With a little push one way or the other, Song One could have been something totally different. It could have been a cheesy romance drama about two lost souls serendipitously colliding in a night club in the hip Williamsburg, Brooklyn music scene…but it really isn’t that cheesy or dramatic. It could have been a dark, creepy thriller about a boy and a girl falling in love as they sip Prosecco over the comatose body of the girl’s little brother; that all happens, but the creepiness is totally unintentional (which makes it even creepier, somehow). Song One is neither of those movies, though those sound like movies I’d much rather watch. What first time writer-director Kate Barker-Froyland’s made is a millennial romance that just, sort of, stands still. None of its elements are egregiously poor, but as a whole it’s just, you know…there.

The film pulls a fast one on us in its opening, in which a young street musician named Henry (Ben Rosenfield) is struck by a car and sent into a coma. His somewhat estranged sister, Franny (Anne Hathaway), an anthropology grad student, flies home from Morocco. As a strange way of making up for lost time, she snoops around in Henry’s journal and listens to his favorite music and visits his old haunts. She discovers his favorite musician is Brit folkster James Forester (real-life musician Johnny Flynn), who happens to be playing gigs in New York. She approaches him after a show, tells him about Henry, and things get weird from there. James begins visiting Henry in the hospital and playing him songs (remember, comatose). He goes on dates with Franny, has dinner with she and her mom (Mary Steenburgen) and, as I mentioned earlier, clinks glasses of Prosecco with Henry’s family over his unconscious body.

The most compelling thing about the movie is the question of how Henry is going to react when he discovers his sister has been dating his idol while he was out in coma-land. I mean, that’s got to be the craziest thing to wake up to, right? Maybe he wouldn’t believe it and fall into denial, or maybe he’d be overjoyed to see James, or hate him because he had sex with his sister. Wait a second…what if he could hear them the whole time?! Alas, Barker-Froyland isn’t interested in any of this, not in the slightest. When Henry finally wakes up, he’s immediately wiped from the movie and we never see or hear from him again. Talk about a tease.

The movie showcases a bunch of musical performances, with Flynn performing a handful of songs and NPR favorites Sharon Van Etten and Dan Deacon (among others) being shown doing their thing on stage in smallish venues (Deacon performing “The Crystal Cat” under crazy strobe lights is awesome). The musical interludes feel detached from the story, though, and it says something when they’re the most interesting scenes in a movie with Hathaway and Steenburgen in it. The actors do a good job across the board, but it feels like they could be doing this stuff in their sleep. Steenburgen’s a good actor, but it ain’t pretty when she has to sell lines like, “I always told him to look both ways! You just do your best, you know? You just…do your best!”

The focus here is the romance between Franny and James, but it’s a really, really unremarkable one. They do all the things you’d expect them to do in a music-centric movie set in New York City: they play songs sitting on the East River until early morning, share headphones, mope about their privileged white lives. Some of their conversations are so mundane and cutesy it’s hard to swallow. They reminded me of those couples who always end up talking to each other in a corner at house parties because they’re super into each other, but no one else finds them interesting or wants to talk to them. This is a movie about that couple.

As a fan of many of the musicians highlighted in Song One, I can say that it’s at the very least a pretty good exhibition of their talents, especially Flynn (the songs were written by Jenny Lewis and Johnathan Rice, but he performs them as well as he would his own). The film looks slick, too, though it doesn’t really capture the NYC atmosphere, (always a missed opportunity when that happens). With more nerve or edginess or ambition, Song One could have been an impressive, star-studded debut, but sadly it ends up being little more than an adequate movie without a mission.

Spanning the farthest reaches of time and space, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar will show you worlds so wondrous you’ll feel the floor fall out from under you and the breath leave your lungs. It’s an experiential, transportive sci-fi film that’s even more spectacular than advertised. The film is made a mess of, however, by a clunky and scatterbrained plot. Nolan burrows deeper than ever into his creativity to build an epic journey into the stars, but more of that energy could have been devoted to making his on-screen explorers, their relationships, and their internal struggles, as inventive and sharply-executed as the visuals. Still, you’ll be floored by Nolan’s outer-space opus, its imagery overwhelming in scope and wonder, its ambition boundless. This is a worthy moviegoing experience, despite its flaws.

