Batman Forever

Skippable, and it is the course correction that overshot. After Batman Returns was judged too dark for a family audience, Joel Schumacher was hired to brighten it, and the result is a Gotham of neon tubes, enormous statues and primary colour, with two villains competing to be louder.

Jim Carrey was at the peak of his fame and plays the Riddler accordingly, which the film cannot contain, and Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face appears to have decided to match him rather than play the part. Neither performance leaves room for a story about a man with two sides, which is what Two-Face is for.

What is genuinely good is buried. Val Kilmer is a better Bruce Wayne than Keaton and a less interesting Batman, and the film's one serious thread, about a psychiatrist asking why he does this and a repressed memory of his parents' deaths, is the first time any of these films treated the character as a case rather than a mood. Nicole Kidman's part is written as a prop around it.

It made a great deal of money, which is why the next one exists. A longer cut with the psychological material restored has been discussed for years and circulates in incomplete form.