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Matt Reeves ’ “The Batman” isn’t a superhero movie. Not really. All the trappings are there: the Batmobile, the rugged suit, the gadgets courtesy of trusty butler Alfred. And of course, at the center, is the Caped Crusader himself: brooding, tormented, seeking his own brand of nighttime justice in a Gotham City that’s spiraling into squalor and decay.

But in Reeves’ confident hands, everything is breathtakingly alive and new. As director and co-writer, he’s taken what might seem like a familiar tale and made it epic, even operatic. His “ Batman ” is more akin to a gritty, ‘70s crime drama than a soaring and transporting blockbuster. With its kinetic, unpredictable action, it calls to mind films like “ The Warriors ” as well as one of the greatest of them all in the genre, “ The French Connection .” And with a series of high-profile murders driving the plot, it sometimes feels as if the Zodiac killer is terrorizing the citizens of Gotham.

And yet, despite these touchstones, this is unmistakably a Matt Reeves film. He accomplishes here what he did with his gripping entries in the “Planet of the Apes” franchise: created an electrifying, entertaining spectacle, but one that’s grounded in real, emotional stakes. This is a Batman movie that’s aware of its own place within pop culture, but not in winking, meta fashion; rather, it acknowledges the comic book character’s lore, only to examine it and reinvent it in a way that’s both substantial and daring. The script from Reeves and Peter Craig forces this hero to question his history as well as confront his purpose, and in doing so, creates an opening for us as viewers to challenge the narratives we cling to in our own lives.

And with Robert Pattinson taking over the role of Bruce Wayne, we have an actor who’s not just prepared but hungry to explore this figure’s weird, dark instincts. This is not the dashing heir to a fortune prowling about, kicking ass in a cool costume. This is Travis Bickle in the Batsuit, detached and disillusioned. He’s two years into his tenure as Batman, tracking criminals from on high in Wayne Tower—an inspired switch from the usual sprawl of Wayne Manor, suggesting an even greater isolation from society. “They think I’m hiding in the shadows,” he intones in an opening voiceover. “But I am the shadows.” In the harsh light of day, Pattinson gives us hungover indie rock star vibes. But at night, you can see the rush he gets from swooping in and executing his version of vengeance, even beneath the tactical gear and eye black.

As he’s shown in pretty much every role he's taken since “Twilight” made him a global superstar in 2008, working with singular auteurs from David Cronenberg to Claire Denis to the Safdie brothers, Pattinson is at his best when he’s playing characters who make you uncomfortable. Even more than Christian Bale in the role, Pattinson is so skilled at making his beautiful, angular features seem unsettling. So when he first spies on the impossibly sexy Zoe Kravitz as Selina Kyle, slinking into her leather motorcycle gear and shimmying down the fire escape in her own pursuit of nocturnal justice, there’s an unmistakable flicker of a charge in his eyes: Ooh. She’s a freak like me.

Pattinson and Kravitz have insane chemistry with each other. She is his match, physically and emotionally, every step of the way. This is no flirty, purring Catwoman: She’s a fighter and a survivor with a loyal heart and a strong sense of what’s right. Following her lead role in Steven Soderbergh ’s high-tech thriller “Kimi,” Kravitz continues to reveal a fierce charisma and quiet strength.

She’s part of a murderer’s row of supporting performers, all of whom get meaty roles to play. Jeffrey Wright is the rare voice of idealism and decency as the eventual Commissioner Gordon. John Turturro is low-key chilling as crime boss Carmine Falcone. Andy Serkis —Caesar in Reeves’ “Apes” movies—brings a paternal wisdom and warmth as Alfred. Colin Farrell is completely unrecognizable as the sleazy, villainous Oswald Cobblepot, better known as The Penguin. And Paul Dano is flat-out terrifying as The Riddler, whose own drive for vengeance provides the story’s spine. He goes to extremes here in a way that’s reminiscent of his startling work in “ There Will Be Blood .” His derangement is so intense, you may find yourself unexpectedly laughing just to break the tension he creates. But there’s nothing amusing about his portrayal; Dano makes you feel as if you’re watching a man who’s truly, deeply disturbed.

This is not to say that “The Batman” is a downer; far from it. Despite the overlong running time of nearly three hours, this is a film that’s consistently viscerally gripping. The coolest Batmobile yet—a muscular vehicle that’s straight out of “ Mad Max: Fury Road ”—figures prominently in one of the movie’s most heart-pounding sequences. It’s an elaborate car chase and chain-reaction crash ending with an upside-down shot of fiery fury that literally had me applauding during my screening. During a fight at a thumping night club, punctuated by pulsating red lights, you can feel every punch and kick. (That’s one of the more compelling elements of seeing this superhero in his early days: He isn’t invincible.) And a shootout in a pitch-black hallway, illuminated only by the blasts of shotgun fire, is both harrowing and dazzling. Greatly magnifying the power of scenes like these is the score from veteran composer Michael Giacchino . Best known for his Pixar movie music, he does something totally different with “The Batman”: percussive and horn-heavy, it is massive and demanding, and you will feel it deep in your core.

Working with artists and craftspeople operating at the top of their game, Reeves has made a movie that manages to be ethereal yet weighty at the same time, substantial yet impressionistic. Cinematographer Greig Fraser pulls off the same sort of stunning magic trick he did with his Oscar-nominated work in Denis Villeneuve ’s “Dune”: Through pouring rain and neon lights, there’s both a gauziness and a heft to his imagery. His use of shadow and silhouette is masterful, and does so much to convey a sense of foreboding and tension. I could write an entire, separate essay on the film’s many uses of the color red to suggest energy, danger, even hope. And the costume design from the great Jacqueline Durran —with Dave Crossman and Glyn Dillon designing Pattinson’s rough-and-tumble Batsuit—put just the right finishing touch on the film’s cool, edgy vibe.

This is the most beautiful Batman movie you’ve ever seen—even if it’s not really a Batman movie at all.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

The Batman (2022)

Rated PG-13 for strong violent and disturbing content, drug content, strong language, and some suggestive material.

176 minutes

Robert Pattinson as Bruce Wayne / Batman

Zoë Kravitz as Selina Kyle

Paul Dano as The Riddler

Jeffrey Wright as Lt. James Gordon

John Turturro as Carmine Falcone

Peter Sarsgaard as District Attorney Gil Colson

Andy Serkis as Alfred Pennyworth

Colin Farrell as Oz / The Penguin

• Matt Reeves

Writer (Batman created by)

• Bill Finger
• Peter Craig

Cinematographer

• Greig Fraser

Costume Designer

• Jacqueline Durran
• William Hoy
• Tyler Nelson
• Michael Giacchino

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‘The Batman’ Review: The Future of Superhero Movies Is Finally Here, for Better or Worse

David ehrlich.

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It was less than three years ago that Todd Phillips’ mid-budget but mega-successful “Joker” threateningly pointed toward a future in which superhero movies of all sizes would become so endemic to modern cinema that they no longer had to be superhero movies at all. With Matt Reeves ’ “ The Batman ” — a sprawling, 176-minute latex procedural that often appears to have more in common with serial killer sagas like “Se7en” and “Zodiac” than it does anything in the Snyderverse or the MCU — that future has arrived with shuddering force, for better or worse. Mostly better.

This isn’t “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” posturing as a 1970s conspiracy thriller or “Logan” half-committing to its Western heart, nor is it a simple throwback to Christopher Nolan’s Bush-era take on the Dark Knight, which grounded Bruce Wayne in a tactile Gotham while still broadly adhering to the storylines and spectacles expected of its genre. No, the better part of this Batman belongs to another genre altogether, as Reeves stubbornly eschews the usual razzmatazz in favor of a hard-boiled murder-mystery in which The World’s Greatest Detective just happens to be a (very) tortured billionaire with an unexplained hard-on for bats.

Which isn’t to suggest that people will confuse this mirthlessly dark Bat-noir for a Raymond Chandler adaptation, or even any of the David Fincher movies that lent “The Batman” its grim style or haunted air of fear — not with Colin Farrell playing Oswald Cobblepot under 50 pounds of Jake LaMotta cosplay, Paul Dano ’s Riddler drawing foam question marks in his lattes, and a glowering Robert Pattinson karate-chopping street gangs while entombed inside a rubber Batsuit thicker than the tires of a monster truck. But it’s those brief (and very rare) dashes of action that best illustrate the film’s defiantly anti-blockbuster approach, as Reeves designs them with a much greater emphasis on close-up emotion than big screen excitement.

