The Dark Knight Rises

The last film of the trilogy, set eight years after the previous one. Gotham is quiet. A law passed in Harvey Dent's name has finished organised crime, Batman has disappeared and Bruce Wayne does not leave the house. The quiet has a price: the law was built on a lie, and two people know it. Bane arrives. He raids the stock exchange, hollows out the ground under the city, blows the bridges and cuts Gotham off from the outside. From there the film is an occupation story. Street tribunals, an emptied prison, a city under snow, and thousands of policemen held underground. Bruce is in a pit a long way away. The middle of the film is entirely the effort to get out of it, and that section closes with a climb made without a rope. What the narrative is interested in is not revenge but fear: the film says early that fearlessness is a lack rather than a strength, and builds its ending on that sentence. The Selina Kyle line is the lightest and best working part of the narrative; the character never lets a scene settle on whose side she is. Bane's voice was re-recorded after shooting. Preview audiences said he could not be understood and the mix was redone. The opening section, a sequence on an aeroplane, was released as an IMAX presentation attached to the front of another film. It was shot in Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, London and Jodhpur in India; the stadium sequence was filmed with a real match-day crowd. Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, Marion Cotillard and Joseph Gordon-Levitt are in the cast. Christopher Nolan directed. Who it is for: anyone who wants the trilogy closed. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the tension of the previous film; the narrative is loose, the logic gaps are visible and the middle is heavy.