Batman

Essential, and it is the film that made the character serious again. Twenty years of a camp television series had fixed Batman in the public mind as a joke, and the casting of Michael Keaton, known then for comedies, prompted an organised letter-writing campaign against the production before a frame was shot.

What arrived is a gothic design exercise. Anton Furst built a Gotham of oppressive vertical stone with no sky, won an Academy Award for it, and set the look of superhero cities for a decade. Burton is far more interested in that and in the Joker than in Batman, who has perhaps twenty minutes of screen time out of uniform and almost no interior life.

Jack Nicholson is the film, in a deal that reportedly gave him a share of the gross and made him one of the highest-paid performers in history. His Joker is a mob enforcer who falls in a vat and emerges as a performance artist, and the art-gallery sequence, set to Prince, is pure 1989 and still works.

The one change that still annoys people is the retcon making the Joker the killer of Bruce's parents, which closes a loop the character is better without. Keaton is good precisely because he underplays: a small, quiet man who is obviously unwell.