The combat is shot in silhouette, the sole Batmobile sequence is framed tighter than “Locke,” and the setpieces double down on Greig Fraser’s bonfire cinematography — his Stygian color palette extending Bruce’s personal hell across the whole of Gotham — to a degree that makes them seem like a scorched-earth rebuttal to the candied aesthetic of most other superhero movies (and a serious crisis for any corporate multiplex that doesn’t regularly change its projector bulbs). Even this film’s relatively familiar, broadly Nolan-esque Batman tries to save the city climax is discomforting for the way it stages all the usual POWs! and BAMs! against a recognizable backdrop of real-world horror.

And there is plenty to be afraid of in this Gotham, as “The Batman” makes clear by opening with a Halloween-night home invasion that unfolds like a chapter from the Book of Saw (a fitting prelude to a film whose Riddler is equal parts Joker and Jigsaw). The mayor is murdered by a serial killer just days before his potential re-election, leaving behind the first of several mangled bodies and taunting clues.

What it doesn’t leave behind is a power vacuum. If the mayor’s vacated office is certain to be awarded to the inspirational young Black woman who was challenging him for it (Jayme Lawson as the wonderfully named Bella Reál), that foregone conclusion allows Reeves to shift his attention towards the rat’s nest of festering white men who are ominously unconcerned with the outcome of the vote. Gotham has been controlled from inside Falcone’s nightclub for longer than Bella has been alive, and the rot has grown deep enough to keep things from changing.

That stagnation bleeds through the film’s retro-modern production design, as Koch-era taxi cabs and MS-DOS coexist alongside Trumpian identity politics and viral livestreams, all of them housed together in a Gotham that seamlessly blends parts of London, New York, and Chicago into a single mega-city buried under a mountain of violent grime (the film’s immaculate CGI is largely invisible and pointed towards world-building instead of than spectacle). The past is always coming back to haunt people in “The Batman,” though some are determined to prove that it never really went away.

Fittingly, and despite all of the ways “The Batman” pushes superhero movies forward, it still has one foot stuck in the familiar. For all of its bruising power, it still pulls a number of its punches. It’s possible Reeves’ epic had its wings clipped from the minute it was conceived with a PG-13 in mind. The film’s antiseptic bloodlessness often neutralizes the stench of a city rotting from the inside out, even if the MPA rating doesn’t stop Reeves from creating several of the scariest moments in superhero movie history. But the more significant issues lie under the surface.

Writ large, the biggest impediment to Reeves’ caped incursion on a foreign genre is that “The Batman” is so eager to blur the line between a superhero movie and a serial killer neo-noir that it isn’t particularly good at being either of those things. Its portrait of Bruce Wayne as a revenge-obsessed recluse is psychologically thin even by the standards of a Batman story (Pattinson’s sullen performance is 90 percent clenching), while Andy Serkis’ turn as Hot Alfred Pennyworth finds the iconic butler limited to cooking breakfast and delivering exposition on demand. Meanwhile, the Riddler’s game of cat-and-bat (and cat) is weighed down by Reeves and co-writer Peter Craig’s groan-worthy struggle to Gothamify the Zodiac Killer, though Dano’s demented embodiment of the villain adds a riveting new dimension to his character before it’s too late.

It doesn’t help that the film’s parallel genres are crudely forced together by a half-baked corruption plot that trickles down from the same tradition of “Chinatown” and “L.A. Confidential,” but lacks the layered intrigue of those inspirations. That plot is further diluted by John Turturro’s sniveling comic take on crime boss Carmine Falcone, as the most dangerous figure in this grimdark mosaic also becomes the only character who isn’t nearly serious enough. And yet that same part of the story is also what gives us Zoë Kravitz ’s fierce and focused Selina Kyle, a family-minded nightclub waitress born into a city where cyclical violence continues to hide behind empty promises of renewal a full year after an anonymous vigilante first began terrorizing petty criminals from the shadows.

In the burnt orange underworld of Gotham — as in “The Batman” itself — good and bad are as inextricable from each other as the different genres that define their terms, and the film’s hard-earned flares of light are only so capable of pointing the way forward because of how vividly they’re painted against the darkness that surrounds them. Forged from the embers of previous Batman movies despite never indulging in the kind of meta-commentary that has defined so many recent mega-sequels, Reeves’ effort may be too overstuffed and underwritten to succeed on its merits as either a Bruce Wayne story or a blockbuster noir, but there’s something ineffably beautiful to how “The Batman” smelts its many separate components into a new kind of superhero movie. It’s not just another multiplex extravaganza about masked saviors fighting to rescue a few glimmers of genuine hope from a cultural legacy of fear and greed, but one that’s also thrillingly unafraid to put its money where its mouth is.

Maintaining the courage of his convictions is not a problem for this Bruce Wayne. In fact, conviction is pretty much the only thing he’s got left by the time the movie starts — that and the billion-dollar fortune he’s willing to squander in order to scare Gotham straight for killing his parents when he was a kid (Reeves mercifully declines to revisit the murders themselves, though he finds a clever way of depicting the effect they might have on a young boy with a penchant for dress-up). Pattinson’s Bruce isn’t a playboy philanthropist or a recovering fuck-up trained by Ra’s al Ghul or whatever else this character has been in the past. He doesn’t have a social life or a sense of humor. All he has is the big house his parents owned, the slowed-down version of Nirvana’s “Something in the Way” that follows him like a bad smell, and the mission that gives meaning to his life. Batman is simply the scar that’s grown over Bruce Wayne, and the wound it covers is wider than it is deep.

If this angle is true to the history of the character, doubling — or quadrupling — down on the Caped Crusader’s intrinsic darkness still feels like a bold choice in the wake of Ben Affleck’s dour stint behind the cowl and the hilarious LEGO Batman movie that roasted it alive. Pattinson’s Bruce is so broken inside that you half expect him to microwave a whole lobster for dinner and laugh at the ending of “Jerry Maguire” for dessert, and the fact that he always looks like he’s just come back from a 2006 My Chemical Romance concert doesn’t help (it only makes his penchant for journaling feel more emo than it does “First Reformed”).

That it doesn’t come off as a parody of a parody is a testament to both the holistic nature of Reeves’ vision and the eagerness with which Pattinson buys into it. Bruce is pure id (“I am vengeance” is a common refrain), but the actor behind the eyeliner is earnest enough to balance out his anger, and “The Batman” survives its eventual transition into more familiar superhero movie territory because of the slow-thawing self-awareness that Pattinson brings to the title role — his realizations galvanized by a career-best Michael Giacchino score that pounds into your head as if Batman were sitting at the piano and playing it himself. If Bruce already knows that fear is an effective weapon, he’s about to learn that you can’t build anything with it.

The truth comes to light slowly — ploddingly — as Batman and lieutenant James Gordon follow Riddler’s clues deeper into Gotham’s web of corruption (Gordon is played by a thankless Jeffrey Wright, the actor defaulting to his “Westworld” mode in a movie where no one is cast against type). Their goofy investigation unfolds in tandem with the one that Batman launches with Selina, though both are regularly interrupted and brought closer together by Riddler’s explosive games. Kravitz’s electric screen presence is enough to make Selina’s origin story feel less basic than it is, and she and Pattinson are both so beautiful that you might be able to stifle your laughter when Catwoman moves in to kiss Batman’s motionless face (new type of superhero movie, same type of sexual dysfunction). This is a case where cinematic heft excuses all manner of silliness; it’s more exciting to watch a close-up tracking shot of Bruce walking down the corridors of Falcone’s nightclub than it is to see other superheroes save the world.

By far the most nuanced relationship here is that between Batman and Riddler. The one proper scene they share together at the end of their long flirtation is fascinating for its aired grievances and curious misapprehensions, as “The Batman” finally merges its procedural body to its superhero soul just in time for a wild fight over Gotham’s future — the film reconciling a split identity to a degree that some of its characters never can. While Reeves unfortunately retreats to the safety of franchise-building mode with the penultimate scene, “The Batman” succeeds in transforming the Bat-Signal into a beacon of hope rather than something to fear. Not just for the citizens of Gotham, but also for the multiplex audiences who will inevitably have to visit the city a few more times before Hollywood gives us somewhere else to go. Compared to the superhero movies that came before it, “The Batman” is already halfway there.

