The Dark Knight Rises: Critic Reviews

The Dark Knight Rises is a thundering finale to what is, undoubtedly, the greatest comic adaptation to film.

Chaos reigns for much of The Dark Knight Rises, often in big, beautiful, IMAX-size scenes that only Nolan could have conceived.

The grave and satisfying finish to Mr. Nolan's operatic bat-trilogy.

Christopher Nolan insists on the seriousness of the Batman mythology; he has thoroughly reinvented it, reauthored it and thought it through, in a way no other director has done with any other summer franchise.

The dark knight duly rises for the bruising final stanza in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, a satisfying saga of revolution and redemption that ends the tale on a note of thunder.

A fitting conclusion to an artful trilogy, culminating with satisfying dazzle, despite some notable flaws.

[Nolan] has made a completely satisfying movie with The Dark Knight Rises, one steeped enough in self-contained mythology to reward hard-core fans while giving less invested viewers a rousing, adroitly executed piece of popcorn entertainment.

In case you'd forgotten - and the summer of 2012 has given us much to forget - this is what a superhero movie is supposed to look like.

The history of Batman's burden is, however, increasingly cumbersome, and it's Mr. Bane who finally makes the pertinent point: "Gotham is beyond saving and must be allowed to die."

While director Christopher Nolan and star Christian Bale's epic of criminality and all-consuming conviction ultimately falls a bit short, their Batman trilogy ends with a suitably thrilling mix of guts and glory.

It's spectacular, to be sure, but also remarkable for its all-encompassing gloom.

Yes, The Dark Knight Rises. And rises. And rises some more.

The director and cowriter/brother Jonathan Nolan pay heed to Wayne's wounded emotional arc. And the film is a feat of painstakingly crafted closure.

The Dark Knight Rises only rarely starts to tremor under the weight of its own portent, and is not without its own sly humor. Well done.

The story is dense, overlong, and studded with references that will make sense only to those intimate with Nolan's previous excursions into Batmanhood.

The film begins slowly with a murky plot and too many new characters, but builds to a sensational climax.

What worked beautifully in "The Dark Knight" seems overworked and almost ridiculously grim in "The Dark Knight Rises."

The script, by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, takes a few vague pokes at Wall Street and the financial elite but mainly revives the ponderous psychodrama of the first movie.

Production-wise, effects-wise, Nolan's movie - much of its big action sequences shot with Imax cameras - is spectacular.

Nolan's finale gives us the inevitable with generous portions of suspense, surprise and delicious shock.

This could - should - have been a swifter movie, but it sends the Batguy out in style. And let's face it, he's earned it.

If the film is not quite the achievement "The Dark Knight" was -- and maybe that's the real question -- it's still a fitting end to a very ambitious series.

Speaking lines they cannot possibly understand, not one actor makes any attempt to be believable. So manufactured and synthetic that they eventually lose all sense of reality, they're like reconstituted orange juice and processed cheese.

Retains the moral urgency and serious-minded pulp instincts that have made the Warners franchise a beacon of integrity in an increasingly comicbook-driven Hollywood universe.

Christopher Nolan's dramatically and emotionally satisfying wrap-up to the Dark Knight trilogy adroitly avoids cliches and gleefully subverts your expectations at every turn.