Oh, the amazing things you’ll see: alien tidal waves thousands of feet high; planets where time itself gets bent and stretched beyond all recognition; clouds frozen into floating ice chunks; a black hole that looks unlike anything I’ve seen on film. But before shooting off to the edge of the galaxy, the story begins on the ground, in the dirt, on a farm owned by a country-bred former astronaut named Cooper (Matthew McConaughey). He’s raised a brainy daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy), and a son, Tom (Timothee Chalamet), with his caring, wise father-in-law (John Lithgow). Earth is plagued by parasitic dust storms called “The Blight” that have ravaged the planet of her crops and diminished the global food supply to frightening lows.

One day, Murph discovers a gravitational anomaly in her bedroom she claims is the doing of “her ghost”, who’s allegedly also been pushing books off her bookshelf. Following clues extrapolated from the anomaly, Cooper and Murph end up at a secret NASA compound where they find Cooper’s old mentor, Prof. Brand (Michael Caine), who consequently needs him to lead a mission through a wormhole near Saturn to track down a team of previous explorers who were tasked with finding a new home planet for the human race. His crew mates are Brand’s daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway), snarky scientist Doyle (Wes Bentley), the jittery but brilliant Romilly (David Gyasi), and a walking homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey, a talking robot named TARS who looks like a mobile version of the monolith from Kubrick’s masterpiece. Cooper accepts the mission, and doesn’t know when he’ll be able to return to little Murph, who’s resentful and torn to pieces. Nolan cleverly pairs the image of Cooper speeding away from the farm in his truck, kicking up a trail of dust, with audio from a space shuttle countdown and liftoff, a shining example of his audacious filmmaking style.

The plot is rooted in complex physics, metaphysics, relativity, and other concepts richer than the average moviegoer is used to. Nolan and his co-writer and brother, Jonathan Nolan, must have been terrified audiences wouldn’t be able to keep up, because the dialogue is so over-explicated and reiterative (if they reference Murphy’s Law one more god damn time…) your ears will turn beet red. If clarification was the objective, the Nolans achieve the opposite; the incessant exposition and space-time mumbo-jumbo only make things more complicated, and the heady concepts swirling above it all only add to the confusion.

Cluttered as it is, the script poses some fascinating scenarios. A great example is the aforementioned time-bending planet, whose proximity to a black hole means that for every hour Cooper and his team spend on its surface, 7 years pass for everyone else on earth. An unforeseen accident that extends the team’s stay on the planet leads to the film’s most devastating scene, in which Cooper returns to the ship, opens his video mailbox, and discovers the severe consequences of his mistake. McConaughey, convulsing and drowned in tears, breaks your heart. This portion of the film is terrific, because it’s a case in which the big, bombastic on-screen action dovetails perfectly into a moment of raw human emotion. It clicks, and it’s divine.

An older Murph is played by Jessica Chastain, whose poise as an actor makes her the film’s second-biggest boon, next to McConaughey. Cooper and Murph’s inter-dimensional father-daughter relationship is the glue that binds the film, which otherwise would feel like a collection of unrelated sci-fi short stories. Matt Damon enters the fold at around the halfway mark as one of the original astronaut explorers, adding a welcome layer of mystery to the proceedings. Bill Irwin, who voices TARS without an inkling of robotic inflection, lends the film a surprisingly significant amount of warmth and humor. What’s frustrating, though, is that 50 percent or more of the actors’ dialogue seems to be fixated on tiresome exposition, Hathaway being the prime victim of this design choice. She tries valiantly to emote, but labyrinthine chatter about space-travel mechanics constantly gets in her way.

Where the film threatens to fall apart is in its final act, a prosaic series of events sorely lacking finesse. Nolan’s finales often come off as emotionally cold or overwrought because he’s so self-serious and obsessed with juggling pathos, plot twists, philosophy, and mind-bending visuals all at once. Interstellar is sadly no exception, with a climax so disorganized that you’re frantically trying to shuffle things around in your head to make sense of it all, too preoccupied with deciphering logistics to feel the full impact of Nolan’s message, which he means to be poignant, but ultimately thuds. The shame is, the message is a beautiful one, in which we’re asked to consider the preciousness of the time we have with our family, and confront the inevitability that one day, we will all drift apart into eternity. I was ultimately touched by the heart of the story; I just wish I didn’t have to shove so much space junk out of the way to get there.