Warner Bros. will release “The Batman” in theaters on Friday, March 4.

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A grim, gritty, and gripping super-noir, The Batman ranks among the Dark Knight's bleakest -- and most thrillingly ambitious -- live-action outings.

It's long, but The Batman looks and sounds great, and its grounded take on Gotham is a solid fit for this Caped Crusader.

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Matt Reeves

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Zoë Kravitz

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Jeffrey Wright

Lt. James Gordon

Colin Farrell

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‘The Batman’ Review Roundup: An ‘Exhilarating,’ ‘Unforgettable’ and ‘Overlong’ Comic Book Film

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The review embargo for Matt Reeves ‘ “ The Batman ” has lifted, bringing with it a handful of raves and several mixed takes on the director’s very long and very dark interpretation of the Caped Crusader. The Warner Bros. comic book tentpole is set during Batman’s second year as a masked crime fighter and follows the vigilante as he tries to capture the Riddler, who sends Gotham City into chaos by exposing the corruption of its leaders.

Robert Pattinson stars as Bruce Wayne/Batman in “The Batman” opposite Zoe Kravitz as Selina Kyle/Catwoman, Paul Dano as Edward Nashton/Riddler, Jeffrey Wright as James Gordon, John Turturro as Carmine Falcone, Peter Sarsgaard as Gil Colson, Andy Serkis as Alfred Pennyworth and Colin Farrell as Oswald Cobblepot/Penguin.

One thing critics agree on when it comes to “The Batman” is that there has never been a comic book movie like it before. Pattinson teased as much earlier this month when he said the film’s opening scene left him shocked.

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“I watched a rough cut of the movie by myself. And the first shot is so jarring from any other Batman movie that it’s just kind of a totally different pace,” Pattinson said in an interview . “It was what Matt was saying from the first meeting I had with him: ‘I want to do a ’70s noir detective story, like “The Conversation.”‘ And I kind of assumed that meant the mood board or something, the look of it. But from the first shot, it’s, ‘Oh, this actually is a detective story.”

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Read some highlights of what critics are saying below.

Variety’s  Peter Debruge:

In ways far more unsettling than most audiences might expect, “The Batman” channels the fears and frustrations of our current political climate, presenting a meaty, full-course crime saga that blends elements of the classic gangster film with cutting-edge commentary about challenges facing the modern world. It’s a hugely ambitious undertaking and one that’s strong enough to work even without Batman’s presence, not that it would have any reason to exist without him. But by incorporating the character and so many of the franchise’s trademarks — Catwoman (a slinky Zoë Kravitz), the Penguin (Colin Farrell, all but unrecognizable), loyal butler Alfred (Andy Serkis, fully analog) and an epic car chase involving the latest iteration of the Batmobile — Reeves electrifies the dense, ultra-dark proceedings with an added level of excitement that justifies the film’s relatively demanding running time.

Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri:

“The Batman” is dark, no doubt about it. Even darker than the already-dark Christopher Nolan-directed “Dark Knight” trilogy, whose success once set off several rounds of way-too-dark comic book adaptations and action spectacles. You might have thought Batman couldn’t get any darker, but you’d be wrong: Heath Ledger’s Joker in ‘The Dark Knight’ sewed a telephone into a guy’s abdomen in 2008 so that Paul Dano’s Riddler could then feed another guy’s abdomen to a cage full of rats in 2022. This is a Batman movie reimagined as a grisly serial killer film, only this time it’s not just the serial killer who looms in the shadows, watching his prey and waiting to pounce; the hero does, too. They could have called it ‘Zodiac$.’

Uproxx’s Mike Ryan:

Matt Reeves’s ‘The Batman,’ at least as far as superhero movies go, feels so old-fashioned that it has come all the way around to unique again. While watching ‘The Batman,’ it feels like it has more in common with gritty crime mysteries like ‘L.A. Confidential’ or ‘Se7en’ than, say, ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home.’ (A movie I like quite a bit, for the record.) ‘The Batman’ is a movie fully embracing its present and not looking forward to what everything might mean five movies down the line. At just under three hours in length, yes, it’s long, but it’s self-contained. And also rare for a Batman movie … Batman is actually the main character.

Rolling Stone’s David Fear:

Pattinson is an inspired choice to bring this haunted, emo-beast-mode version of the character to the screen, and while you can see him hitting certain beats that are now expected for the Caped Crusader — gotta growl them lines, gotta grimace a whole lot — there’s an undercurrent of pathos and vulnerability that he brings this moody-blues interpretation of Bruce/Batman. Even when he was the handsome face of a franchise juggernaut like ‘Twilight,’ the British actor specialized in portraying misfit souls…. His Batman is definitely a mood. He’s also a more moody, enraged, and volatile iteration of the DC Comics’ heavy hitter than previous incarnations, which — given that your competition includes Christian Bale and Ben Affleck — is no small feat.

Entertainment Weekly’s Leah Greenblatt:

Kravitz is feline and fiercely lovely, a girl with her own private pain and motivations; Dano feints and giggles, a simpering loon. (In a world where Heath Ledger’s Joker still exists on celluloid, alas, pretty much every kind of pulp villainy is bound to feel like pale imitation.) But it falls on Pattinson’s leather-cased Batman to be the hero we need, or deserve. With his doleful kohl-smudged eyes and trapezoidal jawline, he’s more like a tragic prince from Shakespeare; a lost soul bent like a bat out of hell on saving everyone but himself.

IndieWire’s David Ehrlich:

It was less than three years ago that Todd Phillips’ mid-budget but mega-successful “Joker” threateningly pointed toward a future in which superhero movies of all sizes would become so endemic to modern cinema that they no longer had to be superhero movies at all. With Matt Reeves’ “The Batman” — a sprawling, 176-minute latex procedural that often appears to have more in common with serial killer sagas like “Se7en” and “Zodiac” than it does anything in the Snyderverse or the MCU — that future has arrived with shuddering force, for better or worse. Mostly better.

Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson:

For the most part, Reeves’s approach is refreshing. The Gotham he’s created — out of bits of London and Chicago, with visual references to New York and other cities thrown in — is an aesthetic marvel. His amalgamated city churns with dangerous allure, a bracing mural of fluorescent orange and dusky purple. Reeves has populated this benighted place with a host of fine actors, among them Colin Farrell as the gangster known as the Penguin, Zoë Kravitz as a sultry and wounded Selina Kyle, Jeffrey Wright as principled cop Jim Gordon, Paul Dano as a dark-web Riddler, and a suavely sinister John Turturro as crime boss Carmine Falcone. The Batman has considered texture — it’s as pleasingly immersive as Nolan’s trilogy.

IGN’s Alex Stedman:

As for Dano, his Riddler is easily the best live-action Batman villain since Heath Ledger’s Joker. This is a far, far, far cry from the previous most famous Riddler performance by Jim Carrey, with Reeves putting a modern, murderous spin on the wordsmith that’s heavily influenced by the real-world Zodiac Killer. Dano sinks into this unhinged yet genius killer with terrifying realism. Seriously, Dano managed to give me chills with a single eye movement in one scene. The best Batman villains are the ones who challenge at least two of the three of his mind, morals, and body, and this Riddler puts the first two to the test. Whenever Pattinson and Dano face off, it’s impossible to look away.

The Playlist’s Robert Daniels:

Unforgettable images — the coned, fiery blue flames of the Batmobile, bodies thrashing, enveloped in shadows, the brailed scars crawling across Robert Pattinson’s muscled back — converge in Matt Reeves’ three-hour, noir-infused epic “The Batman.” Ever since Bob Kane and Bill Finger created him in 1939, the philanthropist playboy by day, Caped Crusader by night, has signified isolation, grief, trauma — vengeance. Over the decades, television and cinematic incarnations, projected through the personalities of the actors who’ve portrayed him, have amplified those traits through both campy and brooding means. But Pattinson’s Dark Knight, more vicious, more forlorn, and less worldly, hampered by his privilege rather than aided, is not only different from every version before him. Inspired and enthralling, this detective story veers far away from the current homogenous superhero landscape.

