RjfO' alt='Film Noir Movies Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 2 ' title='Film Noir Movies Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 2 ' />Batman Returns Movie Review Film Summary 1. The gloomy undertone of the Batman movies is like a tow line, holding the movie back, keeping it from springing free into the wind. Tim Burtons Batman Returns, even more than the original Batman, is a dark, brooding film, filled with hurt and fear, childhood wounds and festering adult resentments. It is also a most intriguing movie, great to look at, fun to talk about. There is no doubt Burton is a gifted director, but is he the right director for Batman The film opens in cruelty and shame, as the parents of a deformed baby put him into his bassinet and drop him into the river on a cold, snowy Christmas night. The frail little craft floats downstream and into the sewers of Gotham City, where the infant is rescued and raised by the penguins who luckily happen to live there. Pitched at the divide between art and industry, poetry and entertainment, The Dark Knight goes darker and deeper than any Hollywood movie of its. Since 1993 we have watched cartoon Red Hoods and Gotham Knights, but just what are the greatest animated Batman movies ever Pajiba Sweetened by Mock, Lightened by Droll. Heres an alphabetical listing of all our Film A Little Chaos Review Alan Rickman And Kate Winslet Reunite For A. Mad Max Fury Road, The Dark Knight Rises and A Clockwork Orange are all arriving on the service this month as well as Preacher season 2 starring Dominic Cooper. The Dark Knight is a 2008 superhero film directed, coproduced, and cowritten by Christopher Nolan. Featuring the DC Comics character Batman, the film is the second. Advertisement. Arriving at adulthood, his hands like lobster claws, the Penguin Danny De. Vito learns about the human world by peering out through sewer gratings. His soul burns with the need to discover who his parents were, and why they treated him so meanly. Elsewhere in Gotham, the mayor Michael Murphy presides over the municipal Christmas tree lighting before cold crowds under sullen skies. He is joined by the vile tycoon Max Shreck Christopher Walken, who has a scheme to build a power plant that will drain the city of its energy. His browbeaten secretary Michelle Pfeiffer, killed after she discovers the scheme, is licked back to life by alley cats and vows vengeance, sewing herself a skintight, fetishistic costume and venturing out into the night as Catwoman. Meanwhile, in the bat cave beneath his gloomy mansion, Batman Michael Keaton ponders whatever deep needs led to his own peculiar existence. Even back in the days when Batman lived in comic books, his world was a little darker than, say, Supermans. There was a shade of film noir in Gotham City, in contrast to the deco 1. Supermans Metropolis. The Dark Knight, a graphic novel that inspired the Batman movies, was darker still, and now Burton takes it all the way into a movie set mostly at night, photographed on refrigerated sets, so that the actors sometimes look as if they would rather have a mug of hot chocolate than all the passion and wealth in the city. The plot doesnt exactly unwind like a well coiled machine. The movie proceeds in fits and starts, from one little drama to another, as the Penguin ventures out from his subterranean haunts, and a newspaper circulation war leads to scare stories about his alleged crimes. The evil Max Shreck meanwhile directs his henchmen in a conspiracy to deliver Gotham into his own megalomaniac hands, and Murphy, as the incumbent mayor, blathers like an ineffectual nonentity while the Penguin mounts a campaign against him. Advertisement. Batman is summoned by the Batsignal to the side of Police Commissioner Gordon Pat Hingle, to do battle against the crime wave. And on his nocturnal rounds, he crosses paths with Catwoman, whose claws can draw blood, and who is as skilled as Batman in climbing high buildings, swinging through the air, and employing the martial arts. Dressed in their fetishistic costumes, they would obviously make an ideal couple something that occurs to them more gradually than it does to us. Their few erotic moments together are, alas, so incomplete and unsatisfying they look as if they might have been trimmed for the PG 1. Remembering the movie and contrasting it to my childhood memories of the comic books, I wonder if perhaps I cannot fully respond to this film because I was shaped in a kinder, gentler time. I always thought it would be fun to be Batman. The movie believes it is more of a curse that Batman is not a crime fighting superhero but a reclusive neurotic who feels he has to prove himself to a society he does not really inhabit. All of Tim Burtons films Pee