"This Joker’s genesis is determinedly mature and uncartoony, compared to, say, Jack Nicholson’s low-level crook Jack Napier falling into a chemical vat in Tim Burton’s Batman, turning him into the Joker with white skin, green hair and a rictus grin. (The look of DC’s Joker was originally inspired by Conrad Veidt in the 1928 silent classic The Man Who Laughs, a man whose face was disfigured into a grin by his father’s political enemies.) There is no reason why Phoenix’s elaborately backstoried Joker shouldn’t be as powerful as Heath Ledger’s mysterious, motiveless, originless Joker in The Dark Knight. But at some stage the comic-book world of supervillaindom has to be entered, and Ledger was more powerful because he wasn’t weighed down with all this realist detail and overblown ironic noir grandeur, and he wasn’t forced to carry an entire story on his own. This Joker has just one act in him: the first act. The film somehow manages to be desperately serious and very shallow."

"When you bring me out, can you introduce me as Joker?"

"But what condition? Could it be pseudobulbar affect, which is neurological in origin and gives rise to uncontained laughing and crying? Under stress, Arthur certainly breaks into a hyena’s cackle, which stops as abruptly as it starts; he also weeps, and, in closeup, we follow the tracks of the tears on his clown’s white-painted face. (I haven’t seen such artful drips since 1971, when Dirk Bogarde’s hair dye melted, along with his soul, at the end of “Death in Venice.”) The film, however, takes no serious interest in what might be wrong with Arthur. It merely invites us to watch his wrongness grow out of control and swell into violence, and proposes a vague connection between that private swelling and a wider social malady. “Is it just me, or is it getting crazier out there?” he asks. Guess what: it’s both!"

"What is agreed upon, among those who have seen “Joker,” is the prowess with which Phoenix holds it all together. His face may get the greasepaint, but it’s his whole body, coiled upon itself like a spring of flesh, from which the movie’s energy is released. He’s so thin that, when he strips to the waist and bends, his spine and shoulder blades jut out from the skin; is he a fallen angel, with his wings chopped off, or a skeleton-in-waiting, halfway to the grave? Francis Bacon, I think, would have stared at Arthur with a hungry eye."

"Joaquin Phoenix renders the iconic villain on an intimate, human scale in Joker, a disturbing film about one man's psychological destruction and a city's descent into criminal anarchy."

"Robert De Niro – Murray Franklin"

"Mentally ill people don’t go around serial-killing people—plotting a homicide or a bank robbery or a burglary. No, they react on impulse emotionally. It’s impulsive and emotion-driven.” And in the film, Raine pointed out, all of Arthur’s violence seemed authentic to him because it was “reactive aggression.”"

"I don’t think the Joker had free will, given his life. He was a walking time bomb waiting to explode—all it took was some significant life stress, beatings up, losing a job. You’ve got nothing left.… The well-documented risk factors—this was [the character’s] destiny. No one is born into that kind of violence."

"Phoenix makes Arthur an exceptionally vivid monster. His performance is a symphony of scowls, howls, grins, grimaces and, of course, those endless fits of laughter. It's a big, grotesquely showy piece of acting, but you can't take your eyes off him."

"Zazie Beetz – Sophie Dumond"

"Brett Cullen – Thomas Wayne"

"Shea Whigham – Detective Burke"

"Everybody's telling me that my stand-up's ready for the big clubs."

"But as convincingly gritty as it looks, "Joker" falters in its attempt to conjure a backdrop of social unrest. We hear news of a rise in violent crime and anti-rich sentiment aimed at billionaire tycoons like Thomas Wayne, whose son Bruce Wayne will, of course, grow up to become Batman himself. But these stabs at political relevance feel mostly coy and disengaged."

"You don't listen, do you? You just ask the same questions every week. "How's your job?" "Are you having negative thoughts?" All I have are negative thoughts. But you don’t listen anyway. I said, for my whole life, I didn’t know if I even really existed. But I do. And people are starting to notice."

"You know what’s funny? You know what really makes me laugh? I used to think that my life was a tragedy...but now I realize...it's a fucking comedy."

"[to Thomas Wayne] I know it seems strange, I don't mean to make you uncomfortable, I don't know why everyone is so rude, I don't know why you are; I don't want anything from you. Maybe a little warmth, maybe a hug, “Dad“, maybe just a bit of common fucking decency!"

"[written in notebook] The worst part of having a mental illness is people expect you to behave as if you don't."

"[to Penny Fleck] You know, you used to tell me...that my laugh was a condition. That there was something wrong with me. There isn’t. That’s the real me."

"Hannah Gross – Young Penny"

"Douglas Hodge – Alfred Pennyworth"

"Dante Pereira-Olson – Bruce Wayne"

"I think that it's important to really look at those individuals who are suffering from mental illness and really try to find some love and empathy for these people. For me, the themes in that movie were empathy and feeling sad and empathetic for that character."

"I haven't been happy one minute of my entire fucking life."

"Carrie Louise Putrello – Martha Wayne"

"[written in notebook] I just hope my death makes more cents than my life."

"And with all of its themes of masks, and legends, and the relationship between the hero and his city, Nolan's trilogy is both a powerful myth and a great commentary on myth-making."

"What passes for a right-wing movie these days is The Dark Knight Rises, which submits the rather modest premise that, irritating though the rich may be, actually killing them and taking all their stuff might be excessive."

