The Batman

Essential within its own continuity, which shares nothing with the DCEU or the DCU, and it is the best Batman film since The Dark Knight. It requires nothing before it.

The decision that makes it work is treating the character as a detective, which the films had largely stopped doing. He arrives at crime scenes, examines evidence, interviews witnesses badly, and is wrong about the case for most of the running time. Matt Reeves directs it as a 1970s procedural: rain, corruption, an investigation that keeps leading back to the institutions, and a killer leaving ciphers.

Robert Pattinson plays him in his second year as genuinely unwell. There is no playboy persona, he barely speaks in public, and the film is clear that this is a traumatised man who has not worked out that frightening people is not the same as helping them. The arc is him discovering that, in a flood, with a torch.

At a hundred and seventy-six minutes it is long and the last act arguably one sequence too many. Greig Fraser's photography is the best in any superhero film, lit almost entirely by practical sources, and the Batmobile's first appearance, announced by an engine before anything is visible, is the best entrance the character has had.