Nolan shot Interstellar in 35mm, VistaVision, and IMAX 70mm, which gives the breathtaking imagery a sort of dirtiness and inelegance that fits the story well, while sufficiently supporting the grandiosity of his vision. The mind-boggling proposition of visually representing four or more dimensions on-screen has always been fascinating to me, and Nolan and his team (including Her cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema) have concocted the most awe-inspiring version I’ve seen. It’s encouraging to see a big budget supporting such an artful, sincere endeavor. Flying under the radar, surprisingly, is Hans Zimmer, whose tasteful, nuanced score is one of his best, floating in and out of scenes fluidly and emphasizing only when appropriate. His notorious blaring, thrummy horns are replaced by sensitive, heavenly organs, which is a saving grace, because the last thing Interstellar needs is more chaos to further obstruct its purpose.

Interstellar trailer

Just as many expected, Argo took home the top award of Best Picture at the 85th Academy Awards, despite Ben Affleck not receiving a Best Director nomination, something that has only happened four times in 85 years. It was a year for records as Daniel Day-Lewis winning Best Actor for his role in Lincoln means that he is now the only person to have won three Best Actor awards in Oscar history. Also, the first time since 1969 there was a tie for a category (both Skyfall and Zero Dark Thirty won for Best Sound Editing).

Even though Argo walked away with the top honors and two other awards (Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Editing), Life of Pi was the film that took home the most awards this year with four wins (Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Score and Best Visual Effects). And while Lincoln had 12 nominations, the film only ended up winning two awards (Best Actor and Best Production Design).

List of 2013 Oscar Winners:

(The winners are highlighted in bold red font)

Amour
Argo
Beasts Of The Southern Wild
Django Unchained
Les Misérables
Life Of Pi
Lincoln
Silver Linings Playbook
Zero Dark Thirty

Michael Haneke – Amour
Benh Zeitlin – Beasts Of The Southern Wild
Ang Lee – Life Of Pi
Steven Spielberg – Lincoln
David O. Russell – Silver Linings Playbook

Denzel Washington – Flight
Hugh Jackman – Les Miserables
Daniel Day-Lewis – Lincoln
Joaquin Phoenix – The Master
Bradley Cooper – Silver Linings Playbook

Emmanuelle Riva – Amour
Quvenzhane Wallis – Beasts Of The Southern Wild
Naomi Watts – The Impossible
Jennifer Lawrence – Silver Linings PLaybook
Jessica Chastain – Zero Dark Thirty

Alan Arkin – Argo
Christoph Waltz – Django Unchained
Tommy Lee Jones – Lincoln
Philip Seymour Hoffman – The Master
Robert De Niro – Silver Linings Playbook

Anne Hathaway – Les Misérables
Sally Field – Lincoln
Amy Adams – The Master
Helen Hunt – The Sessions
Jacki Weaver – Silver Linings Playbook

Michael Haneke – Amour
Quentin Tarantino – Django Unchained
John Gatins – Flight
Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola – Moonrise Kingdom
Mark Boal – Zero Dark Thirty

Chris Terrio – Argo
Lucy Alibar, Benh Zeitlin – Beasts of the Southern Wild
David Magee – Life Of Pi
Tony Kushner – Lincoln
David O. Russell – Silver Linings Playbook

Amour
Kon-Tiki
No
A Royal Affair
War Witch

Seamus McGarvey – Anna Karenina
Robert Richardson – Django Unchained
Claudio Miranda – Life Of Pi
Janusz Kaminski – Lincoln
Roger Deakins – Skyfall

Brave
Frankenweenie
ParaNorman
The Pirates! Band Of Misfits
Wreck-It Ralph

5 Broken Cameras
The Gatekeepers
How To Survive A Plague
The Invisible War
Searching For Sugar Man

William Goldenberg – Argo
Tim Squyres – Life Of Pi
Michael Kahn – Lincoln
Jay Cassidy and Crispin Struthers – Silver Linings Playbook
William Goldenberg, Dylan Tichenor – Zero Dark Thirty

Dario Marianelli – Anna Karenina
Alexandre Desplat – Argo
Mychael Danna – Life Of Pi
John Williams – Lincoln
Thomas Newman – Skyfall