/Film’s Chris Evangelista:

Do we really need yet another “Batman” reboot? The answer, after watching Matt Reeves’ tremendous “The Batman,” is apparently a resounding yes. The story of the Dark Knight has been told and retold again so many times that you might think there’s nothing left to do with this character, and yet, Reeves and company have crafted a sprawling, ominous, dreamy epic; a mash-up of action-adventure, mystery, horror, noir, and even a little romance thrown in for good measure. There were multiple moments here where I had to stop and ask myself, “Wow, is this the best Batman movie?” It just might be.

The AV Club’s A.A. Dowd:

In ‘The Batman,’ Matt Reeves’ slick, overlong, majestically moody superhero spectacular, Robert Pattinson really puts the goth into Gotham City’s chief protector. His eyes slathered in mascara like Robert Smith (or The Crow, another nocturnal winged avenger), this version of the DC crime fighter zips around town on a motorcycle to the non-diegetic accompaniment of Nirvana’s album-closing downer “Something In The Way.” He also narrates the film in hushed voiceover that teeters, gargoyle-like, over the edge of self-parody. “They think I’m hiding in the shadows,” he whispers. “But I am the shadows.” These musings sound like diary entries — and it turns out that’s exactly what they are. At last: a Batman who journals!

CNN’s Brian Lowry:

While the seriousness is welcome, the level of darkness risks becoming oppressive in a manner that doesn’t leave much room for fun of any kind. If that’s hardly a negative for Batman-ologists, it threatens to blunt the film’s appeal among those who can’t identify the issue of Detective Comics in which he first appeared. Still, that’s a modest quibble compared to the main gripe that “The Batman” could easily lose 30 minutes without sacrificing much. Most of that flab comes during the final hour, which serves a purpose in terms of the character’s maturation but piles on at least one climax too many.

The Verge’s Charles Pulliam-Moore:

For every one of “The Batman’s” good ideas — like focusing on Batman and Gordon bonding over their shared fondness of actually doing detective work — there are at least two things holding it back. These include the fact that none of the Riddler’s riddles here are all that complicated, or that Pattinson and Wright don’t have all that much on-screen chemistry. In The Batman’s defense, the movie does want you to understand how profoundly lonely Bruce Wayne is and how difficult it is for him to relate to other people; the weird energy between him and Gordon may be a directorial choice. But even in Bruce’s more vulnerable moments with longtime Wayne family butler Alfred Pennyworth (Andy Serkis), there’s an emotional inertness that feels intentional, but ultimately unsatisfying, given the intimacy the characters traditionally share.

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The Batman needed a harder reboot

Matt Reeves, Robert Pattinson, and a strong cast rely on execution for a familiar comic book movie

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Batman is back, and he is pissed as hell. The Batman , Matt Reeves’ moody reboot of the famous comic book hero, launches a new version of the Caped Crusader for the 2020s. Somewhere between the Snyderverse’ s failure to launch a solo franchise with Ben Affleck’s elder-statesman take, and the enduring appeal of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, there’s a lot of room for something new. Unfortunately, Reeves’ new take has a lot in common with the old takes.

The Batman is full of moments most Bat-fans will have seen before, and not that long ago. At its most exhausting, it restages moments from the Nolan trilogy: A mobster tells Bruce Wayne the truth about how the world works, Batman fights his way through a nightclub in a fury or through a hallway illuminated only by gunfire, footage of the film’s villain terrorizing their next victim is broadcast over the evening news. Almost all of the characters, apart from the Riddler, are recognizable from previous Batman movies. The new layers on display here are easily derived from what came before. There is nothing particularly bold about The Batman . Its strength is in its execution.

A rain-slick mystery in the mode of David Fincher’s Seven , The Batman is a methodical hunt for the Riddler (Paul Dano) after his grotesque murder of Gotham City’s incumbent mayor in the leadup to the city’s elections. Batman (Robert Pattinson) has been operating in Gotham for two years, and has established both a street rep that keeps common crooks scared and a rock-solid partnership with police Lieutenant James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) that lets him in on crime scenes, even if most other cops hate it.

The case takes the pair on a tour through Gotham’s underworld, crossing paths with crime boss Carmine Falcone (John Turturro), striver Oz “The Penguin” Cobblepot (Colin Farrell), thief Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz), and all of Gotham’s mobsters and elites, who have become codependent. Like its protagonist, The Batman is driven — while the hunt for the Riddler sprawls out in different directions, the film never deviates from it. Bruce Wayne rarely appears out of costume, wholly given to his mission and seeing little use for the life he was born into.

In building a story around the construction of Batman over his human alter ego or any people around him, The Batman becomes a movie of abstract ideas about cities, and where their denizens should place their faith when they know the game is rigged. These are compelling ideas to explore, particularly in this version of Gotham City — which is built to look like a dark-carnival rendition of 1970s and ’80s New York City transposed to the present day. Recognizable landmarks are given a grimy makeover, and theatrical gangs overrun the streets in a merging of fantasy and reality that ultimately adds up to a metaphor in search of a meaning.

If Batman is, as he repeatedly states, “vengeance,” then what is Gotham? The answer is pretty simple: It’s every city as portrayed by conservative commentators, a den of crime that needs Batman to clean it up, but maybe not the way he’s been doing it for the last couple years. Bruce Wayne’s arc is one where a young man who was molded by Gotham learns that perhaps it’s time for him to mold it in turn.

This also feels familiar: The arc of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy was expressly about the idea that Batman was a necessary response, but also one with an expiration date. It’s about a guy who learns how to move from boogeyman to inspiration, and how the latter is a more effective vehicle for change.

The contours of how Reeves gets there is how he distinguishes The Batman . Like Heath Ledger’s Joker, the Riddler in this film is a cipher with a point to make: Gotham City’s vision of law and order is a lie fueled by corruption, and Batman’s journey to stop him, using the tools and means of his wealth, calls that wealth into question. In the world of The Batman , all money is dirty money, powering the ascent of dirty politicians and mobsters while also blinding the well-intentioned to the reality of their impact on the community. The tension between Batman and Catwoman does not just come from their positions on opposite sides of the law, but also Gotham City. He lives in a tower and sees the entire city, while she comes from the gutter and tells him he can’t see a damn thing.

The echoes of past Bat-films are made worse when the people telling the story are so good. Robert Pattinson is a great Batman, surly and serious, but not impenetrable. His Bruce is still open to learning, still capable of feeling, but isn’t invincible. He might not crack a smile in this film, but it’s conceivable that he could, once he achieves a better work-life balance. Zoë Kravitz also makes for a great Selina Kyle, even though the movie does little to establish Catwoman as a known presence the way it does Batman. As Batman’s de facto partner, Jeffrey Wright’s Jim Gordon is perhaps too similarly steely, a great movie cop, but one who could lean a bit more into the fact that he’s a Gotham City cop, where a guy named “The Riddler” leaves birthday cards behind for Batman.

The film’s take on the Riddler may be the movie’s most divisive aspect. Much like Batman, Paul Dano is masked for most of the movie, a character who’s more in line with Jigsaw from the Saw franchise than the quizmaster of the comics. He’s a cruel constructor of death traps, out to impart some kind of moral lesson that won’t be revealed until the movie’s end. Unfortunately, he looks quite silly, somehow requiring more suspension of disbelief than the guy in pointy ears trying to catch him.

Fortunately, The Batman ’s detective-story structure means he’s mostly an offscreen puppetmaster, and as ridiculous as he appears, everything else in The Batman looks incredible, as ambitiously staged fight scenes unfold in a city draped in shadows and streetlamps. The film is only hard to parse during one of its most ambitious setpieces, a car chase that attempts to give its pursuit the physicality of a fistfight, with close shots and weighty collisions. It’s a failure of ambition in a movie that mostly has none, because the cinematic vision of what Batman can be has become terribly narrow.

The pieces were there to do something different. Director Matt Reeves established himself as a surprising blockbuster director with his Planet of the Apes sequels, two films that turned a rote franchise revival into meaningful, bold show-stoppers. His cast is headed up by popular actors with outsider appeal, and more than a decade of dark and grim Batman stories inspired by the same handful of comics have primed audiences for something different.

Instead, The Batman is frustratingly safe, a movie full of potential for more and settling for less. It preaches to the choir, reinforcing the same ideas trodden over and over again across five movies, multiple video games, and every comic book in the mold of Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli’s Batman: Year One . If those are your Batman touchstones, the film may very well speak to you. If, on the other hand, you’re curious as to whether Batman can speak to a different audience, it might be time to pack up the signal. No one’s coming to save you.

