“Fear is a tool. When that light hits the sky, it's not just a call. It's a warning.”

this is a beautifully crafted film balanced by the right amount of edgy vigilante goofiness that shows just how much Matt Reeves adores and understands the dark knight of Gotham. the full-on emo boi spin on Bruce’s character is as cheeky and smart as it is well-played and despite it - the eyeliner, the grunge, the noir drama of it all - being so thickly laid on… when Giacchino amps up the haunting score and Pattinson pulls out his most tortured gaze, this team delivers impeccable hero pathos. it takes a master to match the self-aware indulgence with such thematic sincerity still and I laud the director for that. and what a cast! 

I always love seeing how different directors stage the impossible island city that seems to be a geographical as well as an architectural nightmare in every way and has become a many-faced hellpit over the decades. Reeves embraces this historical notion of the palimpsest with a mix of old and new Gothic styles, gorgeously framed and lit by Greig Fraser. from Dune to this, the later shows an incredible sense for constructing genre spatialities while especially here also birthing a very strong focalization with his anamorphic noir scapes being as emphatic and moving as the more closeup conversational bits. there’s a restraint to the camera that intimately relates the broiling emotions just underneath the story’s surface. The Batman takes its time, and it does so along a dark and pleasurably unsettling road.