Wees Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and the two Batmans are about characters whose strange qualities place them outside the mainstream, and who live in worlds that owe everything to art direction and set design. Looking at these movies is a pleasure they are not ordinary, or boring. Perhaps I would have enjoyed Batman more if the movie had been about someone else, perhaps one of those Marvel superheroes who frankly concede their personal inadequacies. I can admire the movie on many levels, but I cannot accept it as Batman. And I was disappointed that the disjointed plot advanced so unsteadily, depriving us of the luxury of really caring about the outcome. It is a common theory that when you have a hero, like James Bond, Superman or Batman, in a continuing series, its the villain that gives each movie its flavor. Batman had the Joker, played by Jack Nicholson, to lend it energy, but the Penguin is a curiously meager and depressing creature I pitied him, but did not fear him or find him funny. The genius of Danny De. Vito is all but swallowed up in the paraphernalia of the role. Batman Returns is odd and sad, but not exhilarating. Advertisement. I give the movie a negative review, and yet I dont think its a bad movie its more of a misguided one, made with great creativity, but denying us what we more or less deserve from a Batman story. Looking back over both films, I think Burton has a vision here and is trying to shape it to the material, but it just wont fit. No matter how hard you try, superheroes and film noir dont go together the very essence of noir is that there are no more heroes. I had a feeling by the end of this film that Batman was beginning to get the idea. Batman The Dark Knight Returns Blu ray Deluxe Edition DC Universe Animated Original Movie 1. A seamless cut, new audio commentary, and feature length Frank Miller doc Count me in. Reviewed by Kenneth Brown, September 1. Successfully adapting Frank Millers seminal 1. Batman The Dark Knight Returns, would be a monumental challenge and undertaking for anyone, Christopher Nolan included, and its long been considered unfilmable. Alan Moores Watchmen being another, not that Zack Snyder didnt prove just how filmable a fairly faithful adaptation really could be. Executive producer Bruce Timm and his team apparently dont scare so easily. For Warner Bros. Animations fifteenth and sixteenth DC Universe animated original movies, Timm and his fellow producers have decided to finally give comic fans the adaptation theyve spent more than twenty five years begging for. Originally released in two parts, The Dark Knight Returns is a far more successful adaptation than I expected, and a more fully realized animated film than the bulk of DCU original animated movies on the market. Part 1 admittedly lacked some of the depth and complexity for which Millers take on the Dark Knight mythos is revered specifically the comicbooks running narration and the insight it provided into Batmans perspective and actions but as a traditional animated venture, it excelled. Part 2 also doesnt offer much in the way of Millers original narration, an unfortunate necessity for the filmmakers and a bittersweet change for fans of the comic, but it doesnt pull any punches either. On almost every front, the films second half is an intelligent, able bodied adaptation of its source, a surprisingly bloody, hard hitting actioner, and a thrilling conclusion to director Jay Oliva and writer Bob Goodmans carefully crafted and beautifully animated superhero saga. The new Deluxe Edition of The Dark Knight Returns is a slightly different Dark Knight, though, offering a seamless 1. And while some will cry double dip and argue this is the only version that should have been released, its an experiment Im happy to see the DCU animated movie team attempt. Before now, each DCU film has been 7. Hopefully, be it by dividing longer stories or by releasing significantly longer standalone movies, the DCU team will be able to present a more cinematic take on these adaptations, and be less and less hemmed in by runtime and budget. As Oliva and Goodmans adaptation opens, Batman is no longer Gotham Citys Dark Knight. There is no Dark Knight. Superheroes have been forced into retirement, the government has taken it upon itself to police the criminal element superheroes once contained, and Batman voiced by Peter Weller hasnt been seen or heard from in ten years. Not that Bruce Wayne has disappeared. Hes been watching. Growing old. Stale. Disillusioned. Angry. His retirement wasnt a response to government mandate the Bat bows to no man but to grief and fear. Grief over the death of Jason Todd at the hands of the Joker and fear that his all his efforts have only made Gotham City a breeding