The Batman premieres in theaters on Friday, March 4.

Batman: Caped Crusader is all Gotham City throwbacks in first trailer

Hbo’s green lantern show gets a greenlight (get it), the penguin looks like a heaping helping of gotham city mob drama.

'The Batman' Review: A crime-thriller suffocated by PG-13 demands

It's time Batman got a proper R-rated movie. We've seen him dance. We've seen him "get nuts," get seduced, and get rubber nipples. We've seen him rebrand as a "so serious" Dark Knight, then reboot as a brawny brooder. With The Batman, writer/director Matt Reeves teams with Robert Pattinson to take another spin on the iconic superhero. But without the freedom an R-rating allows, this movie — full of menace and murder — feels toothless. 

Imagine if David Fincher made a Batman movie but it was censored to air on televisions at Walmart . That's what Reeves' The Batman feels like.

Like Fincher's Zodiac and Seven , The Batman thrusts audiences into a deeply twisted detective story, where a sharp-minded but impulsive sleuth sets out to capture a serial killer. The clues of the case will be revealed to the detective and his audience simultaneously. So, we shouldn't be able to get a step ahead. We should be awed by the deductions our intrigued anti-hero unfurls before our eyes.

Robert Pattinson's Batman is aggro but not interesting.

Regrettably, Reeves first misstep is that his anti-hero doesn't have the exhilarating disdain and wild bravado of Fincher's. His Batman is less booming with bravado, more brooding and boring. His theme song is a moaning emo track that never rises to a roar or a victorious chorus, and Pattinson's performance is similarly one-note. Worse still, this Batman isn't much of a detective, making leaps in logic that are more inexplicable than elementary. 

To the credit of Reeves and co-scribe Peter Craig, The Batman doesn't bother with an origin story, so a news broadcast swiftly establishes that 20 years ago Bruce Wayne's parents were murdered. However, they skip too much by rushing through a first act with no character development. It's expected you know the drill: Orphan haunted by his past stalks the night as a vigilante dressed as a bat, hellbent on justice. Also, Alfred (this time played by Andy Serkis) is his butler/father figure/metaphorical punching bag for bad moods.

But this Batman's not like the other Batmen. He's a mood, made up of grumbling angsty monologues, hard stares, and grit teeth. Oh, we've done that? Well, he's so aggro that his yarn-walling is done with spray paint on concrete! (This is not a joke. It's a real scene.) 

Zoë Kravitz deserves better than this sex kitten Catwoman.

Catwoman is similarly confined to a mood of murky misanthropy. Zoë Kravitz's natural charisma is suffocated in a role that asks her chiefly to sneer and hip swivel while wearing leather. The two larger-than-life characters of Batman and Catwoman are bled of their verve. So, their fight scenes — though thoughtfully choreographed to be balanced with a hint of sexual innuendo — lack spice. Their forbidden romance feels more required than earned or authentically lusty. Their chemistry is inert, making me wish I could flee the theater and revisit the wild sensuality of Michael Keaton and Michelle Pfeiffer's Bat/Cat liplock in 1992's Batman Returns . 

It's almost like Reeves forgot superhero movies should be fun. Sure, there are action sequences, big-budget and full of spectacle. There are villains, vicious and eccentric. Sometimes, there's even a bit of grim humor amid the avalanche of exposition and Batman scowling. (A bit about a thumb drive is unexpectedly and darkly funny.) But Reeves appears more interested in creating grisly pageantry than entertainment. 

The Batman is grisly yet tame.

The Batman 's central plot focuses on the titular vigilante's quest to capture a serial killer called The Riddler (Paul Dano) . Forget the spandex razzle-dazzle and rubber-faced clowning of Jim Carrey. His wardrobe is army green, his face hidden by a winter combat mask that turns his whining diatribes into something sweatier and rank.

His M.O. — from home invasions to brutal murders, bombings, dropping messages directly to the media, and leaving taunting ciphers for the police — appears to be cherry-picked from notorious true-crime cases, including the Unabomber, the Zodiac, and the so-called "Evil Genius." Yet, within all this murder, menace, and mayhem, The Batman pulls its punches. 

There is violence. But the hardest blows are either offscreen or obscured by shadow, rain, or a purposefully blurred focus. This is a PG-13 movie after all. It has to be because Batman is a property that's so popular that even Christopher Nolan couldn't get an R-rating for his Dark Knight Trilogy. Of course, it's possible to have effective violence without showing it or the gore it creates. Reeves doesn't manage this.

To his credit, he comes up with a cavalcade of ways to imply extreme violence without showing it. These include playing an audiotape of a pivotal murder and cutting wide to cinematographer Greig Fraser's precisely framed long shots, so visually striking you might be too dazzled to think about why he's cutting away.

Still, when a core element of the movie is exploring what violence is acceptable (say, Batman punching out a bunch of knockout game-playing gang members) and which is too far (everything the Riddler does), the point is muddied when you won't truly exhibit the latter. 

It's not only the violence where The Batman feels tamed. As hinted at above, the sexuality of this film pales in comparison to Tim Burton's Batman Returns , which reveled in a BDSM aesthetic and giddily displayed Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle making out. Here, they'll kiss and flirt-fight with all the stiffness of Barbie and Ken dolls. Meanwhile, there's a hint that Selina might be queer, bi or pan — considering how she coos over a female cohort, calling her "baby" over and over again.

But perhaps to avoid the well-documented biases of the ratings-bestowing MPAA, she also repeatedly refers to this character as her "friend." No wonder the proposed politics of The Batman are confoundingly muddled, trying to both-sides every argument over corruption and justice. 

The most hilarious instance of PG-13 pandering involves the Penguin, who is a drug-peddling mafioso here. Though relegated to a tertiary role, Colin Farrell relishes every moment in the heavy prosthetic makeup that turns him into a scarred and shit-talking wise guy. When he appeared, I actually had hope this movie might come alive, because Farrell clearly understands the thrill of being a Batman villain. His enthusiasm is contagious.

And yet you may wonder why this iconic character is without his signature cigar? “I fought valiantly for a cigar," Farrell told Variety. But the studio shot him down. "I said, ‘I can have it unlit! Just let me have it unlit.’ They were like, ‘No.’ [As if] a bunch of 12-year-olds are going to start smoking Cuban cigars because [the Penguin is smoking cigars in a movie.]”

This is a movie about a serial killer, who re-enacts real and really horrendous murders, but having a drug-dealing murderer hold an unlit cigar is a bridge too far. Think of the children.

Just give us an R-rated Batman movie.

Frankly, it's stupid that Reeves was put into this bend-over-backward scenario, where the main plotline involves murder, drug-dealing, and conspiracy. Yet, he needs to play nice enough to not offend the sensibilities of the MPAA, perhaps because Warner Bros. wants a four-quadrant hit that sells toys to children.

Would The Batman have been a great movie if it were rated R? No. Somehow at 2 hours and 55 minutes, Reeves couldn't find time to wedge in captivating character development for his hero. So, we're expected to coast on pre-existing fandom to lock into this Batman and this Catwoman.

Perhaps Reeves got distracted by all the workarounds demanded of diluting a script that clearly wanted to be for grown-ups. Maybe that's why this movie has even more plotholes than it does Batman baddies. Look over here and don't pay attention to the glaring leap in logic! This could be why the dialogue is often cringingly cliched, with characters crying things like "You're not my father!" and spelling out themes like "Fear is a tool" and pivotal epiphanies like: "I have had an effect here — but not the one I intended." 

Colin Farrell as the Penguin is a highlight.

Still, The Batman does have its bright spots - chiefly the supporting cast, who seem unmarred by Reeves' oppressive gloom. Farrell finds fun in bringing the cartoonish Penguin into a more grounded space, spitting insults and crooked grins. When he finds the opportunity to waddle, it's witty and splendid. Dano channels Prisoners -level intensity as The Riddler, though his theatrics sometimes swerve from unnerving to annoying.

Storied character actor John Turturro sparks with menace as kingpin Carmine Falcone. From the moment his dark eyes hit the screen and the slow grumble of his voice unleashes a velvet hammer of threat, I shivered and craved more. Yet the standout for me was Peter Sarsgaard in a small role as a District Attorney. 

These great actors do what truly great actors do. They take a character who might be thin on the page and craft them into something captivating all the same. In just three sequences, Sarsgaard creates a journey with his supporting character, folding in hope, regret, dejection, rage, and resignation. It's a performance so good it actually makes me want to watch this movie again…or at least his scenes. 

