Variety called Joker: Folie à Deux 'bolder than the original.' Audiences gave it a D CinemaScore.

Mon Dieu. Let us begin with the geography of this catastrophe. Variety files this review from the Venice Film Festival on September 4th, 2024 — a place where critics drink Aperol Spritzes on the Lido and pretend that a film starring Lady Gaga performing show tunes in a courtroom is, how you say, 'bolder.' Bolder than what, exactly? A first film that made one billion dollars and won two Oscars? Non. Bolder in the sense that walking into traffic is bolder than crossing at the crosswalk.

Twenty-eight days later, the film opens. Warner Bros. spends two hundred million dollars to produce this opera of sadness. The domestic opening weekend? Thirty-seven million dollars. The CinemaScore? A D. Not a D-plus. Not a D-minus. A flat, unaccompanied, single-syllable D — the same letter grade audiences gave to 'mother!' when Darren Aronofsky asked them to watch Jennifer Lawrence be devoured by humanity. Variety's word for this experience is 'bolder.' My word is 'délire.'

Look at the sentence construction here. 'Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga sing the folie electric.' Folie. Electric. These are not words. These are scrabble tiles arranged by a man who needs to file four hundred words before lunch so he can attend the Searchlight Pictures cocktail reception at 6 PM. The review contains seventeen mentions of 'ambition' and zero mentions of 'this is a two-hour musical where Lady Gaga barely sings and Joaquin Phoenix gets stabbed offscreen.' Quelle ambition!

Here is what Variety does, every festival, every year. They sit in a velvet seat in Venice. They watch a film no civilian has yet seen. They write a love letter to the auteur. The auteur's studio buys advertising. The advertising pays for the critic to return to Venice next year. It is a perfectly closed Renaissance economy, and the only people excluded from it are the audiences who paid eighteen dollars to sit in a Cinemark in Toledo and watch Arthur Fleck get knifed in a prison stairwell while Lady Gaga hums.

This is not criticism. This is not even a review. This is a press release with footnotes. Two out of ten — one point for using the word 'electric' unironically, one point for filing it before the box office could fact-check them.