Matt Reeves' take on Batman, his supporting cast of characters, and the city of Gotham feels so familiar yet extremely refreshing. Dropping Batman into a noir detective story worked so well, the narrative delivers fun action, a compelling mystery, and fantastic supporting villains and allies. Despite it’s nearly 3 hour runtime there’s almost no filler, the story flows so well and it’s runtime allowed it to tell the story it wanted to tell fully.

Robert Pattinson‘s performance as Bruce Wayne/Batman is exactly what I wanted it to be, a somewhat “Kurt Cobain” inspired take, he’s full of angst and still relatively new to crime fighting, he portrays a young and believable Batman that truly isolates himself from society with many flaws and lessons yet to learn, his arc of learning what it means to be The Batman is truly powerful and done in a way we haven’t seen on the big screen before. Zoe Kravitz's Catwoman is badass and plays off Pattinson so well, their chemistry is great and not to mention she has a really fantastic character arc herself, honestly prefer this over the Batman and Catwoman dynamic in Returns. Dano Is fantastic as the film’s main antagonist The Riddler, delivering such a horrifying and fantastic performance, I love how hidden he is throughout the story and the constant mind games he plays with Batman, I much prefer this take on the character to the over the top one in Batman Forever though it feels a little unfair to compare them due to how different they are and their roles in their individual stories. Jeffrey Wright Is a fantastic James Gordon, his partnership and friendship with Batman was incredibly believable and I can see this being my favorite take on the character, and Colin Farrell as penguin was extremely entertaining and fun with an absolute fantastic job on the makeup departments end. Overall flawless cast, my only real issue is I wish we got more Andy Serkis as Alfred, he was awesome and I was really into his version of the character but I wish they explored him and Bruce’s relationship a bit more.

I love this slow burned detective story with heavy inspiration from both Zodiac and Se7en, like I said it fits Batman perfectly and I’m glad we finally got a live action Batman story to really highlight his detective skills. The Visual style of Gotham City is truly phenomenal, with the cinematography really making this a truly visually stunning comic book movie. The score and Nirvana needle-drop really seal the deal for me, this is a fantastic adaptation of the character, Every other comic book movie adaptation this year except maybe Spider-Verse 2 most likely won’t hold a candle to this.

Dark, Full of mystery, thrilling, action packed, sexy, and extremely emotional, this is The Batman film I have wanted my whole life and I couldn’t be happier.