Warning:  this piece will discuss details of the storyline of THE DARK KNIGHT RISES as well as the other Batman films.  GIANT SPOILERS WILL ABOUND; proceed at your own risk. Christopher Nolan is remarkable among the great directors of action films–Steven Spielberg, David Lean, James Cameron, John Ford, certainly Michael Bay–in that while working […]

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES:  Worth A Ticket – The Saga That Rewrote Superhero Movies Goes Out With A Weighty Bang Christopher Nolan likes his intricate, novelistic plotting.  You remember the portion of The Dark Knight where Batman had to travel to Hong Kong to capture a banker who was laundering money for Gotham City’s gangsters, because […]

  If THE DARK KNIGHT had no superhero or comic book trappings–if The Joker were scarred but not hideously made up, and Batman were a bit lower-tech and merely disguised rather than wearing a cowl and cape–Christopher Nolan’s film would still be one of the best action-adventure crime movies of the past 20 years.  Within […]

  To say BATMAN BEGINS successfully rebooted the Warners franchise is accurate, but incomplete.  Christopher Nolan’s film, from the script he wrote with David S. Goyer, is a complete rethinking of the very concept of a comic book/superhero movie, one comparable to what The Godfather and Cabaret did with the gangster movie and the musical […]

  And then this happened. With BATMAN & ROBIN, the franchise that had been reclaimed for adults by Tim Burton in 1989 was turned back over to children (and not bright children) by Joel Schumacher in 1997.  Schumacher took everything he’d done in Batman Forever and turned it up, as they say, to 11.  He […]

  As Alex in A Clockwork Orange would say, this is the real and like tragic part of the story beginning, O my brothers.  After Batman Returns undergrossed Batman by $90M in the US, Warners, you might say, freaked out.  Although everyone was careful to agree that Tim Burton and the studio had mutually parted […]

  After the gigantic success of Batman, Tim Burton went on to direct Edward Scissorhands, which although naturally a smaller level of hit, was enormously important to Burton’s career, because it was a very personal project that didn’t seem likely to find a mainstream audience at all, let alone be one of the year’s top […]

  It’s been 23 years since the pre-Christopher Nolan version of the Batman franchise launched into the boxoffice stratosphere, and a lot has changed in the movie landscape.  (1989 is so long ago that it was a topical gag in the movie to cast Gotham City’s Mayor with an actor who looked like New York’s […]