Batman Begins

Batman has been all about darkness, Nolan just makes it a shade darker. Go see it.

Nolan takes an admirable stab at developing a character-driven drama, only to give in to generic action-movie conventions with a blinding, deafening, explosion-laden finale that could have capped off any number of interchangeable Jerry Bruckheimer flicks.

Batman Begins summons up moments of great eloquence and power. If only its cast of characters was as fully inhabited as its turbulent city.

Every so often, it's time to re-boot Batman.

It's not just the birth of Batman we're seeing in this triumphant interpretation, it's also the dawning of Gotham City's age of greed.

The psychological realism and the science-fiction villainy don't always mesh seamlessly. But unlike so many superheroic summer spectacles, this one actually has a soul behind the special effects.

This is the moment Nolan began to establish his blockbuster tendencies: dynamic camera movement, rich cinematography, and heavy use of a majestic background score.

This entry is the only film in the dark knight trilogy that doesn’t feel like a Christopher Nolan movie, and I adore it for that reason.

Nolan’s first take on Batman redefined the character for a 2000s audience and gave superhero films the license to play it straight in a way that they hadn’t really before, sans the melodramatic heights of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films.



The technical aspects are deft, especially the sound and cinematography... But what really works is how Gotham exists in a world apart from out own.