The Dark Knight Rises

Essential as the conclusion, and the most flawed of the three. It is also the most ambitious: an eight-year time jump, a city under occupation, a protagonist who spends the middle act in a prison on another continent, and an ending that actually ends.

The scale is enormous and largely practical, including an aircraft hijack filmed in mid-air that remains the best opening of the three. Tom Hardy plays Bane entirely through eyes and posture, with a voice processed to sound piped in from somewhere else, and the stadium sequence is the most frightening thing in the trilogy.

The problems are the plot's. A five-month occupation in which thousands of police are trapped underground and fed, a nuclear device with a visible countdown, a stock exchange fraud that transfers a fortune in minutes, and a late reveal that depends on a character having concealed an identity nobody checked. The film moves fast enough that most of it only collapses afterwards.

What it gets right is the argument it finishes. The trilogy has been about whether a symbol can be handed on, and the ending answers yes, in a way that costs the man carrying it everything he built. Anne Hathaway's Selina Kyle is the best thing in the film and the only character enjoying herself.