Christian Bale

Five British Film Institute writers mention Christian Bale in reviews of five different films, and three of them come back to the same place. Tony Rayns describes his Bateman as a man held between boastfulness and a suppressed sense of his own insignificance. Ben Walters goes a step further and says the vanity was written onto the body, the inflated physique being that surface made visible. Edward Lawrenson then treats the thing as a register rather than a role, finding the young Wayne of Batman Begins played in a chilly American Psycho mode. The odd entry is Kim Newman's, which records, in a parenthesis inside somebody else's review, that a Welshman born in Pembroke had become Bruce Wayne.