspired by the films of Sydney Lumet and Stanley Kubrick as well as the works of Ken Kesey and even Kurt Vonnegut.
He’s going for a gritty Martin Scorsese vibe — The King of Comedy specifically (most of the plot is borrowed from it), with a splash of Taxi Driver .
Todd Phillips’ direction is slick and effective, with numerous visual references and homages to the early works of Scorcese, in particular Taxi Driver (1976) and The King of Comedy (1982), the latter of which is further reinforced by the casting of Robert De Niro as talk show host Murray Franklin.
The 70s/80s setting is an homage to Phillips’ favorite gritty crime dramas such as Taxi Driver , The King of Comedy, which style/tone he heavily borrowed.
Joker is like James McTeigue’s V For Vendetta (2005), only with an unstable manchild rather than a literate revolutionary as the inspiration for civil unrest.
There are also elements lifted from “Death Wish,” “Network,” “V for Vendetta,” “The Empire Strikes Back,” “The Shining” and “The Purge.”
Joker doesn’t understand its representation of violence because it doesn’t know what to do with its politics, opting instead for a confused aestheticization of anarchy à la V for Vendetta, all incendiary chants and masked malcontents thronging the streets.
When wealthy Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen) calls Gotham’s impoverished masses “clowns”, his words echo around endless TV screens, providing a V for Vendetta -style mask to rioting protesters carrying “Kill the Rich” placards.
Envision a misguided remix of Taxi Driver (1976), V for Vendetta (comic), and Batman (1989).
There shouldn’t be a need to take on this maniacal character yet again, but Phillips’ film is exceedingly unique in its interpretation and cements its place alongside movies like 2006’s “V For Vendetta” and 2017’s “Logan” as auteur comic book cinema.
It’s not hard to deduce what classic films Phillips and long-time cinematographer Lawrence Sher borrowed for inspiration: The urban alienation of Taxi Driver and The King Of Comedy are clear thematic and visual touchstones.
If any deference is paid, it’s to Martin Scorsese, whose Taxi Driver inspires the gritty look of Gotham City circa 1981 (deep bows to the brute-force camerawork of Lawrence Sher) and whose lead character in that film, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), lives in the same bloody torment as our clown-face antihero.
Joker does indeed borrow elements from Martin Scorsese pictures (specifically, The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver, sometimes paying homage to the cinematography of both alongside sharing a similar setting) including a prominent collaborator in Robert De Niro, except it never feels like thievery considering a major component of the narrative sees Arthur Fleck investigating his own upbringing.
Though thematic and aesthetic parallels can be drawn to producer Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, Joker is also inspired by the films of Sydney Lumet and Stanley Kubrick as well as the works of Ken Kesey and even Kurt Vonnegut.
He’s going for a gritty Martin Scorsese vibe — The King of Comedy specifically (most of the plot is borrowed from it), with a splash of Taxi Driver .
Todd Phillips’ direction is slick and effective, with numerous visual references and homages to the early works of Scorcese, in particular Taxi Driver (1976) and The King of Comedy (1982), the latter of which is further reinforced by the casting of Robert De Niro as talk show host Murray Franklin.
Phillips’ greatest trick is making Joker look like a gritty character study from the 1970s, inspired by the films of Martin Scorsese ( Taxi Driver ), William Friedkin ( The French Connection ) and Sidney Lumet ( Network , Serpico ) but it’s nothing more than a poor imitation.
The films he’s referring to are “Serpico,” “Taxi Driver,” and “Network.”
Set in the late-1970s/early-80s hinterland, Phillips pays obvious tribute to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy , as well as including notes from The French Connection and Serpico .
Horrible Bosses (2011)
Directed by Seth Gordon
influenced by The Hangover (2009)
Characters Themes Plot
Day, from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, portrays a scratchy-voiced oddball with an embarrassing criminal record (an obvious nod to Zach Galifianakis’s weirdo role in The Hangover).
The Bigger Picture: We're still feeling the effect of The Hangover —not just in that beat-by-beat copycat sequel, but in the myriad recent, raunchy, R-rated comedies.
It’s the kind of ludicrous plan that you’d only find in the movies and seems clearly inspired by the men-behaving-badly genre reignited by the success of “The Hangover,” but it totally works thanks to one of the most talented ensembles of the year.
