Christian Bale

Access the Batcomputer!

Chris Nolan coming on board...just the fact that they'd asked him to do it meant that they didn't want the same thing that we'd seen before, which is what I was interested in, creating something completely new.

The ne plus ultra of comic-book films...an appropriately tough movie, busy but efficient, rich and thoughtful, and ornamented with visual appeal and exciting action.

Reveries and fever dreams of early America--Malick casts not for dry history but a psychic projection of spirit from beyond the centuries.

It takes only a small leap of imagination to get from Jim Davis to GI Steven Green, the 21-year-old alleged rapist-murderer...men like Jim are trying to unwind from something worse than a bad day at the office.

Nolan's supreme confidence, narrative skill, and taste for complexity make for unusually rich popular entertainment. Where was The Prestige this summer when we needed it most?

Two gripping hours so richly realized you won't want them to end.

Ledger slips into the purple suit as if it were an animal skin for a primal, archetypal dance...Nolan's richly realized adaptation of a modern American mythology fulfills our faith in the material and its interpreters.

The action sometimes conjures a thrill-ride's breathtaking quality or, in other words, Terminator Salvation's only hope of redemption with audiences.

True-crime story or romantic myth-making? This was the question I brought in to Michael Mann's Public Enemies...and, though seemingly an either-or proposition, the question still on my mind when I walked out.

Doggedly obvious melodrama...But what makes the clichés palatable is a communal commitment to getting the story right.

The Nolans consider the issues of the day...explore the role of legendary heroes (from Robin Hood to Batman and Robin) in galvanizing the public, and labor mightily to ensure that how their Batman ends dovetails with 2005’s Batman Begins.

It's hard to excuse the reconception of the eleven or twelve-year-old Pocahontas...as a statuesque supermodel, especially as kids don't need their stories to be hung on romance to deem them, err, shapely.

There's a self-aware feel to the period pageantry, the alternatingly seductive and kinetic cinematography, and the actor's showcase this ramshackle contraption has been held together with spit and bailing wire to be.

This material...isn't deceptively simple: it's just simple.

A biblical epic in 2014 is a strange beast indeed, walking a fine line in the hopes of pleasing both the faithful...and those audiences more accustomed to secular myths.

Elucidate[s] the fiscal rigamarole leading up to the bursting of the housing and credit bubble circa 2008, while also whipping up a palatable froth of cynicism and absurdity.

For all its thrumming profundity...has just as much sleepwalking self-parody: all of the actors’ pacing and arm-flapping and gazing off into the distance suggests, as much as an art film, the world’s longest prescription drug commercial.

A contrived but effective parable of the American West, its painful legacy, and small measures of redemption...But our focus frustratingly remains on the white people and Blocker’s struggle to reach empathy...

As strikingly original in form as Oliver Stone’s JFK...infotaining Hollywood history that’s equal parts funny and horrifying in its high-stakes political gamesmanship...