The Batman Review

The premise is simply that Batman is a detective, and the first ninety minutes deliver on it with a discipline the character has rarely been granted: crime scenes, ciphers, informants, a real investigation whose second act reverses what the first established about Thomas Wayne. Greig Fraser lights Gotham almost entirely with practicals and red emergency light, and the sequence in which the Batmobile emerges from a wall of flame behind an overturned truck is the best pure image any superhero film has produced.

Robert Pattinson plays year two as a recluse with no social skills, which is a genuine reading of the character rather than a brooding pose, and Zoe Kravitz gives Selina more interiority than the script provides. Paul Dano's Riddler is frightening until he appears unmasked, at which point the film runs out of ideas for him. The flooding finale abandons the detective story for a mass casualty spectacle that any of these movies could have staged. It is beautifully made and roughly forty minutes longer than its plot can support.