Cathy Yan’s Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) is a gleefully anarchic treat with some of the most inventively staged action sequences I’ve seen in a comic book film. Yan has complete mastery over the tonal shifts that would be fatal in a lesser filmmaker’s hands – playing into and subverting comic book tropes with reckless abandon. The range of narrative devices the film plays with – from Margot Robbie’s pitch-perfect turn as our unreliable narrator, to the contrasting genre styles of the supporting casts’ narrative arcs, to the delightfully absurd digressions and shifting timelines and running gags. The performers are all fantastic, and it’s nice to have a female-led comic book film in which the camera doesn’t leer at our protagonists for the entire running time. Like Yan’s first feature, the brilliant Dead Pigs, Birds of Prey is ultimately about the question of whether or not everyone is selfishly out for themselves, or whether we can ever learn to trust one another. But like Dead Pigs, it’s a film that is infused with so much buoyancy and joy from beginning to end.