"[to Bruce] Remember when you left Gotham? Before all this, before Batman? You were gone seven years. Seven years I waited, hoping that you wouldn't come back. Every year, I took a holiday. I-I went to Florence. There's this cafe, on the banks of the Arno. Every fine evening, I would sit there and order a-a Fernet Branca. I had this fantasy that I would look across the tables and I'd see you there, with a... wife, maybe a-a couple of kids. You wouldn't say anything to me, nor me to you. But we'd both know that you'd made it, that you were happy. I never wanted you to come back to Gotham. I always knew there was nothing here for you, except pain and tragedy. And I wanted something more for you than that. I still do."

"We both know I have to kill you now. I suppose you'll just have to imagine the fire."

"Not a lot people know what if feels like to, like... to be angry, in your bones. I mean, they understand. I mean, foster parents, everybody understands. For a while, at least. But then they want the angry little kid to do something he knows he can’t do: move on. So, after a while, they stop understanding. They send the angry kid to a boys' home. I figured it out too late: you gotta learn to hide the anger, practice smiling in the mirror. It's like putting on a mask. So, you showed up this one day in a cool car, pretty girl on your arm. We were so excited! Bruce Wayne, billionaire orphan? I mean, we use to make up stories about you, man. Legends. And, you know, with the other kids, that's all it was, just stories, but... right when I saw you, I knew who you really were. I'd seen that look on your face before. It was the same one I taught myself. I don't know why you took the fall for Dent's murder, but I'm still a believer in the Batman, even if you're not."

"[eulogy at Harvey Dent's funeral] I knew Harvey Dent. I was his friend. And it will be a long time before someone inspires us the way he did. I believed in Harvey Dent."

"Oh, you think darkness is your ally, but you merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it. I didn’t see the light until I was already a man. By then, it was nothing to me but blinding! The shadows betray you, because they belong to me!"

"Calm down, doctor! Now is not the time for fear. That comes later."

"Speak of the devil and he shall appear!"

"The rich don't even go broke the same as the rest of us, huh?"

"We take Gotham from the corrupt, the rich, the oppressors of generations who have kept you down with myths of opportunity, and we give it back to you, the people. Today, we turn myth to reward! We turn the water into wine and implore you drink deep of the cup. Gotham is yours. None shall interfere; do as you please. [one of Bane's captured Tumbler Cannons blows a hole in the prison's gates, allowing his followers inside] But start by storming Blackgate and freeing the oppressed! Step forward, those who would serve, for an army will be raised. The powerful will be ripped from their decadent nests, and cast out into the cold world that we know and endure. Courts will be convened. Spoils will be enjoyed! Blood will be shed! The police will survive, as they learn to serve true justice. This great city, it will endure. Gotham will survive."

"All superheroes are black sheep. But the Dark Knight has always been murkier than most. His superpowers are not an accident of birth, or of stumbling into the wrong lab at the wrong time. They're not powers at all, simply a simulation made possible by good fortune and the leisure that accompanies it. Bruce Wayne can splurge on the kit and cars to set himself up as a crime-fighting Christ substitute, plus power and glitter enough to hide his hobby. He's always been a curious idol: within aspiration because he's flesh and blood; beyond it because he's the lucky recipient of inherited wealth. So it should be no surprise that The Dark Knight Rises so firmly upholds the financial status quo. Christopher Nolan's film indulges in much guttural talk of the gap between the 99% and the 1%, but it is the former who are demonised, whose revolting actions require curbing and mutinous squeals muting. Your average Joe, it turns out, requires a benevolent, bad-ass billionaire to set him straight, to knock him sideways, if necessary. The Occupy Gotham movement, as organised by gargly terrorist Bane, is populated by anarchists without a cause, whose actions are fuelled by a lust for destruction, not as a corrective to an unjust world. Such self-made characters as we meet in the film are, by and large, fishy – power-grabbers hiding behind a fig-leaf of philanthropism. Even someone who earns their crust nicking other people's stuff looks agog when the masses storm posh apartments to try and redistribute a bit of bubbly. Batman's butler-crush and bells and whistles feudalism is swallowable – it's a cartoon, right! Likewise the free pass that Wayne's Rowntree-ish gestures, disapproval of criminals and general tortured grizzling seems to allow him. But The Dark Knight Rises is a quite audaciously capitalist vision, radically conservative, radically vigilante, that advances a serious, stirring proposal that the wish-fulfilment of the wealthy is to be championed if they say they want to do good. Mitt Romney will be thrilled. What's strange is that quite so many of the rest of us seem to want to buy into it."

"[eulogy at Bruce Wayne's funeral] I see a beautiful city. And a brilliant people, rising from this abyss. I see the lives, for which I lay down my life - peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy. I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known."

"There are always people you care about. You just don't realize how much until they're gone. The idea was to be a symbol. Batman could be anybody. That was the point."

"One man's tool is another man's weapon."

"Joseph Gordon-Levitt - John Blake"

"Tom Hardy - Bane"

"Morgan Freeman - Lucius Fox"

"Anne Hathaway - Selina Kyle/Catwoman"

"The legend ends. The Dark Knight rises."

"Christian Bale - Bruce Wayne/Batman"

"Every Hero Has a Journey. Every Journey Has an End"

"The Epic Conclusion to the Dark Knight Legend"

"Michael Caine - Alfred"