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Critics reviews

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES

Christopher Nolan United States, 2012
GreenCine
If hundreds of millions must be thrown at summer tentpole films, better an eccentrically stupid wreck like this than streamlined blandness. First comes exasperation, then—as the pricey chases and baffling missteps keep coming in equal measure—amusement at the sprawling excess.
December 5, 2012
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That the film is incoherent—narratively, yes, but also ideologically—makes it unsatisfying, but in a way it's preferable to something more streamlined and tidy, where any chance of friction is minimized once the edges are sanded away.
November 27, 2012
Screen Machine
Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises, this year's blockbuster conclusion to his Batman trilogy, is, in ways both obvious and numerous, a bad movie. It is dramatically inert, visually indecipherable, and deeply malformed on the level of narrative. But it is all these things in a manner that is entirely consistent with the qualities, both good and bad, of Nolan's other blockbuster productions. And this makes it valuable.
November 1, 2012
The material is not without poetic possibilities. It is, after all, a tale of rooftops and catacombs and of the ground that crumbles between them, the netherworld of Fantômas and Mabuse. In the hands of Christopher "Strained Seriousness" Nolan, however, every shred of wit, mystery and humanity is pummeled out, leaving only a bullish mishmash of zeitgeisty anxiety.
September 4, 2012
Film Quarterly
Duplicity is certainly the major theme in Nolan's work going back to his first film, Following. But my initial impulse was to read The Dark Knight Rises as incoherent and opportunistic rather than engaging in the duplicitous shadow play that characterizes the director's best work. I say opportunistic, because it was almost as if Nolan went out of his way to give someone from practically any political persuasion some nugget of satisfaction to take away from the film.
September 1, 2012
Film Quarterly
The argument runs that because masked mercenary Bane attacks the Stock Exchange and then sets off French Revolution-style mob violence, it adds up to an alarmist denunciation of Occupy's sinister potential. But in terms of outright political content, it's surely Selina Kyle who gives Robin Hood-style voice to Occupy's ideas about economic equality. The soldier of fortune Bane is more like a Shock Doctrine fundamentalist.
September 1, 2012
Bruce Wayne is a billionaire industrialist who makes money by speculating on stocks and producing high-tech weaponry—in other words, he is the epitome of the 1%. From this vantage point, it's easy to read the THE DARK KNIGHT RISES as Mitt Romney's twisted superhero fantasy, with Bruce Wayne/Batman standing in as his ego ideal: a billionaire investment banker who moonlights as a vanquisher of threats to democracy and is ultimately glorified as a Christ figure.
August 31, 2012
The Comics Journal
The thing is, when you're supposedly selling deep grim truths about humanity and hard-won uplift, every liberty you take with plausibility degrades your product, and the failure to work out logical, satisfying storytelling is really a failure to do the work you were paid a king's ransom for. And yet I can't honestly see what sort of comeuppance there might be for its shortcomings.
August 29, 2012
Nolan's vision has the paranoid contours of a conspiracy thriller. Everything is monitored (Selina craves a program called ‘Clean Slate', to expunge her name from the State's various databases), everyone is jaded; making a fresh start is almost impossible. Only sadness is real in this not-so-comic comic book – sadness and regret, and the sense of being battered by life. Biff! Pow!
August 10, 2012
Blog da Boitempo
The Dark Knight Rises pushes things even further [than The Dark Knight]: is Bane not Dent brought to extreme, to its self-negation? Dent who draws the conclusion that the system itself is unjust, so that in order to effectively fight injustice one has to turn directly against the system and destroy it?
August 8, 2012
To my mind [Nolan's] worst film. Any presence of character, psychology, or of relationships, is only implied in dialogue—it's never actually present. The large cast of characters is handled so poorly, they end up like butter spread over too much bread.
July 27, 2012
One of the things that really undoes the film toward the end is that Nolan does this big reveal that shows that almost everything we, the audience, think we know about Bane's background isn't actually about him at all, but about a totally different character. So Bane, who is supposed to be a mercenary, also becomes a sort of narrative mercenary—he doesn't have any sort of well-developed reason for doing anything in the film.
July 27, 2012