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Streaming: where to find the best Jokers in the pack

To call Joker “the gift that keeps on giving” runs somewhat counter to the general spirit of Todd Phillips’s nihilistic supervillain spectacle: perhaps it’s the thief that keeps taking instead. Either way, it’s a film that refuses to go away. The better part of the autumn was spent debating the artistry and politics of an unusually polarising, pessimistic blockbuster as it laughed its way to a billion dollars worldwide. Just as the discussion threatened to die down, the film surprised everyone (and infuriated many) by leading the Oscar and Bafta nominations. So the pop-cultural litigation of a comic-book movie continues – just in time for its streaming release on Monday.

I’m a Joker admirer, I admit – and not just for its exquisitely grimy craft and Joaquin Phoenix’s punky, balletic, can’t-look-away performance. It’s a hard film to regard with particular warmth, but its unravelling of a damaged male psyche that’s at once overstimulated and underprotected, both privileged by default and neglected on the margins, has stayed with me over the months. It’s a film that careers wildly between a compassionate gaze and a dispassionate one, and is more conflicted than the “incel” culture rallying cry that its detractors claim it is. If you’ve resisted its pull until now, it’s worth deciding for yourself.

If it’s still gnawing away at you, however, perhaps a Joker-adjacent streaming playlist is in order – not least since the film itself is a composite of numerous past iterations and influences. You could start, of course, with a return to past versions of the character, often in more fantastical versions of Gotham City.

I wouldn’t wish a repeat viewing of Suicide Squad and Jared Leto’s garish interpretation (available on all major streaming platforms, if you must) on anyone, but sandwiching Phoenix’s bravura turn between the gleefully shrill comic burlesque of Jack Nicholson’s turn in Tim Burton’s Batman (free on Now TV) and Heath Ledger’s inspired, Oscar-winning human-monster hybrid in The Dark Knight (Now TV again) gives a helpful sense of the character’s lineage. If geek completists want to trace it back to Cesar Romero’s slightly camper, less ghoulish Joker in the original Batman TV series from the 1960s – or the lower-key, Mark Hamill-voiced Joker of the 1992 animated series – Google Play has you covered on both fronts.

What of less immediate antecedents? Much has been made of how Phillips’s film doffs its cap to Scorsese – and sure enough, you can’t watch the latter’s scabrous, still undervalued media satire The King of Comedy (free on Amazon Prime) or Taxi Driver (Prime again), with its era-defining rebel yell of the unhinged, unloved Travis Bickle, without identifying the exact elements of both films that Joker has sampled and remixed. From an equivalent era and state of mind, it also echoes the humid desperation that suffuses Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (streaming on Chili) and Al Pacino’s electric performance as a bank robber down to his last nerve. In interviews, Phillips has repeatedly cited a different Lumet-Pacino collaboration, the hard, seamily atmospheric undercover cop noir Serpico (on Now TV), as a reference point: I see the kinship less, but it’s a great film all the same.

Michael Douglas in Falling Down.
Michael Douglas in Falling Down. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

Less frequently mentioned with regard to Joker – not least because it’s rarely remembered in its own right – is Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down (on iTunes), a luridly entertaining film that seemed an eccentric provocation when it came out in 1993, but holds up as rather brilliantly prescient today. This portrait of a fraying white-collar dad (played by Michael Douglas at his most perfectly short-fused and square, down to his haircut) who comes sensationally apart over the course of one exasperating day in Los Angeles is a manic manifesto for toxic-but-martyred masculinity. Watch it and see how far we haven’t come.

New to streaming & DVD this week

Ad Astra
(Fox, 12)
Undeservedly overlooked in awards season, James Gray’s first foray into big-budget science fiction matches true visual and sonic splendour with the open emotionalism of his smaller, intimate films.

The Nightingale
(Vertigo, 18)
Unlike her beloved debut The Babadook, Australian director Jennifer Kent’s slow but visceral colonial-era outback revenge tale isn’t going to be a meme machine: this is violently tough-minded cinema of real weight and grace.

The Last Tree
(Spirit, 15)
A young black man is uprooted from his childhood Lincolnshire idyll to his birth mother’s rougher London environs. Shola Amoo’s elegantly crafted, superbly acted film sensitively unpicks a tangled identity crisis.

Downton Abbey: The Movie
(Universal, PG)
If you skipped it in cinemas because, well, it’s just telly, this well-attired spinoff film’s featherweight pleasures won’t prove you wrong. Only fans need apply.