“Before My Time” – Chasing Ice
“Pi’s Lullaby” – Life Of Pi
“Suddenly” – Les Miserables
“Skyfall” – Skyfall
“Everybody Needs A Best Friend” – Ted

Anna Karenina
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Les Misérables
Life Of Pi
Lincoln

Anna Karenina
Les Misérables
Lincoln
Mirror Mirror
Snow White and the Huntsman

Hitchcock
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Les Misérables

Argo
Django Unchained
Life Of Pi
Skyfall
Zero Dark Thirty

Argo
Les Misérables
Life Of Pi
Lincoln
Skyfall

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Life Of Pi
Marvel’s The Avengers
Prometheus
Snow White And The Huntsman

Inocente
Kings Point
Mondays At Racine
Open Heart
Redemption

Adam And Dog
Fresh Guacamole
Head Over Heels
Maggie Simpson In The Longest Daycare
Paperman

Asad
Buzkashi Boys
Curfew
Death Of A Shadow
Henry

The Golden Globes Award show got off to a bit of a shaky start when the Teleprompters malfunctioned during Paul Rudd and Salma Hayek’s award presentation, leaving them in an awkward speechless moment. Despite a couple minor out of sync setbacks though, the awards giving out by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association went fairly well, thanks in part to the wonderful hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. A couple other highlights on the night were ex-president Bill Clinton appropriately presenting the film Lincoln and Jodie Foster gave a wonderful coming-out speech while accepting a lifetime achievement award.

There were some surprises at the Golden Globes, but because the HFPA voting size is approximately 1.5% of the voting size of the Academy, using the results here to predict the Oscars would not be highly advised.

The biggest surprise was when Argo picked up the Best Picture in drama and when Ben Affleck won Best Director for it, an award for which he was not Oscar nominated for. Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained also received some love from the Globes when it won Best Original Screenplay and the Supporting Actor award by Christoph Waltz.

Full list of 2013 Golden Globes award winners:

(Winners are highlighted in bold red font)

FILM

Best Motion Picture – Drama
Argo
Django Unchained
Life Of Pi
Lincoln
Zero Dark Thirty

Best Picture – Comedy/Musical
Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Les Miserables
Moonrise Kingdom
Salmon Fishing In The Yemen
Silver Linings Playbook

Best Director
Ben Affleck – Argo
Quentin Tarantino – Django Unchained
Ang Lee – Life Of Pi
Steven Spielberg – Lincoln
Kathryn Bigelow – Zero Dark Thirty

Best Actress – Drama
Rachel Weisz – The Deep Blue Sea
Helen Mirren – Hitchcock
Naomi Watts – The Impossible
Marion Cotillard – Rust And Bone
Jessica Chastain – Zero Dark Thirty

Best Actor – Drama
Richard Gere – Arbitrage
Denzel Washington – Flight
Daniel Day-Lewis – Lincoln
Joaquin Phoenix – The Master
John Hawkes – The Sessions

Best Actress – Comedy/Musical
Judi Dench – Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Meryl Streep – Hope Springs
Maggie Smith – Quartet
Emily Blunt – Salmon Fishing In The Yemen
Jennifer Lawrence – Silver Linings Playbook

Best Actor – Comedy/Musical
Jack Black – Bernie
Bill Murray – Hyde Park On Hudson
Hugh Jackman – Les Miserables
Ewan McGregor – Salmon Fishing In The Yemen
Bradley Cooper – Silver Linings Playbook

Best Supporting Actress
Anne Hathaway – Les Miserables
Sally Field – Lincoln
Amy Adams – The Master
Nicole Kidman – The Paperboy
Helen Hunt – The Sessions

Best Supporting Actor
Alan Arkin – Argo
Christoph Waltz – Django Unchained
Leonardo DiCaprio – Django Unchained
Tommy Lee Jones – Lincoln
Philip Seymour Hoffman – The Master

Best Screenplay
Chris Terrio – Argo
Quentin Tarantino – Django Unchained
Tony Kushner – Lincoln
David O Russell – Silver Linings Playbook
Mark Boal – Zero Dark Thirty