It's never a pleasure to share that a superhero movie falls short of thrilling. For all the acrimony towards critics — especially when it comes to DC movies — we rarely go to a theater hoping to be bored or underwhelmed.

So, today it is my grim task to tell you The Batman is studded with stars, action, comic book characters, real-world parallels, gorgeous cinematography, and grit-teeth seriousness. But it falls short of exciting or entertaining or fun. It wasn't a ride, but a chore. Considering all the stories that might be told with these characters, the truly daring possibilities it scratches at dwarf the film it actually is.  

The Batman is now in theaters.

Topics Film

Kristy Puchko is the Film Editor at Mashable. Based in New York City, she's an established film critic and entertainment reporter, who has traveled the world on assignment, covered a variety of film festivals, co-hosted movie-focused podcasts, interviewed a wide array of performers and filmmakers, and had her work published on RogerEbert.com, Vanity Fair, and The Guardian. A member of the Critics Choice Association and GALECA as well as a Top Critic on Rotten Tomatoes, Kristy's primary focus is movies. However, she's also been known to gush over television, podcasts, and board games. You can follow her on Twitter.

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“The Batman,” Reviewed: Eh, It’s Fine

By Richard Brody

It’s cause for modest celebration that “ The Batman ” achieves, for much of its nearly three-hour running time, a baseline of artistry: it’s eminently sit-through-able. There’s a category of movie that used to be the Hollywood stock in trade, which a dear departed relative used to call “brain cleansers”—one kicks back, the time passes with some rooting interest, some excitement, some curiosity about what’s coming next. For its first two hours or so, “The Batman” largely fulfills the commitment to be engaging and clever; its deftly inventive director, Matt Reeves (who co-wrote the script with Peter Craig), conveys the impression of substance where it’s hardly to be found. The movie is good with an asterisk—an asterisk the size of the financial interests at stake in the franchise’s intellectual property. As free as Reeves may have been to make the film according to his lights, he displays an element of custodial, even fiduciary, responsibility. It may well win him favor with the studio, with the ticket-buying public, and with critics who calibrate their enthusiasm to box-office success, but it gets in the way of the kinds of transformative interpretations of the characters that would make the difference between a baseline movie and an authentically free and original one.

The Batman is a vigilante who works with the coöperation of the police, who project a bat-sign into the sky, with a bright light, as a call to him and a warning to evildoers who anticipate him swooping in. Yet, as he lands on a subway platform and lays low a gang of young miscreants, made up Joker-style, who are assaulting an Asian man, the victim is also struck with fear and pleads with the Batman not to hurt him. The Batman describes his uneasy role as an avenger—indeed, he says, as vengeance itself—in a voice-over that holds out hope that the superhero will be endowed with at least an average level of subjectivity and mental activity. No such luck: that voice-over might as well be a part of the explanatory press notes for all the insight it offers into the protagonist’s thoughts. Yet his haphazard thwarting of random street crime in the chaos of Gotham City gets sharply focussed on one criminal, the Riddler (Paul Dano), who, in the opening act of his crime spree, virtually summons him.

The Riddler gruesomely murders the mayor of Gotham and tapes to the victim’s body a greeting card for the Batman and other clues to his motives and to his next victim—to the conspiracy that he has discovered and the perpetrators he’s targeting. In taunting the Batman by dosing him with knowledge, the Riddler is also making him an unwilling but inextricable ally, both forcing him to join in the same fight and informing him of the underlying and overarching truth about Gotham, about the social order that the avenging masked man is dedicated to defending and preserving. The Riddler has learned that many of the city’s officials, particularly ones involved in law enforcement, have been on the take from gangsters (I’m avoiding spoilers here and throughout); decisions to prosecute are tainted by the self-dealing of politicians and police.

The Batman is drawn even further into the tangled conspiracy when he accidentally encounters another masked avenger, Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz), who, as Selina Kyle, works in a night club run by a gangster named Oz, who is nicknamed the Penguin (Colin Farrell), and frequented by other criminals, such as a mobster named Carmine Falcone (John Turturro), and corrupt officials. When her roommate and lover, Annika Koslov—whom the Riddler linked to the conspiracy—vanishes, the Batman helps her to investigate, and she helps him to untangle the web of corruption that the Riddler has discerned and capture the Riddler himself. Meanwhile, the Batman is working closely with a police detective named Jim Gordon (Jeffrey Wright), who, in collaborating in the pursuit of the Riddler, is playing the dangerous game of unmasking corrupt colleagues and superiors.

The reason for dwelling on these details is pleasure. The intricacy of the movie’s intertwined plots has a plain and simple efficiency that undergirds the onscreen actions like an architectural framework, and Reeves adorns that framework with a vigorous variety of visual twists and dramatic tempi. The opening scene, in which the Riddler spies on the mayor before doing him in, involves a telescope that Reeves (working with the cinematographer Greig Fraser) mimics with a telephoto lens, while, on the soundtrack, the masked Riddler wheezes with a huffing eeriness out of David Lynch. The best gizmo in the Batman’s bag of high-tech tricks is a pair of contact lenses that are also video cameras beaming their signal to the devices of his choice. The movie’s design also offers a handful of piquant touches, from the infinitesimal points of Catwoman’s mask-ears to the cable zip line that the Batman discharges for rapid rescues and escapes. (The Batmobile, however, is definitively outshone by the vintage black Corvette in which Bruce Wayne, out of disguise, shows up at a funeral.)

There’s a car chase that, if not especially original, at least conveys its obvious patterns in images of taut precision and culminates in the film’s money shot, which brings it to a rooting conclusion with a strikingly clever and simple twist of visual logic. There’s a fight scene in a dark room at night where the only light comes from bursts of gunfire; there’s a jolt of superheroic vulnerability when the Batman makes a midair misstep in his flight suit. In a movie deprived of humor, one moment of it bursts out with a gleeful surprise, as the gargle-voiced Penguin cuts loose with a rant attacking the Batman’s linguistic skills. That’s as good as it gets, though; the laundry list of moments that pop hangs on the framework as if to conceal its essential emptiness.

The crucial marker of the movie’s faux earnestness is visual darkness—the movie is set largely at night (explained in part by the Batman’s own nocturnal habits), which furnishes the bland metaphor, or cliché, for grim doings. The sleek foreground of elaborate yet functional design doesn’t reverberate with symbolic power; it has no loose ends for the free play of imagination. Its coherence is impressive, overwhelming—and deadening. The energy of directorial intention doesn’t reach offscreen—it implies nothing beyond the action. (It’s the kind of enticing visual beauty, conveying above all the realm of power, that Kogonada questions in “ After Yang .”)

The emptiness below the movie’s surfaces reflects the emptiness of the characters it depicts; they’re reduced to a handful of traits and a backstory, defined solely by their function in the plot. Even though the title character bears two identities and lives a double life constructed of careful and elaborate ruses, “The Batman” makes shockingly little of Bruce Wayne. Robert Pattinson’s performance provides the only hint of substance: in both personae, he maintains a stone face throughout. The utterly repressed expression that he lends them could suggest anything from self-discipline to existential anguish, though I see it as a superhuman effort not to burst out laughing at the simulation of seriousness, of any personality at all. The movie’s solid dramatic architecture is essentially uninhabited—“The Batman” is a cinematic house populated only by phantoms with no trace of a complex mental life.

The indifference to characters as sentient beings rather than pawns in a plot emerges in a twist that’s a long-standing marker of action-film superficiality: apocalyptic chaos. Again avoiding spoilers, the Riddler doesn’t only target individual high-level miscreants in Gotham but decides that the entire city deserves to go down with them. (The possibilities, with its Biblical implications, are endless—and remain untapped.) When his monstrous scheme is unleashed, crowd scenes conjure mass destruction as a plot point, the staggering loss of life as a generic and inchoate jumble. Extras, whether live or digitally created, are anonymous collateral damage in a city that “The Batman” presents only as a stage for the clash of its protagonists. The movie’s inability to imagine its superheroes and supervillains with any meaningful psychological identity is of a piece with the failure to imagine ordinary people with any degree of individuality. Nothing that distracts from suspense or excitement, no details of personality to get in the way of superficial identification with flattened-out heroes, nothing that suggests a world of possibilities beyond the sealed-off borders of the screen, is allowed to seep through the movie’s solid and opaque surfaces. Its triumph of superficial pleasure is chillingly triumphalist.

