10 Best Movie Deaths Of 2019

3. Murray Franklin (Joker)

Joker Arthur Fleck kills Murray Franklin
Warner Bros. Pictures

Joker is a movie that's packed to the gills with standout moments, but its most compelling scene is easily the talk show sequence that concludes with the death of Robert De Niro's smarmy host, Murray Franklin.

It features some of the best acting we've seen all year, particularly from Joaquin Phoenix as the title character, who is on mesmerising form as he delivers a painfully honest speech about the miserable experience of being one of the "little guys" in society, before pulling out a gun and shooting Murray in the head.

Because of how unpredictable Arthur's behavior has become, it's a massive shock to the system to see him - without a flicker of hesitation - draw a pistol and murder a celebrity on live TV, and the way he sits there and smiles when the deed is done is, chillingly, a moment of real happiness, one of the few times in the movie that Arthur actually feels pride in himself.

While the simple action of killing someone with a gun is hardly the most creative thing we've seen in movies, it's the masterful execution of this scene that elevated Murray's death to among the best of the year.

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Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!