Like “The Hangover,” the genius of “Horrible Bosses” lies in the fact it takes the simplest of concepts and builds upon it with hilarious non-stop laughs.
It follows in the footsteps of the wildly successful The Hangover, blending a buddy flick, a simple premise, and undiluted dirty humour together to make for a solid laugh-out-loud comedy flick.
It's a story about three schlubby Everyman protagonists driven to consider murdering their respective bosses: in the hands of a proper comic misanthrope of the Wilder vein, somebody who can sympathise with his characters while refusing to cut them even a little bit of slack , this might have been an exquisitely nasty and hilarious black comedy, but that's not at all where director Seth Gordon and the team of three sceenwriters take the material: instead, it's basically just The Hangover with a healthy sense of class resentment in place of lifestyle porn and economic desperation subbing for hopped-up sexuality - these are both positive developments, if you asked me - that makes the mistake of letting its heroes off the hook much too readily, while having absolutely no idea what to do with a really swell concept once it gets past the exposition stage.
The continued influence of Marvel has a lot to do with this, but the evolution of comedy into action spectacle really started with The Hangover in 2009.
Think The Hangover with far less drunkenness and slightly more murder.
Except, this time around, the premise actually has some legs and could go to some even wilder places — you know, like The Hangover series, only without the implausibility.
Not likely to break any new ground like some of its R-rated peers such as “The Hangover,” “Bridesmaids” or “Girls Trip,” “Game Night” remains fresh simply for being a crude-yet-sweet mainstream comedy for the middle-aged crowd that doesn’t belittle their intelligence.
- "Game Night" is a groan-inducing, face-palming, did-I-really-just-see/hear-that comedy in the tradition of "The Hangover," "Neighbors" and "Horrible Bosses."
The subsequent bro-driven, smart-stupid, and very profitable salad days of Knocked Up, Superbad, and The Hangover led to the critical and commercial apex of Bridesmaids and the ascendancy of Melissa McCarthy, and continued into a long denouement, as Hollywood repeatedly reconfigures the same handful of elements all the way to 2018 — with notably diminishing returns.
But while Phillips goes out of his way to channel the visual aesthetics of works like Dog Day Afternoon , Network , Taxi Driver , After Hours and The King of Comedy , his ends up being only a surface level dissection of these types of characters and this sort milieu.
With his open nod the New Hollywood films of the 1970s, particularly the Scorsese classics Taxi Driver and King of Comedy (but also One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Dog Day Afternoon ) writer/director Todd Phillips has offered a powerful depiction of one man’s mental breakdown in the context of a society tearing itself apart.
Instead, Joker draws on the grubby “New York Shitty” cinematic canon of the late 1960s through mid-70s – with a particular debt owed to Death Wish (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and Taxi Driver (1976).
Gotham City as envisaged here is modelled on the New York of 1970s films like Dog Day Afternoon and Taxi Driver – over-populated, crime-ridden and grimy in a manner that has since become a shorthand for cinematic integrity.
Set in the fictional Gotham City in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, Joker is a slick, heady pastiche of The King of Comedy , Network , Dog Day Afternoon , and 80 years of DC Comics stories distilled into a supremely stylish and affecting package.
The aim, evidently, was to combine the brash racket of American Hustle with the cynicism of Lord of War .
Adapted from a “Rolling Stone” article called “Arms and the Dudes,” “War Dogs” is a familiarly giddy rise and fall saga that unfolds like a watered-down cross between “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “Lord of War” that’s been sprinkled with some of “The Social Network” for good measure.
Thanks to some great performances, “War Dogs” rises above similar themed films (for some reason, I kept thinking back to 1983’s “Deal of the Century” as well as 2005’s “Lord of War”).
It’s a far cry from “Lord of War,” Andrew Niccol’s scathing 2005 satire about an arms dealer played by Nicolas Cage.
There's definitely a joke to be made about the idea of Frank the Tank brokering an arms deal but, though there is no Will Ferrell cameo, War Dogs is caught somewhere between Nicolas Cage's Lord of War and the filmmaker's KY jelly wrestling brand of comedy; therein lies the problem.