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These Brutally Honest Fan Reviews Prove That The Batman Is Not For Everyone

"The Batman" has only just become available to the movie-going public, but it's already gotten a stellar response from critics and fans alike. The Matt Reeves-directed feature boasts an 85% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes from critics, while its user score sits at over 90%. Some fans have gone so far as to even declare "The Batman" the best of the Caped Crusader pictures ever (via The Wrap ). While that may not seem like an enormous statement when accounting for the derided "Batman & Robin" or the divisive "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice," it becomes a more arguable point when considering Christopher Nolan's "Dark Knight" trilogy or Tim Burton's beloved "Batman." 

Still, "The Batman" has lived up to the hype and earned praise even next to other chapters in the Batman saga. Robert Pattinson's portrayal of Bruce Wayne/Batman has earned raves, while supporting players like Colin Farrell and Paul Dano enjoy juicy, disappearing act parts in the movie's three-hour runtime. Even so, "The Batman" has not been for everyone . Some fans have made it clear that not everyone has fallen head over heels for Reeves' latest version of Gotham City. While the response has not been as mixed as, say, Zack Snyder's dark, mythic take on the DCEU , there is a vocal minority who have not been won over by Reeves' impressive cast or massive runtime. 

Beautiful, but underwhelming

Director Matt Reeves' vision for "The Batman" is undeniably epic, but a massive budget, A-list cast, and intricate, dark story have not won over some who have found the movie "underwhelming," despite it containing an impressive look.

"I'm not going to hold you 'The Batman' was shot beautifully but the movie was overall underwhelming imo," one Twitter user wrote about the film. Another took the criticism a step further and described the picture as the "most underwhelming, overrated film of my lifetime." Another said the movie left them "disappointed." "Talk about over-hyped," the Twitter user declared . 

Even those feeling the story left much to be desired have heaped praise on the cinematography, courtesy of Greig Fraser as director of photography. He previously worked on films like "Dune" and Disney Plus'  "The Mandalorian." A visually-engaging frame, however, is not enough for critics of "The Batman." "Does anyone else remember when Aretha Franklin was asked to weigh in on modern pop stars and when they got to Taylor Swift she paused and simply said '...gorgeous gowns?' That's my entire review of THE BATMAN (2022)," one Twitter fan wrote in summation. 

The Batman is too long

When it was announced that "The Batman" came with a 2 hour and 56 runtime, some fans were elated, feeling the length provided the right potential for a sprawling introduction to a new Batman in Robert Pattinson . Runtimes for comic book movies typically run between 2 hours and 2 hours and 30 minutes, but they have grown over the years. When Zack Snyder released his cut of "Justice League," for instance, on HBO Max, it ran just a hair over 4 hours . "Avengers: Endgame" didn't go quite that far, but sported a 3-hour runtime, and "Spider-Man: No Way Home" ran just shy of two and a half hours. 

Longer runtimes may be more common in the superhero genre today, but some are simply not fans, at least when it comes to the case of "The Batman." "Gorgeous cinematography, solid performances, but it's 3 hours long and FEELS IT," one Twitter user wrote in their review of the movie. 

"Is this really the movie they forced Ben Affleck out for?" another fan asked . "Wasn't awful but that was wildly pretentious and anticlimatic and way too f**king long." In another review still praising "The Batman" as an "achievement," a viewer said the pacing was simply off. "It's not the runtime but it feels like the pacing was a bit messy. I didn't get enough time during some scenes and others it dragged too long," the Twitter user wrote . 

The film is anticlimactic

One of the most common criticisms from dissenting fans thrown at "The Batman" is that its ending is "anticlimactic." While many have not seen the final picture, they have likely heard "The Batman" contains a shocking finale , one that even introduces us to a possible new villain for a potential sequel . Some, however, felt that after nearly three hours of buildup, the conclusion of "The Batman" just didn't live up.

"Pointless, unnecessary, anticlimactic, and a waste of time. Bottom of the Batman barrel," one Twitter user declared about the movie. A separate review actually praising the movie admitted to an ending that was a "bit disappointing." 

"The Batman was 3 hours of straight GARBAGE, bad acting, average drawn out plot, and anticlimactic ending," another user wrote , questioning how so many could be praising the picture. "Just a terrible, terrible movie. Wish I could get those 3 hours back."

Screen Rant

Moon knight returns from the dead in brand new marvel series, fist of khonshu.

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Next Generation of X-Men's Sentinels Revealed in Official Marvel First Look

Transformers: 1 decepticon leader's alt-mode hints at the return of a classic megatron form, captain america, wolverine & black widow's new matching costumes combine each of their darkest qualities.

• Marc Spector is resurrected as Moon Knight after Khonshu is freed from his Asgardian prison in a dramatic turn of events.
• Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu #0 explores Spector's resurrection and sets the stage for his return in #1.
• The Midnight Mission team takes center stage in the issue, preparing fans for Moon Knight's next era.

Warning: contains spoilers for Blood Hunt #4 The defender of those who travel at night has finally been reborn, as Marc Spector returns to life as Moon Knight in the final pages of Blood Hunt #4. Now, Marvel has revealed a super secret "surprise shadow drop" of Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu #0 to prepare fans for Spector's full return in October's Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu #1.

Moon Knight was killed sacrificing himself to stop Robert Plesko - the most recent Black Spectre - from destroying New York City and all its inhabitants, and the iconic hero could not be resurrected because Khonshu was being held captive in Asgard.

Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu #0 - from long time Moon Knight writer Jed MacKay and artist Alessandro Cappuccio - will explore Marc Spector's resurrection in the midst of the vampire's horrifying blood hunt , while spotlighting the epic heroics of Midnight Mission members Tigra, Soldier, Reese, Hunter's Moon, and 8-Ball. The return of Marc Spector is celebrated in gorgeous new covers by E.M. Gist, Alessandro Cappuccio, and Davide Paratore.

The issue underscores the scope of MacKay and Cappuccio’s riveting take on the Moon Knight mythos by spotlighting the now-iconic crew of the Midnight Mission, shedding light on recent developments, and setting the stage for Marc Spector’s next era! This week, retailers received a variant cover of MOON KNIGHT: FIST OF KHONSHU #0 by Cappuccio, but they can immediately order copies of the issue featuring a main cover by E.M. Gist to be delivered for a 7/3 on-sale date. Full moon rising! As an avatar and agent of the Egyptian God of the Moon, Khonshu, former mercenary Marc Spector has died and come back to life on more than one occasion. To the ignorant, his fate beyond death’s grasp may seem idyllic, but being chosen as a fists of Khonshu comes with a heavy cost! And, like bones in a street fight, Marc Spector, and the multitudes he contains, may be about to break!

Moon Knight Has Finally Been Resurrected Following Khonshu's Freedom

Marc spector dons an epic new costume as the iconic fist.

Marc Spector has been defending innocent folk from the dangers of the night for years now, after being gifted superhuman abilities by the moon god Khonshu. Attempting to make up for his past sins as a deadly mercenary, Moon Knight has defeated countless forces of evil, as well as battled his own inner demons as a powerful hero who struggles with mental health issues. In a bid to stop the new Black Spectre's plans to destroy New York City, Marc sacrificed his life to stop Plesko , all while knowing he could not be resurrected due to the imprisonment of his god Khonshu.

"The father, freed. The son, returned. Marc Spector, Jake Lockley and Stephen Grant hit the streets once more as Moon Knight, and he's making up for lost time," MacKay shared.

Thankfully, Blood Hunt #4 saw Tigra, Hunter's Moon, and Wrecker breaking Khonshu out of his Asgardian cell, placed there after the events of the Age of Khonshu. Freeing the controversial deity allowed Khonshu to not only break through the Darkforce clouds blocking out the sky, but also to resurrect Marc Spector and reinstate him as the true Fist of Khonshu . Marc Spector, Jake Lockley, and Stephen Grant's tale will continue to develop in Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu , where the violent hero will don an epic new costume, returning to a look that includes both black and white, honoring the complex dichotomy of Marc's heroism.

The Midnight Mission Finally Has Its True Leader Back

Moon knight will continue to protect his neighborhood from bumps in the night.

