JOY is the wild story of a family across four generations centered on the girl who becomes the woman who founds a business dynasty and becomes a matriarch in her own right.
18 December 1989, Massachusetts, USA
10 May 1945, Abington, Pennsylvania, USA
11 December 1940, Chicago, Illinois, USA
18 June 1952, Rome, Lazio, Italy
13 February 1974, Fall River, Massachusetts, USA
15 November 1960, Quincy, Massachusetts, USA
22 June 1979, Connecticut, USA
5 January 1975, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
25 March 1977, Caracas, Venezuela
February 24, 2017
Joy is far from Joyful; with an uninteresting narrative, performances that feel drained of passion and a filmmaker caught between his roots and his new-found mainstream sensibility, it is an utter mess.December 28, 2015
Two years after Jennifer Lawrence appeared in David O. Russell's American Hustle, she gets to show some.December 25, 2015
Joy can be viewed as a modern day rags-to-riches fairytale. It's Cinderella without the prince. In a way, that's part of the film's charm.January 03, 2016
The movie's a shambles, alternatingly agreeable and aggravating, held together by our interest in its heroine and by Lawrence's tremendously sympathetic performance.December 25, 2015
It's clear that the point here isn't people, it's payoff, emotional and otherwise.January 09, 2017
Throughout, you're never really given the chance to figure out what makes Joy tick.January 09, 2017
The occasional use of dream sequences and flashbacks, particularly to Joy's courtship and marriage, are jarring. But Russell draws out expert performances from the ensemble.January 09, 2017
Joy ends up feeling like a missed opportunity.February 03, 2017
A briskly entertaining film about a woman who "makes it" as an entrepreneur, even if the film fosters Horatio Alger type illusions in a period of deep capitalist decline.December 17, 2016
Joy feels joyful; it is joyful; it is dreamlike and completely trivial; but it knows it is trivial.January 03, 2016
Russell is almost totally uninterested in the story of how Joy Mangano explored a bizarre and unknown new business model and became its first self-made tycoon, and as a result we aren't interested either.December 25, 2015
Perhaps people who make gazillions selling housewares on The Shopping Channel deserve to be honoured; if they do, Joy is not a fitting tribute to Mangano - nor to the mop.