The performers do their best and there are some scenes that work but the overall piece is remarkably forgettable, reminding viewers of “Bridesmaids” and “The Hangover” while failing to match either in terms of laughs.
The panic to get the dress to the wedding on time is reminiscent of The Hangover and the mad dash to get the groom-to-be home from Vegas (think humor akin to the road-side tuxedo change).
Bachelorette belongs in the same category of raunchy adult comedies as The Hangover and Bridesmaids , and while it's plenty funny, it's also perhaps the one film in the bunch that also seems realistic.
While following the format of recent pre-wedding disaster films such as Bridesmaids (Paul Feig, 2011) and The Hangover (Todd Phillips, 2009), Bachelorette is possibly better thought of as a darker and more painful spin on films such as Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (David Mirkin, 1997).
When the media labeled 2011's alternately hilarious, heartfelt " Bridesmaids " as a female version of 2009's " The Hangover ," it came as a lazy and sexist retort that insulted just how very good the Kristen Wiig-starring " Bridesmaids " was while giving the rancid, mean-spirited raunchfest that was " The Hangover " far more credit than it deserved.
Here's filmmakers' recipe: take elements from two popular movies (in this case, The Hangover and Bridemaids ), make the protagonists the most unbearable shrews imaginable, suck out anything that might be mistaken for humor, and throw lots of money at a few "name" actresses willing to sell their souls for the cause of replenishing their bank accounts.
At times, this feels like a slightly milder version of Peter Berg's generally reviled Very Bad Things , a 1998 black comedy also about a Las Vegas bachelor party gone grotesquely awry.
This is the customary set up for a bachelor-party-gone-haywire comedy, in the style of Peter Berg’s equally-ludicrous Very Bad Things, followed by the flashback to two days ago.
The box office success of The Hangover puts into interesting context another movie about a bachelor party that goes wrong in Las Vegas.
But this is a comedy — or it’s meant to be — and as much as I would have loved for the sense of the sinister inherent in this concept to turn into something deeply, blackly funny (I’m thinking of Very Bad Things as a possible precedent for this, but The Hangover is never so audacious), Lucas and Moore and director Todd Phillips (School for Scoundrels, Starsky & Hutch) go for the easy, cheap laughs, things that will shock a juvenile mindset — a mother breastfeeding?
This is not a dopey/sweet Vegas comedy, like the bland What Happens in Vegas, or a nasty/nihilistic one, like the putrid Very Bad Things (both of which, now that I think about it, starred Cameron Diaz).
The remaining three men spend the next day and a half trying to piece together exactly what the hell happened during their long blackout, and this is where Jon Lucas and Scott Moore's beautifully constructed screenplay really shines; instead of a blow-by-blow orgy of decadence, a la Very Bad Things, it's laid out like a murder mystery.
Phillips’ Joker is brazen in its open homage to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King Of Comedy but it also has certain moments which echo visual cues from William Friedkin’s 1970s masterworks, The French Connection and The Exorcist .
That’s richer still because, ah, yes, very good, here comes the Joker, resplendent at long last in full costume and iconically alluring fright makeup, traipsing down a giant staircase that depending on your brain chemistry will evoke either The Exorcist or Big Little Lies , that inescapable goddamn duh-duh-duh-duh-duh , HEY! reverberating through the theater as you bury your head in your hands.
The framing allows us to see Arthur from odd angles to emphasize his impoverished nature, reminding me of former Batman Christian Bale in The Machinist.
With a physical transformation to match that of Christian Bale in The Machinist, Phoenix has remodeled his looks.
Still, Phoenix commands every frame whether he’s laughing maniacally, grappling with alienation or contorting his body into shapes we haven’t seen since Christian Bale lost all that weight to star in The Machinist .
Reduced to a skeletal state (think Christian Bale in The Machinist , but worse) by a diet of nicotine and pain, Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck is a tragicomic nightmare, a beleaguered, sign-twirling clown who suffers from a medical condition that turns his internal screams into cackling laughter.
Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) dons a soft smile and breathes a tender, impressionable, good-spirited soul, as malleable as his beaten body, which conjures memory of the lack of person that was Christian Bale in The Machinist .
As Arthur, Phoenix is as gaunt as Christian Bale in The Machinist, as awkward as Michael Scott in The Office, and as self-loathing as… well, Michael Scott on The Office.