After the tragic death of Marc Spector a new "Moon Knight" arose in Vengeance of the Moon Knight , clad in an all-Black costume and operating with an even more violent philosophy. Attempting to steal the Midnight Mission from Spector's peers, the new Moon Knight was eventually revealed to be Maximillian Coleridge , the complex antihero who used to be known as the Shroud. Coleridge, a former member of the West Coast Avengers, was eventually defeated by the Midnight Mission. Now, Marc Spector is back to team up with Hunter's Moon and Tigra, as they protect their neighborhood and re-establish trust in the Mission.

While Marc Spector's death was tragic, most fans knew that Moon Knight wouldn't stay dead long... he never does. With Khonshu freed from his Asgardian prison and Moon Knight resurrected, the Fist of Khonshu will refocus his mission to deal with deadly new threats to the community he has sworn to protect.

Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu #0 from Marvel Comics is officially available in stores on July 3rd, 2024.

Source: Marvel

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The Bikeriders review: a breezy, effortlessly cool motorcycle movie

“Jeff Nichols' The Bikeriders is an assured, fun, and supremely cool cinematic slice of 1960s American life.”

• An immensely likable cast
• Stylish, confident direction
• A playful, loose structure
• A second act that occasionally drags
• Several moments of tonal unevenness

The Bikeriders is a film of free-wheeling style and rigid formalism, loud voices and muted emotions, lighthearted comedy and straight-faced tragedy. It’s not the best movie writer-director Jeff Nichols has made, but there are moments, particularly throughout its exuberant, wind-in-your-hair first half, when it will make you wonder if it just might be. It’s unwieldy, rough around the edges, and ultimately amounts to only a little more than the sum of its many impressive parts. At the same time, there is a sense of life rippling throughout The Bikeriders that keeps it light, buoyant, and constantly engaging.

Like so many of Nichols’ movies, it’s a decidedly human drama about the unforgiving nature of time and of trying desperately to hold onto the present in fear of the future. Inspired by a 1968 photo book of the same name by Danny Lyon, it’s a collection of indelible images and individual moments: a couple’s first nighttime motorcycle ride, a memorable joke told around a campfire. Inevitably, certain sections prove more compelling than others, but The Bikeriders succeeds in making you feel the joy and love its characters do when they rest their heads on their partner’s shoulders or drive side-by-side down a country highway. It does that so effectively that you, in turn, feel the same anxiety as the film’s characters when the moments of connection they treasure so deeply begin to slip through their hands.

Set in and around Chicago in the 1960s, The Bikeriders charts the rise of the Vandals MC, a motorcycle club founded by Johnny (Tom Hardy), a bike-obsessed suburban husband and father with dreams of being James Cagney or Marlon Brando. We’re introduced to Johnny and his fellow Vandals by Kathy (Jodie Comer), a spirited outsider whose opening narration reveals how she ended up as the wife of Johnny’s right-hand man, Benny (Austin Butler), a stubborn rebel whose handsome blankness practically invites others to project their own desires and ideas onto him. Butler, coming off his recent star turns in Elvis and Dune: Part Two , isn’t given much depth to explore in The Bikeriders , but that’s all right. His performance is one of stillness and sheer presence, and the work he does throughout the film forms as convincing a case for his future as a Hollywood movie star as anything else he’s done.

Following its initial, lightly comedic and romantic introduction of Comer and Butler’s lovestruck characters, The Bikeriders quickly expands its focus. The film’s first half jumps around in time and place — offering insights into the other members of the Vandals through vignettes that are as beautifully photographed by cinematographer Adam Stone as they are succinctly put together by editor Julie Monroe. The film’s brief asides establish the shared sense of camaraderie that keeps the Vandals together and give all of its cast members, including welcome supporting figures like Damon Herriman, Boyd Holbrook, and frequent Nichols collaborator Michael Shannon, equal chances to shine in the spotlight.

For most of its first hour, The Bikeriders functions less as a traditional narrative film and more like a loose but loving portrait of its central club. It’s in this section that Nichols is the most playful he’s ever been as a filmmaker — finding the time to pack in obvious references to films like Goodfellas alongside his own, assured stylistic touches and moments of surprising narrative experimentation. After taking an eight-year break between films, Nichols has returned with a slice of life dramedy that spends much of its 116 minute runtime actively resisting the reserved style of his previous directorial efforts. As the movie’s motorcycle club inches toward an untenable size and its lawless ways begin to take increasingly darker turns, though, The Bikeriders does gradually slip into a more straightforward rhythm and mode of storytelling that feels in line with Nichols’ past work.

The film’s stylistic shift is reflected in its tone, which grows somber and more melancholic the harder it becomes for Hardy’s Johnny to run his once-modest motorcycle club. This transition isn’t particularly seamless, but it isn’t so jarring as to be disorienting, either. The darkness of The Bikeriders ‘ second half feels, at first, incongruous with the goofiness of its first, which itself made the movie’s more outsized performances — namely, Comer’s supremely charismatic turn as Kathy and Hardy’s endearingly bumbling take on Johnny — feel perfectly tuned to its almost cartoonish sense of fun and romance. It, consequently, takes time for The Bikeriders to convince you that the larger-than-life elements of its first two acts can coexist with the elegiac mood of its final third.

While the film’s collage-esque approach to telling its story allows it to maintain a brisk, jovial pace for its first hour as well, the shorthand way in which Nichols introduces and develops many of its supporting characters renders a number of The Bikeriders ‘ darkest moments surprisingly weightless. These flaws, fortunately, don’t cause The Bikeriders to crash and burn. The film is far too confident in its own story and characters to succumb to a fate like that, and the performances given by its likable cast are enough to keep it moving along, even in the rare instances when its narrative momentum seems dangerously close to stalling out.

Early in The Bikeriders , there’s an extended, completely standalone sequence in which Butler’s Benny speeds through the streets of a small Illinois town. Before long, he’s earned the attention of an entire squad of police cars intent on chasing him down. Rather than trying to outrun them, Benny keeps cruising forward in a straight line — staying just far enough ahead of his pursuers to remain out of their grasp and close enough to keep them on his tail. It’s a brazen, reckless attempt to hold onto a high that’s unsustainable — and the scene itself is one of the most confidently made and quietly moving of Nichols’ career.

Nothing lasts forever, of course. Eventually, Benny’s bike runs out of gas, the same way the Vandals grows too big for Johnny to single-handedly control. You can’t keep violence contained, it turns out, just like how you can’t smother a fire and keep it lit at the same time. Every high-speed chase has to end and, sooner or later, the next song has to play. The Bikeriders knows all of this, and it’s a credit to the strength of the film’s romantic spirit that it doesn’t let the impermanence of its characters’ situations lead it toward a dead end of hopelessness. Every bike ride may have to end at some point, but if you find a way to start again, you may still be able to hear the distant roar of the past floating in on the wind from time to time — like a song you’ve forgotten the words to but still remember well enough to hum along.

The Bikeriders is now playing in theaters.

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But July isn’t just noteworthy for its blockbusters or even its high-profile genre films (see: Insidious: The Red Door, Talk to Me). The month features a handful of smaller titles premiering in theaters and on digital platforms that should be sought out as well. Therefore, just in case July didn’t already seem like an impressive enough month for movies, here are five alternatives to blockbusters like Barbie and Oppenheimer that you should check out in the coming weeks. The Lesson — in theaters now THE LESSON | Official Trailer | Bleecker Street

For the seventh time, Tom Cruise reprises his role as IMF agent Ethan Hunt for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Once again, Ethan and his team -- Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), and Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) -- race to secure a weapon with the power to endanger all of humanity if it lands in the wrong hands. Standing in Ethan's way is "The Entity," a mysterious organization that will push Ethan and his team to its limits.

Since Mission: Impossible debuted in 1996, the film series has been one of the premier action franchises in Hollywood. Through six films, Ethan Hunt has become one of Cruise's defining roles as he enters the pantheon of classic action stars. With a seventh and eighth film on the way, the Mission: Impossible franchise is not slowing down anytime soon.

Every decade has plenty of great action movies, but the 2010s featured some genuine stunners. Even amid the bland action that dominates so many superhero franchises, we got plenty of genuinely thrilling set pieces that were largely unrelated to superpowers.

The movies on this list prove that there's still plenty of new things to be done with action as a genre. They're also a reminder that, for all the wonders that CGI can bring, there's often nothing like filming some action against the backdrop of the real world.