Best Original Score
Alexandre Desplat – Argo
Dario Marianeli – Anna Karenina
Tom Tykwer, Johnny Klimek, Reinhold Heil – Cloud Atlas
Mychael Danna – Life Of Pi
John Williams – Lincoln

Best Original Song
Keith Urban – For You (Act Of Valor)
Taylor Swift – Safe & Sound (The Hunger Games)
Hugh Jackman – Suddenly (Les Miserables)
Adele – Skyfall (Skyfall)
Jon Bon Jovi – Not Running Anymore – (Stand Up Guys)

Best Animated Feature Film
Brave
Frankenweenie
Hotel Transylvania
Rise Of The Guardians
Wreck-It Ralph

Best Foreign Film
Amour
The Intouchables
Kon-Tiki
A Royal Affair
Rust & Bone

TELEVISION

Best Television Series – Drama
Breaking Bad
Boardwalk Empire
Downton Abbey
Homeland
The Newsroom

Best Performance by an Actress In A Television Series – Drama
Connie Britton, Nashville
Glenn Close, Damages
Claire Danes, Homeland
Michelle Dockery, Downton Abbey
Julianna Margulies, The Good Wife

Best Performance by an Actor In A Television Series – Drama
Jeff Daniels, The Newsroom
Jon Hamm, Mad Men
Damian Lewis, Homeland
Steve Buscemi, Boardwalk Empire
Bryan Cranston, Breaking Bad

Best Television Series – Comedy Or Musical
The Big Bang Theory
Episodes
Girls
Modern Family
Smash

Best Performance by an Actress In A Television Series – Comedy Or Musical
Zooey Deschanel, New Girl
Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Veep
Lena Dunham, Girls
Tina Fey, 30 Rock
Amy Poehler, Parks and Recreation

Best Performance by an Actor In A Television Series – Comedy Or Musical
Alec Baldwin, 30 Rock
Don Cheadle, House of Lies
Louis CK, Louie
Matt LeBlanc, Episodes
Jim Parsons, The Big Bang Theory

Best Mini-Series Or Motion Picture Made for Television
Game Change
The Girl
Hatfields & McCoys
The Hour
Political Animals

Best Performance by an Actress In A Mini-series or Motion Picture Made for Television
Nicole Kidman, Hemingway and Gelhorn
Jessica Lange, American Horror Story: Asylum
Sienna Miller, The Girl
Julianne Moore, Game Change
Sigourney Weaver, Political Animals

Best Performance by an Actor in a Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television
Kevin Costner, Hatfields & McCoys
Benedict Cumberbatch, Sherlock
Woody Harrelson, Game Change
Toby Jones, The Girl
Clive Owen, Hemingway and Gelhorn

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television
Hayden Panettiere, Nashville
Archie Panjabi, The Good Wife
Sarah Paulson, Game Change
Maggie Smith, Downton Abbey
Sofia Vergara, Modern Family

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television
Max Greenfield, New Girl
Ed Harris, Game Change
Danny Huston, Magic City
Mandy Patinkin, Homeland
Eric Stonestreet, Modern Family

Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy comes to a close with The Dark Knight Rises and if anything the series is done being nice. Long gone are the days when little one liners would pat the audience on the back and let them know it’s going to be alright. Gone too is the series’ sense of excitement and adventure. The Dark Knight Rises is instead filled with a flat out serious tone that prevents the series from ending on a high note.

The Dark Knight Rises begins with Gotham in a grand state of peace. Essentially all organized crime led by the Joker in the previous film has been shut down with literally thousands of criminals locked up under The Harvey Dent Law. It’s been nine years since the last events took place. Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has become secluded to his mansion with no one seeing him for years except for his always faithful butler Alfred (exquisitely played by Michael Caine). Wayne now walks with a cane after years of crime fighting have taken their toll on his body.

We get introduced to a couple of new characters early on, one of them being Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway). Faithful followers of comics and Batman will know her as Catwoman, the slinky sexy antihero of the Caped Crusader universe. I don’t feel guilty giving this tidbit away since virtually everyone knows this and it is revealed very early in the film. Another character we meet is beat officer John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Levitt probably gives the best performance in the film other than Caine. Blake becomes a trusted ally of Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman). One of the few he can trust. Blake eventually gets promoted to the role of Detective after impressing Gordon when he hunts down certain clues that ultimately reveal what’s really happening in Gotham.

