The Batman (2022)

When the topic of The Batman came up, a teenager I tutor summed it up perfectly as a movie about a "miserable Batman with miserable friends fighting a miserable villain in a miserable city", and he wasn't wrong, because this brooding restyling of the franchise positions Robert Pattison's Batman as a sullen emo and has him, Zoe Kravitz's slinky Selena, the mobsters and Gotham street crims, the justice system, and in fact the entire city of Gotham sunk in a psychotic depression while The Riddler, a Heath Ledger-Joker-echo, murders public figures and taunts authorities with tightly scripted David Berkowitz-style codes - all of which oppressive heaviness is fine - it's Batman, afterall - until the final act reveals the supposed root of the city's decay and it feels, in comparison, almost trivial.

★★★☆☆

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Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021)

It didn't help that an hour in our internet cut out and my viewing partner accidentally drummed up the original 2017 cut, not this 2021 refashioning by Zack Snyder, leaving us perplexed by scenes we'd already seen playing out of sequence, but even once we got back on track this unnecessarily long re-release stretches a bad two-hour movie to an interminable four-hour slog: a first hour and a half of false starts, a muddled middle split pointlessly between Batman's Justice League recruitment drive and Steppenwolf's "mother box" raids (the raids are doing the recruiting, making Batman's story redundant), and a finale that comes only after too many musical lamentations (each time Wonder Woman appears), too many dopey Flash close-ups, far too many little-boy shrugs from Superman, and way too much of that cyborg character so stiff and miserable we never once connect — four hours later, it isn't Justice League so much as Justice beLeaguered.

★★☆☆☆

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Joker (2019)

A Rupert Pupkin's neurological condition, which causes him to laugh uncontrollably and inappropriately, continues through a compounding series of abject miseries.

★☆☆☆☆

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Batman Returns (1992)

Michael Keaton has settled into his role as Batman and is steelier, less neurotic, less Mr Mom and more able to move and flex in his batsuit than he was in the 1989 Tim Burton movie and instead of the uninvolving battle he had with the Joker in the original (a remote battle - were they ever in the same shot together?) he gets to be really up close and personal with his terrifically creepy foes in this sequel - Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman is split, damaged and slinky and Danny DeVito's the Penguin is a hideous, bloated monster.

★★★☆☆

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Batman (1989)

The batsuit is so rigid poor Michael Keaton can only turn his head by moving his whole upper body - it looks like Batman slept badly - and the movie, er, literally follows suit in that it too is awkward and unmoving: Tim Burton's Gotham is a poorly populated theatre set, the hero is oddly mannered and neurotic, and the story is lifeless with neither the camp fun of the Adam West tv series (except for Jack Nicholson's Joker's half-hearted band leader marches x 2) nor the weight and menace of the much later Christopher Nolan movies.

★★☆☆☆

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Justice League (2017)

The Infinity War of the DCEU brings together Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Aquaman and someone called Cyborg to fight a bad guy called Thanos, I mean Bane, I mean Steppenwolf who is seeking the Infinity Stones, I mean the Motherstones, I mean the mother boxes that will allow him to destroy the world, and while it is not as heavyhanded as previous instalments, Justice League continues the mistakes of many previous DCEU instalments like bad editing that results in inexplicable scenes (green slime and an 'electroaxe' with no user instructions, for example), it bites off more than it can chew (couldn't Superman have just woken up on the right side of the bed?), and it features banter between its heroes that just isn't as fast and fun as that of the heroes' Marvel counterparts.

★★★☆☆

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Batman (1966)

It might be time for this camp, shiny stocking-ed Batman to make a comeback because after the deadly earnest of the Christopher Nolan trilogy, this movielength episode of the Adam West series of the 60s is a hoot - a largely plotless but good-time romp featuring hilarious lollybag costumes, deadpan delivery of some overwrought dialogue, and a pantomime finale in which all the characters (Batman, Robin, The Penguin, The Riddler, The Joker, Catwoman and some henchmen) appear in a prolonged unchoreographed and daggy-beyond-belief fist fight aboard a submarine.

★★☆☆☆

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The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

No Batman movie has ever taken itself quite so seriously as this third episode of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, a long and deadly earnest superhero opera that grows increasingly loud and monotonous as it goes on and on with a booming soundtrack that for almost three hours sounds like it is heralding the rise of the valkyries - your patience will be tested and you'll want to give it all away when suddenly towards the end a final act revitalises things.

★★★★☆

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Batman: Arkham Knight

There is a lot to like in this 2015 Batman game - its fluid game mechanics, its spectacular depiction of Gotham City as you glide and swoop through the night sky - but this is the world of Batman as it appears in the Christopher Nolan movies - dark, depraved, full of serial killers, anarchy, torture, and mental illness - pretty heavy stuff which, combined with irritating cutscenes each time you die, make the gameplay unrewarding...but OCD gamers like me will enjoy achieving 100% Riddler trophies, militia drones, breakable objects, etc, after the depressing storylines have played out.

★★★☆☆

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Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

Zack Snyder opens this with the trauma of Bruce Wayne's childhood - a backstory no-one needs to see, not now, not again - and from this tired start it is clear he has approached his job of launching DC Comics' Justice League franchise like an overzealous fanboy wanting to include evvveeerything, mashing together Nolan's Dark Knight series with his own 2013 Henry Cavill Superman movie and ending up with a monstrous, laborious, not-fun-at-all Justice League origin story that briefly features a personality-free Wonder Woman and an overly familiar Lex LuHeathLedgZuckerbergJokethor...surely jumping straight into an already assembled Justice League-proper movie would have been more fun than this!?

★★☆☆☆

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