ground for the likes of the Clown Prince of Crime. The Joker has retired too. Catatonic since Batmans departure, the once relentless madman has fallen into the depths of his own mind and gone silent. That all changes, though, when a supposedly reformed Harvey Dent Wade Williams is released from Arkham and resumes old habits. Bruce reconnects with the vigilante within, dons the cowl, elicits the help of a soon to be retired Commissioner Gordon David Selby, inadvertently inspires a young girl named Carrie Ariel Winter to take up the Robin mantle, and eventually tackles an even greater menace the Mutants, a gang of vicious thugs led by a brute of a beast Gary Anthony Williams whos more than happy to fill the void left by Gothams incarcerated villains. On the surface, writer Bob Goodman and director Jay Oliva havent deviated that far from Millers Dark Knight. A few dialogue changes here, a few necessary snips there. A cigar becomes a pack of gum, the media plays a smaller role in the narrative, minor scenes have been exorcised in favor of a more streamlined story. Nothing too severe. Yet beneath the surface, something is off. Millers noirish narration, which pulled back the curtain on everything Batman was thinking, is gone. A bit of it has been repurposed as offhanded quips but, for the most part, much of what made Millers Dark Knight so complex and fascinating an avenging angel is left to the imagination or, for those lucky enough to be intimately familiar with the source material, memory. For most comicbook to screen adaptations, dropping the original comics narration is priority number one in film, its a tiresome tool that very rarely adds substance to a story. Here, though, its sorely missed, be it Bruces dissection of his retirement and reluctance to return to Gothams rooftops, the particulars of the physical and mental struggles he deals with upon returning, the little details or observations he interjects along the way, or even those things that are more articulated his taunting of the Mutant leader prior to his second fist fight with the behemoth. With the narration removed, Goodman and Olivas terrifically animated Batman is ironically a more two dimensional man and hero than Millers Batman, who was bound to the flat page but loomed larger than life. The Dark Knight Returns was Batman by way of Sin City. Initially, The Dark Knight Returns is Batman by way of a more traditionally expositional animated movie. None of that is to say the opening 7. It isnt. Not by any means. What works on the page doesnt necessarily work on the screen, and if you havent accepted that by now, youre much more of a comic fan than a filmfan. Goodman and Oliva obviously had to make some tough decisions here, and doing away with much of Millers narration and Gothams media coverage was one of them. Tonally, it makes sense in a lot of ways. As far as the story and action are concerned, it even helps, allowing the movie to stand both as a functional entity unto itself and a respectful comicbook supplement that departs from the panel for panel remake some fans may be expecting. Even when things drift off course as far as the first two issues of the 1. Goodman and Oliva guide the movie back to where it should be running parallel to Millers pulp dystopian superhero fiction without being beholden to every bump and twist in the road. There are a few missteps without fuller glimpses into Waynes thought process and mental state, the ghostly bat that haunts him and other aspects of his personal demons arent given nearly as much context but those who havent read the comic wont take issue with any of it, other than to wonder if Bruce is going senile or having a breakthrough. The first half of The Dark Knight Returns nails most everything else. The animation is everything it should be, with character designs and compositions lifted straight out of Millers Dark Knight, a more evocative style than most DCU animated features are afforded, and a greater flair for the cinematic. Batmans various battles are fluid, hard hitting and altogether thrilling as well, from his early outings to his construction site fight, Two Face takedown, tank assault, Mutant leader melee, and final brawl. And the casting, voicework, music, and pacing of the story all click into place, lending extra punch where its needed and extra finesse when called upon. Apple Hd Movies Cinderella. There are a few quibbles to be had I suppose. Weller is no Clint Eastwood, who Miller envisioned when creating and developing his grizzled Batman. Selbys voice isnt ideal for Gordon either, although his delivery grew on me as the film pressed on. And, spoken aloud, the faux future Mutant slang sounds stilted, as if the actors werent sure how to sell it. But these are minor gripes.