Miranda Tate, played by the luscious French vixen Marion Cotillard, is a mysterious billionaire who is trying to work with Wayne Enterprises on a new secret project that could allow Gotham to live in a more energy efficient manner. I had suspicions about her character early on, mainly because she reminded me of a character from the Batman cartoon that aired in the 90’s. However, I’m done talking about her character.

We all know by now that the main villain in Rises is the mask wearing, muscle bound brute known as Bane (Tom Hardy). Nolan’s version of Bane is a far cry from the abomination Joel Schumacher used in his terrible Batman & Robin. In that film he was a doping bumbling idiot of a bodyguard. Here he is cold, calculating and most of all, uncompromising. He is an out and out terrorist. Where he comes from and he thirst for destruction I will not reveal here as it is one of the better pieces of the film.

The opening scene of the film holds a lot of promise. It’s unfortunate that the rest of the film never quite reaches these heights, except for once. The CIA takes a few men in hoods aboard a small plane and flies them over some truly beautiful landscape. But make no mistake. This is no site seeing trip. They want to know the mystery behind Bane. Little do they know that Bane is actually one of the hooded men. All of a sudden a bigger plane is flying above them. Men drop from this second plane hooked to wires and grab onto the smaller plane eventually busting the wings off it and let it dangle like a carrot from a string. Bane makes a grand escape from this plane with a mystery man in tow.

Along with his thirst for pain and his conquest for destruction, Bane is a man made of rock. With his massive shoulders and gigantic biceps, he intimidates anyone who crosses. In most cases he would just grab someone’s head and snap their neck. He is remorseless. Where the Joker’s agenda was to playfully offer ways out of his traps for his victims while he would gleefully chuckle at their inevitable failures, Bane is here to merely destroy any kind of system. Whether it’s that of a city or that of a man’s soul, Bane simply does not care about anything or anyone. He is the meaning of destruction.

After the film’s hair raising opening, the film then settles into a weird rhythm that it unfortunately doesn’t break away from during the film’s remaining runtime. Other than one scene in the middle of the film, Rises is not exciting for a second. Gordon, one of the series’ best characters, is bed ridden for most of the runtime while he has the Levitt character running all over town for him.

The best scene of the entire film is a showdown between Batman and Bane in an underground fortress controlled by Bane and his henchmen. Nolan handles this scene with pure brilliance. Instead of letting the loud and intrusive score (by Nolan faithful Hans Zimmer) and flashy editing intrude on the scene, he lets the scene unfold in silence. Only the sounds of a waterfall ignite the soundtrack as Bane verbally and physically decimate Batman. Shots of Bane’s henchmen as they watch, almost ashamed to follow such a crass leader, are inter-spliced with the action showing how ruthless Bane truly is. The look on their faces as they watch Batman beaten to a pulp is at times hard to watch. Even they can barely watch such reprehensible evil exist.

Unfortunately after the showdown, the film settles back into a state mediocrity. The film trudges on for what feels like forever to a final conflict that feels way too sprawling for the series. I know what we are essentially watching is a comic book/superhero movie, but the final hour seems too illogical to ever really happen. Bane’s ambitions are not unimaginable, just the way he goes about them. Some of these scenes are interesting, but they always require a lot of faith from the viewer. For me it was too much. For the sake of the virgin viewer’s eyes, I will not go into detail.

After everything that happens with these climactic and insanely sensational scenes we are given a closing montage that is a little too ridiculous. One character is revealed to be a crime fighting torch bearer in a stupid wink wink moment and another is given a second life after we are lead to believe of his demise in a stupid gotcha moment. It’s too much and it feels like Nolan, who is a director who almost never comprises, has finally given in to his audience’s demands. I don’t think The Dark Knight Rises is a bad film at all. It’s very well made. All the dollar signs are on the screen and Christopher Nolan is still one of the best and brightest Hollywood directors working today. The film simply does not rise out of its consistent state of complacency. It takes itself too seriously and lacks the straight up excitement of the first two films. A summer blockbuster can be brainy and serious while it hurtles itself through explosions and vibrant action if it wants to, yes. But you still have to have fun while you do it too. Unfortunately, The Dark Knight Rises flies to close to its villain’s coattails to realize this.