The result is a film that may please adults more than youngsters, and isn't that refreshing?

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 25, 2023

The Gotham City created in Batman is one of the most distinctive and atmospheric places I’ve seen in the movies. It’s a shame something more memorable doesn’t happen there.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 25, 2023

One of the most interesting comic-book movies ever made, a movie that vividly illustrates where most of the others have gone wrong.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 25, 2023

The movie is underwritten, but it has so many unpredictable spins that what's missing doesn't seem to matter much. It's mean and anarchic and blissful.

| Jul 25, 2023

Batman, despite the disconcerting mood changes, remains a forceful, visually hypnotic movie with enough pulse-pounding action and seething tension to nail most audiences to their seats even if they feel cheated in the end.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 25, 2023

The thing that's going to make you want to see Batman a second and third and fourth time is Gotham City as a brutal pile of dour, gothic, Art Deco menace.

| Jul 25, 2023

Tim Burton's film is precision machinery... But the film loses sight of plain storytelling. It is ultimately as unsatisfying as any numbers of pictures that have sought and failed to translate comic-book narrative to cinema.

| Original Score: 5/10 | Jul 25, 2023

Mostly, and amazingly, Batman does not die beneath the weight of promotion: it liveth. Its passionate and in all senses "batty" extravagance fills the screen.

| Jul 25, 2023

Alas, Mr. Keaton is totally gobbled up, by Nicholson if not by Basinger. And so it comes to pass that the story is quite gobbled up too, ponderously trying for liftoff but seldom managing more than a quirky sequence or so at a time.

| Jul 25, 2023

The failure to furnish a pair of fairly matched foes is the central flaw in Tim Burton's otherwise flamboyantly enjoyable movie. It throws it off-balance. And Nicholson's own greedy appetite for satanic inventiveness hi-Jacks things his way further still.

| Jul 25, 2023

In one of the few summer movies that leave lasting images, you'll certainly remember the explosive Joker, who's like the graffiti the city spits onto its own walls. But even more, you'll remember the implosive Batman... In the end, it's his movie.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jul 25, 2023

I wouldn't say Batman is an awful movie, but when I felt as if I'd been sitting for two hours, I looked at m watch and discovered we were only 35 minutes into the story.

| Jul 25, 2023

Batman is a giddy, disturbing ride through movies and myths past and present. In short, Batman is terrific -- funny, smart and sensitive too, the perfect cinematic date.

| Jul 25, 2023

Many a picture has better writing and acting, truer characters, more exciting incidents, more authentic creative creations -- and no less costly publicity. Yet something in Batman must appeal uniquely to the mass imagination... Batman is folklore now.

| Jul 25, 2023

In sum, this over-touted phenomenon is a thumping good action movie, with a witty script; it should be seen in 70mm and heard in THX sound. In real life, however, as in the final reel, it is Mr. Nicholson who has the last laugh.

| Jul 25, 2023

The film occupies a sort of limbo, belonging to the genre of fantasy but excluded from its pleasures, equally cut off from childhood and maturity, and frustrating rather than rewarding any surrender from an audience.

| Jul 25, 2023

To concentrate too heavily on the film's comic origins is to miss its grasp of Cinema with a capital "C," the way it resonates with archetypal Hollywood imagery while giving its audience something it feels it hasn't experienced before.

| Jul 25, 2023

Owing little to the jokey super heroics of the '60s television show, this revisionist Batman is thrilling in its subversive fusion of visionary set design and kinky sociopathology, special-effects wizardry and sophisticated wit.

| Jul 25, 2023

In Batman, the Joker finally gets the better of the hero. He pulls off the crime of the century right below the Caped Crusader's nose: He steals his movie.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jul 25, 2023

Batman comes about as close as possible to living up to its hype. It is an entertaining and visually attractive film that features two wonderful performances.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 25, 2023