The Batman

Our Review

Three hours of noir rain, and it earns most of them. Matt Reeves treats Batman as a detective story first, and Robert Pattinson plays Bruce Wayne as a recluse two years into a nightly vengeance habit, eyeliner and all, narrating his crusade like a diary entry. The plot is a genuine serial killer mystery: Paul Dano’s Riddler leaves ciphers for the Batman and executes city officials while livestreaming the corruption he thinks they caused, and the investigation drags Bruce through a Gotham built on mob money and police rot.

Colin Farrell is unrecognizable and terrific as Oz, the nightclub mobster who walked off with his own spinoff series, Zoë Kravitz’s Selina Kyle is sharp and wounded, and Jeffrey Wright’s Gordon is the lone honest cop in the frame. The Nirvana drenched mood gives the whole thing the texture of a serial killer thriller rather than a cape release, and the opening Halloween ambush is as tense as the genre gets.

It is overlong, the third act flood plays like an afterthought bolted on for scale, and the finale speech gets earnest in a way the film had mostly avoided. But the craft is immaculate, the mood is addictive, and Pattinson’s tortured weirdo is the most psychologically interesting Batman on film. Our score: 8/10. The best Batman movie since the Nolan trilogy, and the most rewatchable one too.